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Category Archives: Guatemala

Where Ruins Rule

13 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by lexklein in Guatemala, Travel - General

≈ 90 Comments

Tags

Antigua, Art, earthquakes, Guatemala, memory, ruins, the past, volcanoes

When we suddenly find a flight to Antigua, Guatemala after a last-minute change of travel plans, we’ve got to act fast. In the next 24 hours, we need to find lodging, a list of top sightseeing stops, a few active outings, and a way to get around. We do an obligatory Google exploration and then hit the search bars on the websites of a few blogging friends we seem to remember have been here (thank you, Alison and Don and Nicole!), and in a few short hours, we have a preliminary plan.

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We quickly see what we expected to see: the cheerful metal of the chicken buses, the alabaster church fronts, the small Mayan women wrapped in jewel-toned garments and stooped under their loads of street wares. The chock-a-block markets, the volcanoes that loom over the town and stud the countryside. The chocolate, the coffee, the jade.

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And then a strange thing happens. We really have no major objectives here; in fact, we have a perfect excuse to just be – we’ve had no time to plan! – to take things in, to let the city in through our eyes and our minds for a few days. We slooowww down, and J patiently lets me stop and photograph things that do not tell a typical kind of travel story.

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Writers and readers love whole, substantial things – buildings and shrines, temples and monuments. Histories, records, narratives. The more we amble aimlessly around Antigua, the more I am drawn to its pieces, and the bits that draw me the most are the walls – both the scuffed-up sides of ordinary buildings and the decaying exteriors of the enormous number of ruins in this earthquake-terrorized town.

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What draws me so insistently to these panels of imperfection? At home, I like modern architecture and clean lines, sleek surfaces and a dearth of clutter, yet the chipped and faded paint on the crumbling walls pulls me in, as do the hulking structures, half hollowed out, strewn around the town, their deterioration conjuring the past even as they sit among the trappings of modern life.

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They please the eye first, a patchwork of color and texture, a random splash of shapes not specifically formed by man. The elements have crafted this art; the rain has faded the reds, the volcanic dirt has darkened the yellows, the brush of body parts and clothing has burnished the blues. Then they begin to work on memory, evoking time gone by both here and everywhere – the rise and fall of civilizations, of peoples and ideas.

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Which color came first? Was it the oxidized reds and ochres that appear most frequently? The yellows seem old, too, and so soft, almost as if they were done in colored pencil.

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I imagine the whites being added later, maybe the blues also, as later generations cooled the colors down, an attempt to add a little crisp cleanness to the hot, dusty town perhaps.

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Paul Cooper, writing in a BBC art and culture article, says “[ruins] are places an observer can get lost, where time slips away.” I feel this happening at the sanctuary of San Francisco, a complex of religious structures outside of the main streets that is without question my favorite place in town.

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There is a functioning church here, a faded beauty after multiple earthquakes altered its form over the years, but it’s the gardens around the church where a trance sets in and time does slip away. There are fields of stone rising from the earth, heaving up from the grass and among the palm trees.

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Bougainvillea languishes on a shattered stairwell; splintered archways admit huge ovals of sky, and more gaping holes yawn in pitted walls. New green growth sprouts from dirt-filled crevices between stone and brick; I’m transfixed by the apposition of destruction and regrowth.

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At a certain point, though, I snap to, and begin to question my infatuation with the decay. Is this like disaster tourism, wanting to exalt for the sake of art and literature what was a horrific time for generations of Guatemalans? Am I imposing a developed world appreciation for those “artistic” mottled walls on the modest city shops when they are really just a result of poverty, a fix that is simply unaffordable?

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Cooper comes to my rescue on the first count. “Mankind has always lived among its own ruins. Since our earliest history, we have explored ruined places, feared them and drawn inspiration from them, and we can trace that complex fascination in our art and writing.” I study the pockmarked walls again and decide they have been left this way on purpose, and thankfully so. They are stunning and warm, simple and inviting.

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We do hike our volcano, climb up to the cross on a hilltop overlooking the town, stray into a church or two, but for the most part, this stay is all about wandering and wondering for me.

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Antigua – so aptly named – is a reminder that we carry the past, both good and bad, with us always. The things we build may not last what the earth throws at them either, but what is left has its own beauty and power. Especially here in Antigua.

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This is Not Thailand!

08 Saturday Feb 2020

Posted by lexklein in Guatemala, Travel - General

≈ 72 Comments

Tags

Antigua, CENTRAL AMERICA, changing gears, coronavirus, Guatemala, Southeast Asia, travel problems

The bags were 99% packed, and all systems were go for our trip to Southeast Asia on Wednesday evening. And then they weren’t. What changed? As I noted in my last post, we’d wavered a little on leaving for a long vacation in a place increasingly affected by the coronavirus outbreak, but all of our knowledge, intuition, and local contacts suggested that we were extremely unlikely to actually catch anything.

