Logbook and Photos

We depart from Barillas Marina, El Salvador with our great friends and buddy-boaters Michael, Ginny, Vienna and Rhiannon (the "Atalantans" after their sailboat) in a rental van at 9 am, loaded with luggage and snacks. Long day in the car. We head for Antigua, Guatemala where, in the late afternoon, we find a hotel and an Italian restaurant for dinner.

Antigua is a charming city that used to be the Guatemalan capital until it was badly damaged in a massive earthquake in 1773 and subsequently transferred to Guatemala city in 1776. The town was slowly rebuilt and the traditional character of architecture and cobblestone streets was retained. In 1944 the city was declared a national monument and in 1979, UNESCO, declared it a World Heritage Site. The city is surrounded by three huge volcanoes, one of which is active. The active volcano, Volcán Fuego, can be seen spewing smoke on a regular basis and at night it occasionally glows red at the cone.  The tourists in Guatemala are mostly from Europe and it is very interesting to meet people from Norway, France, Holland, Germany and occasionally from Italy, Spain or Great Britain.

On our first day in Antigua, we head out to find a cultural complex housing 3 museums - a museum of indigenous music, a museum of contemporary Mayan culture, and a coffee museum. These are all housed on the property of a working coffee plantation. As we walk up the drive, we see the workers, mostly Mayan women and children, picking the ripe red coffee beans. This property has been a working coffee plantation since the late 1800's.  In the coffee museum, the interesting displays educate us about the clear superiority of the variety of coffee grown here and the processing method used.

The buses seen throughout Guatemala need to have a special mention.  Old ubiquitous yellow school buses from Canada or the US are purchased by a driver, who takes a lot of pride in his future bread and butter. Each bus is brightly painted to individual taste and is fitted with a great sound system having two volume settings - full and off. The transmissions in these buses rival any semi, with multi-coloured hydraulic hoses that run down the length of the stick shift. These are often covered with fancy leather that can have the driver's name engraved in it. The interior of the bus usually has religious decorations and a tinted windshield, with images of either a heart or a beautiful woman cut out of the tint material.   Each bus has a driver/owner and an assistant/conductor. The assistant's main roll is to get passengers and collect fares - the more customers they get on the bus, the more profit for them.  Try to imagine them filled to capacity and then double or triple it. Typically, there are three people to a two person seat, so it is six people across, plus a pile of people standing.

Leaving Antigua, we spend the afternoon driving to the nearby town of Panajachel, on the shore of Lake Atitlan. Thanks to the Lonely Planet guide, we had a hotel picked out. As we enter town, a man on a bicycle rides alongside and offers to guide us there.  But our target hotel is full, so our guide starts recommending other places to us. The second is too expensive, but our insistent guide says he can find a nice hotel in our price range. He leads us to Mueller's Guest House, and it turns out to be our favorite hotel of the entire trip. There are only 3 rooms, and although a few other people stayed in the third room for a night or two, we never really see them. The very friendly manager makes tea on request for the adults in the late afternoon every day while the kids run and play on the grass of the fenced in property and we play Hearts.

One of our main objectives in coming to Panajachel was to go to the Friday market in the neighboring town of Solola, so right after breakfast we are on one of the colorful Guatemalan buses heading UP the steep hill. The market is amazing.  Stalls crowd the square in front of the church and spread down the surrounding streets for blocks. Produce, household goods, clothes, chickens (living and dead), fish, shrimp and anything else you can think of are for sale somewhere here. This is not a market catering to the tourists! In fact, we are about the only tourists here. Most of the Mayan people are quite short, so we really feel conspicuous! Almost all the people are wearing traditional Mayan clothes: woven skirts and embroidered blouses for the women and girls, colorful embroidered shirts and trousers for the men. While it is so colorful, it is also crowded and smelly, and after meandering through the market, pushed by the crowds (and one unsuccessful pick-pocket on Michael), we finally take refuge to the side and enjoy people-watching.

