Pretty

Look what Jack Frost did to the roof of my car this morning. So beautiful, how does he do that? It's nice to have some moisture in the air again.

Bridget and Jane

I was in the market for light reading as I prepared for my trip, and Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding is like the quintessenial vacation read, right? And it served its purpose very well --amusing, not challenging ... good times.

Is it just me, or does everyone borrow from Jane Austen, like, all the time? (Why not me? You laugh, but Dickens came up in a meeting about estate planning this morning -- Bleak House, natch.) BJD doesn't purloin a whole plot like, say, Clueless did. She really just nods at Jane as a way to celebrate JA's influence on chick lit through the ages, I think. But check this slacker-nicity(tm A. Fish): In the book, Bridget watches the classic BBC version of Pride and Predjudice starring Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy and Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennett, and she notes that the London streets are deserted when it's on, a la all of America during the last episode of Seinfeld. So? Masterpiece Theater (ahem, Masterpiece) just got done running that film! (and it is AWESOME. Thank you for not screwing that one up, at least.) And Colin Firth starred as the BJD Mr. Darcy in the movie. Wheels within wheels. Anyway, who better to steal from than Jane, but she does seem to be everywhere.

Further BJD goodness: I finished it on my first day in Mexico and decided to leave the book in my hotel room for some other tourist, rather than dragging it along. So I stayed in the same hotel on my way out and met a woman from Quebec named Mary Emily who works on a quasi-organic farm outside of Quebec City. Yeah. She speaks mainly French, but we were rocking the English. She mentioned she was reading an English book and, yeah, you got it. She had my old room. I wonder what she was making of all the British slang, but the only question she had for me was, "What does 'perhaps' mean?"

Also: Yay!

I'm The One That I Want

Margaret Cho, in her new stand-up show "Beautiful," is coming to the Orpheum on April 25! Who wants to go with me? She is determined to make us feel good about our non-compliance with the standards of beauty. Heed the call!

Awesome, Part III: The Jungleing

OK, I'm back for our third and final round in which our protaganist conquers the jungle of Guatemala. They never saw me coming! Which is amazing considering how much time I spent crashing around in the undergrowth.

After spending the night at a hotel in El Remate, Lou picked us up and we went over to his house to pack the truck. He and Mario had tied the canoes and kayak on the night before. We drove for a couple of hours on a gravel road that was pretty bad, but they tell me it could have been worse. We'd be going along alright but would periodically come to a few yards of road bed that hadn't really survived the rainy season. Could have used a load or two of gravel. And some big rocks. And geosynthetics! It's a good thing Lou's truck has good clearance and four wheel drive. It reminded me a little of riding through the pasture with my dad, checking cows. At one point we got out to re-secure the canoes:



We made it to Paso Caballos, a small village on the San Pedro river where we started our paddle. The village, like the others we'd gone through, had lots of chickens, pigs, dogs, and horses that roamed around without restraint. None of them looked particularly well fed, and some of the horses looked positively suicidal.

We had an audience of local children as we unloaded the truck. Some men drove up who were taking a motorboat to the place we were going. They offered to transport some of our stuff for us:



That was nice, because it was necessary to carry all our water with us, so our cargo included two big water-cooler-sized plastics bottles. Mario rode with them, so it was just four in the canoes. The canoeing was lovely:






Dennis and Chantal went for a swim, and Dennis displayed his ability to propel himself out of the water like a dolphin:



Awesome. We saw some really cool plants:



There were lots of these sorts of tree parasites -- including orchids, but it wasn't the season for them to be blooming, unfortch. Eventually, we came to spot where we heard water rushing, though the water in the river was undisturbed. We landed to investigate and found this delightful spring with the water rushing out of a rock ledge:



We all went for a swim. After a bit more river paddling, we came across Mario fishing from a borrowed dugout canoe:




We'd made it to our campsite -- the Las Guacamayas Biological Field Station. It was far more luxurious than what I'd pictured. There were bathrooms with showers and screened buildings. Even the dock was covered:




After setting up the tents and familiarizing ourselves with the place, Lou dug out the bottle of rum and the fruit drinks he'd packed, and we climbed up to the bluff behind the station. There's a lookout tower built on it, from which we had a lovely place to view the sunset:




The howler monkeys were doing their thing, and the rum drinks were very tasty. Chantal even got cell phone reception. The wind started to kick up just as we were leaving, and before we could get back to camp, it was raining like crazy. We hadn't even put all the rain flies on yet! Chantal says, "Well, it is a rainforest." Indeed. After messing around unsatisfactorily with the rain flies, we threw up our hands and just picked up the tents and carried them into the nearest building. It was dry and screened in. And there they remained for the rest of our stay.

