Hol Chan Channel and Lake Atitlan

Here is the bus that brings folks to Lake Atitlan. They can barely fit on the small, rural streets.

First beautiful lake view

Second beautiful lake view--probably taken from a boat in the middle of the lake. We are headed for the other side.

Posted from Tikal--we've had a tough time getting an internet connection.

We finally go out to snorkel before leaving Caye Caulker. The reef is the Hol Chan Channel, the end of the second-biggest reef in the world, I think. In any case, very pretty, and the water was heavenly warm, but we are getting ready to catch a 7 a.m. ferry. I will post photos as soon as we get an internet connection that will let me.

 This is a throwback blog. It's one I didn't have a chance to post when we were in the territory. So, for those interested, throw your mind backwards about a week to Lake Atitlan. I'm going to write a whole bunch, then post photos. If you skip forward to the photos, that's okay. :)

Lake Atitlan is considered one of the most beautiful lakes in the world, and not only by the tour guides. It is surrounded by volcanoes and hills, and the lake shore is home to about a dozen small Mayan villages--plus Panajachel, which is sometimes referred to as Gringotenango (white. foreigners' town).We enjoyed Pana and its nature preserve where we saw spider and howler monkeys cotis in a small, natural forest setting as well as a small but lovely butterfly preserve This wasn't the season for butterflies, but it was for monkeys!

Julia, Stephen, Mark and I were interested in visiting Santiago Atitlan in part because of a book we read, written by a Tzutujil Mayan shaman. Martin Prechtel  started life as a Native American/German kid on a reservation and was welcomed into the Mayan community by its leading shaman. This shaman  believed Martin was sent by the gods to replace him when he died. Prechtel  lived in Santiago for 13 years, married, became both a village elder and a shaman, and was driven out by the revolutionaries that descended on Santiago Atitlan in the 1980s.

The world Prechtel describes is so different from Western thought that it is both amazing and fascinating. I apologize if my fanciful little brain isn’t remembering this precisely—I’ve got the gist. Their Mayan life is based on their faith that everything has a spirit. Every individual has not only his own spirit but a companion spirit that he or she finds. The village is the center of the universe, anchored to the underworld and the sky. It does not need perfecting because it is already perfect—it is the gods’ fifth iteration and in the previous four universes, mistakes were corrected. Those currently alive have a responsibility to the gods and the ancestors of those previous universes  if they want to live successfully in this one.

The current universe seems to involve a lot of laughing, dancing, and drinking.  Getting drunk is part of religious ritual. Giving away worldly possessions is the way to earn honor and status in the village. A shaman, for example, might be materially a little better off than some—but shamans don’t have much status as village leaders. Leaders run the village and they gain leadership rights by sponsoring (read: paying for)  festivals where the gods are honored and the locals get lots of special food and good times. Prechtel throws the parties, then worries his head off that he won’t be able to pay the bills—much to the amusement of his mentor.

 Men and women are both represented in the leadership ranks. You can tell one’s status by clothes. Only leaders can wear certain belts and headdresses and shawls around their shoulders. Mark and I saw the clothing at a museum in Guatemala City—at one time, all Mayan villages had their own unique clothing patterns made from cloth woven mainly  by women. Many of the villages in the Western Highlands district, where Lake Atitlan is located, still maintain the tradition.

Life wasn’t about stuff as Prechtel describes it. Difference in material possession was extremely minimal. People didn’t have much and didn’t expect much because they were isolated and not exposed to much, he indicates. He describes health and sanitation conditions, such as worms, that would be treated in the Western world, but apparently were largely ignored in his village. He also describes the many conditions he did treat with herbs and prayer. Reading his description of his shamanistic training, how he found his spirit animal, and at least some sense of how he treated people’s illnesses, was illuminating and surely  not like either seminary or med school.

Villagers could write but they believed their traditions had to be preserved by oral  memory—by telling stories and repeating the dances and ceremonies of the past. Writing them down would encourage the younger generation to neglect active participation, which could unravel their world, they believed (according to Prechtel).  Although Mayan culture historically was obsessed with measuring time—they had all kinds of complicated interlinking calendars—Prechtel describes a language that makes it cumbersome linguistically to speak about the future.

The village may have believed the universe was always the way they experienced it, but in fact it seems to me that Prechtel experienced a small, frozen moment in Mayan history. Mayan culture writ large can match the Western European world in war, conquest and economic exploitation.  But I understand how he could make that logical error. I made it myself as a child. I grew up thinking that America would always have a big middle class, an honest government responsive to its citizens, and a peaceful state. I was told that America had learned from its past and reached perfection, more or less. In the USA, it lasted from the 1950s to the mid-1960s, if you don’t count the Korean war.  History is drenched with small communities and small moments in time like that.

But I digress. :-)

In the last chapter, Prechtel describes with bitterness what he sees as his community’s downfall when Western materialism arrived. I don’t see it as that straightforward. People deserve the chance to make choices.  But the village he described sure seemed light years from the one that greeted us when we disembarked at the pier.  It’s possible another village exists behind that one—we certainly could not discover it in just an afternoon.

Here we are headed across the lake.

Santiago is one of the few communities where you see men wearing the traditional woven pants. Notice that the fellows behind him are wearing jeans. All three are wearing Western shirts.

Santiago Atitlan harbor

These folks are getting off boats at the same time we are. Lot of women wear traditional dress, often not only the style of Santiago, but mixed with other villages' styles or something Western.

I wish I knew how to wind a headdress. This one is simple, for business. The ones for ceremonies and festivals can be very elaborate.

This is the first shop setup by the beach.

The little girls wante me to buy trinkets for $1, so I said yes if I can take your photo. I thought that was a great idea. It started a firestorm of demands that I buy $1's worth from all of them. And of course other children immediately zeroed in demanding that I buy something from THEIR baskets also.

You can see from the expressions that I didn't win any friends.

Notice the coke-cooler stands the fruits and vegetables are resting on.

Modern shoes...and Mom is talking on a cell phone.

I don't think most of the things for sale are hand made or made locally. But we didn't spend much time looking. We headed up the hill to the church.

Small images like this lined the periphery inside--several sets of them in different styles of dress.

These are wearing kerchief neckties.

The Mayans of Santiago combine traditional with Catholic faith. Supposedly, the village has a very large image of a traditional god that is regularly fed, among other things) with alcohol and given cigars; historically a village leader has the job of providing for this need. The image is available for guests to see (not at the church) but we didn't have enough time. Mark, Stephen and I saw some of the very large images (perhaps eight feet tall, on poles to carry in a parade) at a museum outside Antigua. I bought a CD showing traditional festivals at the most traditional villages.

Stephen and Julia rest in hammocks back at our hotel.

 

We just had time to walk to a nature preserve near our hotel--it was nearly dark and closing time but we thoroughly enjoyed watching the spider monkeys play.

 

 

I think this fellow is a coati . Several of them visited us as we were watching monkeys from a platform high in the jungle. It was a taste of the jungle environment  we would see at Tikal.