Today, we hire a panga-driver to take us to some of the other villages around this huge lake, besides Panajachel.  When we awake, the winds are howling and we are concerned about the condition of the lake in a panga.  We are assured it will be fine so off we set.  It is a wet and wild ride as we pound downwind across the lake to the town of Santiago Atitlan.  Squeezed between two impressive volcanoes, Santiago is known for keeping to the traditional lifestyle of the Tzutuhil Maya... and for Maximon. 

Today, we are out and about exploring and find ourselves in Zunil, a town with a central produce delivery location and market for farmers. We have never seen such good looking vegetables and enjoy our time getting a few and talking with the locals.  Note that Gerrit at 7, is taller than this 1000-year old Mayan women!

Chichicastenango is almost world famous for its market, but we arrive mid-week and all is quiet on the tourist front, yet active for the Mayans.  With an offer of help from a local guide,   we are invited to head up a large ridge to see the shrine of Pascual-Abaj. Abaj is the general name for all the Mayan gods, and Mayans have been worshiping at this shrine for thousands of years. The day we are here, there are several ceremonies going one. One ceremony is to dispel the evil spirits plaguing a businessman and his wife and bring them better luck in their business. The Mayan shaman chants in a low voice the entire time.   The man and woman stand in front of a small fire adorning it with flowers, candles and liqueur.  The doctor swings a container with burning incense, swats the man and woman up and down their backs with a pine branch, rolls limes and eggs up and down their backs, arms and legs, and then places the eggs around the edge of the fire (if the eggs crack, it is a sign that the ceremony is a success, and that the evil spirits have been dispelled - they eventually crack!). Then they move over to the main altar and produce a chicken from out of a basket. An assistant holds the chicken upside down by the legs and the Mayan doctor draws a blade and performs a sacrifice.  Blood is let to drip on the fire at the main altar while the slaughtered chicken rests at its base.   Amid the smoke, incense, and sounds, we make our exit. What an intense and vivid experience!

After ChiChi, we set off on what is supposed to be a 4 hour drive to Coban, a city en route to Honduras and the Mayan ruins at Copan.  Nine hours later, we finally check in to a hotel in Coban. The route so blithely shown on our map is actually still under construction. So for 50 miles, we crawl up and down the steep valley sides on a one lane (or less!) gravel road. But the countryside is spectacular! We stop once to ask for directions from a man working in his field. He speaks only a Mayan dialect, but one of the kids runs off to get another man who speaks Spanish. Soon kids are running in from all directions to see the strangers. Chris has a pocketful of candy from dinner the previous evening, which he passes out. He teaches the kids to say "Good-bye" in English and we set off again, to a rousing chorus of good-byes. In the mid-afternoon, we stop in the town of Cunen, where we run into a young Peace Corps worker from Texas. "Jeez-Louise! What are you-all doing here?" He is so surprised to see 4 kids piling out of the van. He has been here for 1 1/2 years and rarely sees tourists come through, let alone tourists with kids.   As we get closer to Coban, we begin driving through coffee growing country. Sacks of beans are piled up at the edge of the road, and loaded pick-up trucks ply their way slowly up and down the hills.  After an entire day driving through very rural areas it is getting dangerously close to dark and we don't want to be out much longer.   Presently, the first street lights begin to appear and we arrive at Coban.  We are awed by the gleaming facade of a new church building approaching. But, it turns out to be a brand new upscale shopping mall, a temple to consumerism…and next to it, a towering set of Golden Arches.

After another half day of driving we arrive at the Copan ruins in Honduras.  The ruin site is breath-taking. It is a large, park-like area covered with grass and huge trees. Some of the trees are growing out of piles of rubble that clearly had been buildings. The whole site is well maintained, and there is active archeological work being done there, mainly in tunnels going in through the bases of the larger structures. In the recently completed museum is a full color replica of an intact temple that had been found in this way (see photo below).