We did our cooking (if by "we" I mean Lou and Chantal) in the staff kitchen. A few men were working at the station while we were there. The kitchen had four tables on which you could build fires to cook over. The nice thing about roofs made of palm leaves is that you don't have to have a chimney; the smoke just escapes wherever, though it makes the building's interior rather blackened.

Lou kept us very well fed with a shrimp and tomato sauce over pasta the first night and a beef teryaki stir fry the next. He even packed in eggs for breakfast (only two broke) and a veritable bakery's worth of homemade breads -- wheat, banana, carrot. So friggin' good!

We made sandwiches for our lunch the next day and set out again -- an hour of canoeing and then two or three hours of hiking to get to El Peru, another Mayan site. Not much has been excavated there, so we only saw a few things. But the closer we got to the site, the more often we'd walk over some incongruous hill in the road -- probably ruins that have not been uncovered. So tantalizing! We passed through a military camp that protects both the ruins and the jungle (any unprotected jungle is mostly cut down and carted off). All these young men in fatigues with semi-automatic rifles. It ain't Itasca.

It was a long, hot walk, but so lovely. Lou and Mario pointed out all the birds, and on the way back, we got very near to a family of howler monkeys -- Mom, Dad, and baby. Awesome squared! The jungle seemed to even desensitize me to the existence of bats, to which we got close up on the water, in this little bower:




My camera battery died on the road to El Peru, but who needs it. After our long day in the jungle, we had a hearty meal and enjoyed a clear, gorgeous view of the lunar eclipse. The station staff were listening to a soccer game on the radio; the play by play was being given in that excitable-Spanish-speaking-soccer-announcer way. We pretended that he was announcing the eclipse; the level of action is comparable, I'd say.

We canoed back out the next day and I, for one, was very sunburned and bug-bitten. I wouldn't have it any other way. We made it back to El Remate by about 4:00 and after a quick goodbye to Mario and Lou, we immediately got in a van and headed for San Ignacio in Belize. We spent the night there at the Midas Resort -- my cabin was round!! So adorable.

In the morning, we were picked up and taken to this bucolic spot:




We tubed on the beautiful clear blue river through two large caves. It was a relaxing enchantment after our strenuous trip into the woods. Afterwards, our guide Juan Carlos drove us on to Corozal, Belize, and the Hotel Mirador. The next day we caught a bus back to Playa del Carmen and the adventure was over. So sad to say goodbye.

I recommend it highly!

Losing Your Stuff

Two short stories in one volume -- The Clothes They Stood Up In and The Lady in the Van by Alan Bennett -- are both about possessions and the lack of them. The first is a rather spare novella about a staid London couple that loses everything they own in a bizarre burglary. In the second, Bennett tells the story of a Miss Shepherd, who spent several years living in a van in his driveway. They are both quick reads and compelling. I especially enjoyed The Lady in the Van; the author is rather reluctantly involved with the crazy Miss Shepherd and is simultaneously compassionate and annoyed. Bennett also wrote The Madness of King George, which I haven't seen but am interested in now. Yay!

Mayans, baby!

OK, sorry for the pause in the vacation slides. I haven't been feeling well this week. I'm hoping for a tapeworm -- it'd save me a lot of money on Weight Watchers.