Including our flights! We’d already rebooked our return flights (a time-consuming and stressful task), which had a problematic Hong Kong layover. As the number of virus cases mounted, however, we began to rethink the seven regional flights we had booked and even our return via Tokyo. We didn’t have that many destinations, but many of our flights involved layovers back in Bangkok, and we started to eliminate some of them in an attempt to salvage our trip.

With every adjustment, we ran into a domino effect of problems. Eliminate Cambodia and the four planes associated with just that one stop? Oops, no flights from Luang Prabang to Danang a few days earlier. Spend more time in Chiang Mai? Nope; Laos was already getting short shrift, and what was the point of flying for over 24 hours to get to Asia and then cut our top destinations short?

Neither our friends on the ground in Thailand and Vietnam nor our families in the U.S. pushed us in any one direction, but there were plenty of signs that this might not be the carefree and fun vacation we had planned six months ago. We are not retired and have obligations at home, and we could ill afford a problem at any point with a return. Though getting sick was not even on our radar, getting stuck or, worse, potentially quarantined based on where we had been, was a worry.

It did us in. Call us wimps, but we wanted to really enjoy this trip and not just get through it. Thirty-six hours before takeoff, we pulled the plug. Before I canceled all the flights, hotels, guides, and drivers, we went online, searched for cheap fares to anywhere we’d never been, and bought tickets for Guatemala for one day after our original departure date. We didn’t even really have to repack the bags!

So here we are in Antigua, the old capital of Guatemala, where we landed two hours before we would have in Bangkok even though we left a full day later! It’ll be a short stay, but it’s a nice consolation prize for the trip to which we sadly bid adieu. For the next few days, we’ll speak Spanish and climb volcanoes, but we’ll be headed back to Bangkok and all of our other SE Asian stops in November if all goes well!

Buenas noches, all, and thanks for all the support throughout our decision-making process!

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I’m a restless, world-wandering, language-loving, book-devouring traveler trying to straddle the threshold between a traditional, stable family life and a free-spirited, irresistible urge to roam. I’m sure I won’t have a travel story every time I add to this blog, but I’ve got a lot! I’m a pretty happy camper (literally), but there is some angst as well as excitement in always having one foot out the door. Come along for the trip as I take the second step …

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Today we’re off to Marsaxlokk, a small, traditional fishing village in Malta. These brightly painted Maltese boats are called “luzzus,” and I couldn’t get enough of them!
Day 1 in Malta is all water and walls.
FINALLY made it out of the U.S. for the first time in 2 years. 😀🌴☀️
Road trip final stop: Grand Teton National Park. We may have saved the best for last. The Tetons startled us every single time we rounded a bend and saw them jutting up from the sagebrush. The park gave us these amazing peaks, wildflowers, horses, huge skies filled with every kind of cloud, and our own cozy little national park cabin. We’ll be back here for sure! #grandtetonnationalpark #tetons #wyoming #roadtrip #hiking #horses #cabins
Road trip stop 8: Yellowstone National Park. The north and northeast sections blew me away - full of wildlife and lemon-lime fields under dreamy skies. The western parts had their moments; the geothermal features were better than expected, but the traffic even worse than anticipated. All of the crowds were for Old Faithful, probably my last-place pick for things to see in the park. #yellowstonenationalpark #montana #wyoming #roadtrip #wideopenspaces #nationalparks #oldfaithful
Road trip stop 7: Beartooth Highway - deserving of a post all of its own. We drove east out of Bozeman, over two hours out of our way, to catch the start of the Beartooth Highway in Red Lodge, MT, and drive its full length back west to arrive at Yellowstone’s NE entrance. This exhilarating, eye-popping road covers 68 miles of US Route 212 from Red Lodge to Cooke City/Silver Gate and crosses Beartooth Pass at almost 11,000 feet. Worth the wide detour and the zillions of photo stops along the way … at least I thought so! #beartoothhighway #beartoothpass #montana #yellowstonenationalpark #roadtrip #detour

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Follow me on Instagram too!

Today we’re off to Marsaxlokk, a small, traditional fishing village in Malta. These brightly painted Maltese boats are called “luzzus,” and I couldn’t get enough of them!
Day 1 in Malta is all water and walls.
FINALLY made it out of the U.S. for the first time in 2 years. 😀🌴☀️
Road trip final stop: Grand Teton National Park. We may have saved the best for last. The Tetons startled us every single time we rounded a bend and saw them jutting up from the sagebrush. The park gave us these amazing peaks, wildflowers, horses, huge skies filled with every kind of cloud, and our own cozy little national park cabin. We’ll be back here for sure! #grandtetonnationalpark #tetons #wyoming #roadtrip #hiking #horses #cabins

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