It was previously thought (this gets long so skip it if you want ;-)) that Maya society was a theocracy built around a priestly class. The building complexes were considered to be ceremonial centers, filled with temples and accessed only by priests. The persons depicted in the art were thought to be representations of the gods, and the hieroglyphic writing was thought to be prophecies based on the astrological observations of the priests. With the recent successful decipherment of Maya hieroglyphic writing, we now know that the texts refer to the history of actual rulers, who are themselves depicted in the carved statues. This is more in keeping with what is known about other ancient societies, such as that of Egypt, where the majority of the art was dedicated to the aggrandizement of the pharaohs and their families. Copan is known for its numerous altars and stelae, large rectangular stone monuments with a carving of a ruler on one side and hieroglyphic inscriptions on the remaining sides. Copan is also home to the longest hieroglyphic inscription of the Maya world.

The area around Copan was settled gradually. K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' was the first king to unite and rule over the entire area, and his dynasty ruled Copan for the next 400 years. The kings had interesting names such as Mat Head, Smoke Monkey, Smoke Jaguar, and 18 Rabbit, based on early interpretations of their name glyphs. The 13th ruler, 18 Rabbit, was a great builder, and commissioned the majority of the stelae and altars that are now present in the Great Plaza. Unfortunately, he was captured and sacrificed by the neighboring kingdom of Quirigua, formerly a subject of Copan.

The 14th ruler, Smoke Monkey, was a relatively weak ruler, ruling during what was probably a very turbulent period due to the dramatic fall of his predecessor, a clear sign that the gods were no longer favoring Copan. However, his son, the 15th ruler Smoke Shell (or Smoke Squirrel, in some interpretations), was responsible for the imposing Hieroglyphic Stairway, which is an historical narrative highlighting the feats of his ancestors. Presumably the decapitation of 18 Rabbit is not mentioned.

One of the most impressive monuments is known as Altar Q. It is a large rectangular block of stone, about 4' long on each side, with 16 seated figures carved around the sides. The top is covered with hieroglyphic squares. Originally thought to represent a conference of astronomers, advances in the understanding of Maya hieroglyphs have shown this to be an historical record celebrating the ascension of the 16th ruler, Yax Pasah. The front of the altar shows a seated Yax Pasah receiving the scepter of the kings from the first king K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo'. Seated around the sides are the intervening 14 kings, shown in order, each seated under their name glyphs carved on the top face of the stone.

During the reign of Yax Pasah (AD 763 - sometime before AD 820), the population of the Copan area grew dramatically. This required significant intensification of the agricultural system, which in turn led to increasing environmental degradation. There were significant environmental changes as well, with both droughts and floods. Studies of skeletal remains have shown marked evidence of malnutrition, infectious diseases, and decreased life spans. The 400 year dynasty came to a close with the 17th king U Cit Tok', a pretender to the throne who was unable even to finish the carving of a monument proclaiming his reign. Over the following 200 years, the ecologically devastated valley was gradually abandoned. Not until the 1980's did the population of the greater Copan valley return to those levels.

After spending a couple hours wandering among the ruins, we had a picnic lunch and then spent the remainder of our time at the museum. Many of the most elaborately carved stones have been moved inside, and replicas have been made to sit outside in the original spot. In addition to the stelae, there were also many examples of facade sculptures. There was a fascinating fully 3 dimensional carving of the head of a demonic looking water bird with a fish clamped in its toothed beak. Quite a sight.

Today, we drive back to El Salvador. It's a long day of driving. We cross the border back to El Salvador, stop at a big grocery store in San Salvador to load up for the next stage of our trip, and finally arrive home, exhausted, about 6 PM. A great trip, slightly longer than we had planned and a long time for two families to spend in one van.  But we are all still friends and have many great memories to share.

This has been a long log.  Congratulations if you have read it in its entirety!   It  has been tough to capture the essence of this truly amazing inland road trip.  Special thanks to Ginny for a lot of the text and research.