In our last episode, Sassmaster had just had lunch and a swim. We lounged around the dock for a while in the sun, and Chantal told me about settling in El Remate after backpacking around for a while in her youth. She was powerfully attracted to the pace of life in Guatemala and told me that even when she was quite young, she thought life in Holland was too complicated. She remembers thinking, "Just show me how to grow my own food." Such amazing self-knowledge! In El Remate, she worked on a sort-of economic development project -- a hotel and restaurant where the buildings were being made with a traditional limestone stucco spread over a wood and stone frame. The project also served as a training ground, teaching people the building method to be used elsewhere.

After our swim, Mario joined us, and Lou drove us to Tikal National Park. Lou is powerfully diverted by birds, and so it can be a little disconcerting driving with him. Case in point, he pulled up sharply so we could see some Montezuma Oropendola:

Click for a larger view. There a real photo here. You can see their sack-like nests on the right. They make this great noise while swinging like a pendulum from a branch. (Click here and scroll down for mp3 of the call.) This goes on pretty much all the time during the mating season (January to May).

We spent the night in the park in lovely cabins:

We walked around a little and saw some animals -- a small crocodile, pheasants (that look nothing like those in S.D.), more oropendola--and a tarantula. Just. Walking. AROUND. That ain't right. I was a little careful about where I put my feet after that.

We had dinner and breakfast at the terrific restaurant on the grounds:

This is one of the nicest national parks I've ever seen. Of course, they get thousands of visitors and here's why:

The Mayan ruins in the park cover 7 square miles -- one of the largest sites, I believe. We spent four hours on our tour, and saw just a small fraction of what was there. Of course, much of it has not been excavated:

They estimate that there are 14,000 structures belonging to the site. Makes you want to bust out a shovel. But some go unexcavated, not because they lack the resources (though that is an issue) but because they don't think new digs would add significantly to their scholarship; there are a lot of similarities between the way the different areas are built and laid out. Also, they figure the jungle has preserved the ruins quite well so far, so they may be best off where they are. I climbed a couple of them:

That second image is from the top of Temple IV. You can see other temples above the trees in the background. George Lucas filmed this view for a brief shot in Star Wars, and if you don't climb it pre-dawn to see the sunrise, you should be ashamed of yourself. But we had fog, so bagged it and slept in. The temple itself is not much to look at -- it is only partially uncovered and, as you can sort of see, clad in scaffolding due to restoration efforts. You actually climb a wooden staircase to get to the top.

But! As we sat at the top and took in the view, I heard this echoing roar. It sounded like a pride of lions. "What on earth...?!" "A howler monkey," Chantal says. A single monkey, mind you. It's the most unbelievable sound, and you hear it all the time in the jungle. (Go here and click on the multimedia link halfway down the page.) We walked quite close to one on our tour, and our guide Juan was egging it on with an approximation of its call. He definitely got a response. Awesome.

Juan was very good and not this blurry in real life:

He talked for hours about what could be surmised about the Mayan culture, citing the various archaeologists, writers, and academics, and offering theories of his own. You could tell he was struggling to choose what to share with us, from the vast range of his knowledge.

One thing I really liked about the people I met in Guatemala is that they all clearly feel very protective of the Mayan heritage -- they brook no bullshit theories about the Mayan people and are very aware of any first-world biases the researchers might bring to their studies. And considering how many Mayan artifacts have been carried off to the U.S. and Europe, they ought to be wary. Chantal told me about one very important piece that actually lives in her home town in Holland. But when she went to see it on a trip home, they told her it wasn't on display but holed up in the archives. If this object was in one of the Mayan museums in Central America or Mexico, it would be like the Mona Lisa at the Louvre -- one of the star attractions.

One more thing, before we leave the park:

For all you May Day fans, this tree is called a ceiba. It was sacred to the Mayans. See if this story sounds familiar: One creation myth has it that the tree was carried on the back of a turtle across water -- the tree of life. It is a "world tree"-- the axis of earth and sky. The roots lie in the underworld and the top reaches to the heavens. (For the non-May Day initiated, this story is at the heart of the ceremony that Heart of the Beast theater puts on in Powderhorn Park in May.)

We left Tikal in the afternoon and spent the night in cabins in El Remate. Pop culture reared its head on my bedspread:

Next: All this, and we haven't even started canoeing!

Everyone's a Critic

Maria's getting heckle therapy: