November 8, 2008

10am: I have a vicious hangover and am lacking sleep, sweating profusely and breathing hard, but I'm not in bed. I'm halfway up the Indian's Nose in a corn field standing by the Virgin Mary.

Luke and I are climbing La Nariz de Indio, a beautiful mountain that overlooks the lake and villages. We took an alternate route up the hill to avoid the 40 Q "gringo fee" and it brought us up a steep and treacherous grade to this mysterious cornfield. We hear the Mayans used to use this spot to pray to their gods but were forbidden to do so by the Spanish. They put a cross and a statue here to remind them to cut the shit.

Locals plant corn and coffee all the way up the side of the mountain and carry it down in baskets. They don't use grids or plant their rows in perfect lines like white people do, they work around the landscape. It's beautiful. They harvest at an impossible angle and I can't see how they don't just tumble down the mountain, practice I guess.

After a brief stop at the top of the hill we make our way down to Santa Clara on the other side of the mountain. Gringos are a rare site here and we get looks from all the children. We get lunch at a really good restaurant where we are the only people in the dining room. Service is extremely slow, but it is worth the wait.



After lunch we wait for our ride back to San Pedro, we lounge in the grass at the side of the road. A red ant bites me on my stomach, I wish I had my harmonica. We watch a young boy flying a kite. He's standing in the middle of the road and his kite string is hanging just a few feet from the power lines. A car goes by about every two minutes or so, and when it does it just sort of swerves around the kid. The kid is just having a blast though, he turns around and looks at us and I give him the thumbs up, he laughs and jumps in the air. This whole scene says a lot about the lack of concern for safety here in Guatemala. People seem a lot more laid back about the issue. If you get burned by the stove, you don't touch the hot flame anymore. Kids learn at a young age to watch out for their well-being, if you don't it's your ass. Mom can't watch little Juan out in the road with his kite, she's busy raising six other kids. As a 25 year old bachelor, I don't know what the correct philosophy is for raising children, but I saw more children in Guatemala playing without any parental supervision and they are the happiest kids I've ever seen. Or maybe its that the laid-back lifestyle is bred into the population: I never heard a single baby crying.
We hop in the next "collectivo," a pickup truck piled high with workers and avocados, bound for San Pedro.  We wind down the treacherous mountain road back home.