The Beauty of Guatemala

Guatemala is a country so beautiful it hurts, the anthropologist Oliver La Farge once said. As I travelled by bus through the Western Highlands, which are in turn reckoned to be the most beautiful part of the country, I could see what he meant. They rise to 12,000ft, tropical rain makes the vegetation lush, and the landscape is how Switzerland might look if you dropped it down in the Caribbean.

Banana palms and orchards fill the lower slopes of mountainous peaks, with coffee and cacao plantations too. Fields of maize climb high into the hills, in some places almost vertical as every inch of cultivatable land is used. The maize has been here as long as the Maya Indians, who make up the bulk of the population, still struggling on through the batterings they take from volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes and politicians.

Travelling on the chicken buses in Guatemala is part of the experience. The bus station on the edge of Quezaltenango, where we were coming from, was the size of several football pitches, and dozens of old Ford buses in reds, blues, greens, yellows and whites lined up facing each other in two ragged rows. A lot of them are ex-US school buses, so there’s plenty of leg room provided you’re not more than six years old.

The seats can take three in comfort, or six in discomfort, plus a chicken or a baby, either of which you may be required to hold. The buses have names like Esmeralda, Santa Elena, Mi Preferida, Sant Iago, Angelita del Senor. Their destination boards show Guata, Xela, Spacate Mazate, Tiquisate and Panajachel, which is where we’re going.

As we wait to leave I see an Indian woman in an immaculate white dress with pink flowers embroidered on the shoulders. She’s selling fresh fruit slices piled into polystyrene cups that crinkle as you drink the banana-pineapple-papaya juice at the bottom. Other people are selling newspapers, bread, packets of peanuts with slices of lemon, biscuits, bottles of water, sweets, coke, cans of juice, embroidery patterns and ice-cream cornets held upright in little wooden trays which look like ping-pong bats with holes stamped out of them.

On the way we stop in a town where eleven vendors clamber down the packed aisle, selling more drinks, peanuts, bread and hot corn on the cob with a fresh lime to squeeze over each piece. As we start to climb into the mountains, blue skies turn to grey mist, and passengers are picking up little sticks from the floor and using them to prop the windows and wedge them closed. We soon find out why when the sky turns dark, the wind rises, the temperature drops.

When we descend from the Highlands we pass the road that turns off to Chichicastenango, where one of the largest Indian markets in Guatemala takes place, and we zigzag down to Solola. The road is so steep and winding in places that the conductor jumps off at one corner, climbs a mound and looks down around the bend to make sure the road is clear as the bus slowly sweeps round in an arc.

Beyond Solola we descend further till we get our first glimpse of Lake Atitlan, which the Mayan Indians regard as the navel of the earth and sky. One look at this vast expanse of water, surrounded by volcanoes, and you understand why. Though we have been descending steadily, the lake below us is still 5125ft (1562m) above sea level, and around it volcanic peaks soar into the sky, the highest, Volcan Atitlan, reaching 11,604ft (3537m). Seen from above the lake is the shape of a sting-ray, but a sting-ray which measures 11 miles (17.7km) across. And perched on the side of the sting-ray’s snout is Panajachel.

Panajachel has been a backpacker’s hang-out for so long that you meet tie-dyed hippies who boast that their parents were hippies and came here long before the lakeside town got ‘ruined by tourism’. You might have thought that hippie kids would rebel against their parents and become Mormon missionaries or software developers in Silicon Valley, but instead the Rainbows and Moonglows have simply upped sticks and opened their sweat lodges in San Pedro and some of the other Indian villages around the lake, away from the tourist hordes at Panajachel.

As we walked from the bus stop to the hotel, Panajachel seemed to me to be lively, colourful and a pretty funky place to hang out for a few days. We headed down the one main street to the Sunset Bar, keen to quench a thirst and stretch the legs after several hours crammed in a bus. Not everyone made it to the bar as they were waylaid by Indians selling fabulous fabrics, and necklaces of lapis, trying to earn a few dollars from their crafts. We did our bit for the local tequila industry too, as the bright white sun turned to salmon-pink and slowly slipped behind the volcanoes, and the blue lake turned black and went to sleep for the night. Seven hours and several bottles of tequila later, we manage to settle the bill and stagger back to the Hotel Las Casitas.

A bit of chilling out seems right for the next day, and I laze at the Deli Restaurant with a banana shake, hearing two English backpackers pass by, one saying: ‘All I can think of at the moment are apples and cornflakes.’ A young Indian boy approaches the table and tries to sell me some postcards, but I show him the pile I’ve already bought. He looks at the ones of the Mayan women in their costumes, all blues and maroons. ‘Solola,’ he says, tapping one costume and pointing towards the town in the hills. ‘Chichicastenango,’ he says of a different costume. We go through all the postcards and he tells me the village where each design is made. He is only about eight years old. I certainly don’t need any more postcards but I buy a batch from him anyway and he wanders off smiling and a few cents richer.

By the wall a hummingbird hovers, seemingly looking at the cinema programme before deciding it prefers a hibiscus flower. What’s on? 3.30 Casablanca, 6pm Dead Poets’ Society, 8.30 Much Ado About Nothing.

The following day it’s much ado about the famed market in Chichicastenango. It’s a bumpy 90-minute bus ride there, at a cost of 10 quetzals, about a pound. The quetzal is the Guatemalan currency as well as the national bird and national symbol, and carved models of it are on sale in the market. The quetzal is rare, though you might see one in the Quetzal Reserve in the Verapaz Mountains. Its body is only about six inches long but the male has splendid tail plumes a few feet in length. Its head and most of its body is a blue-green-turquoise colour, with a spash of red on its breast. This is said to come from the time when one of the Spanish conquistadores killed a Mayan chief, Tecún Umán, and the little quetzal bird flew down to try to cover the chief’s dead body. Next day it flew away, its breast stained forever.

The bus back down to Panajachel is packed. A sign above the windscreen says that ‘Jesus Christ rides with us’. If so, he must be on the roof as there’s no room inside.

In the market quetzals hang from souvenir shops, which alternate with stalls piled high with fruit and veg. It’s a mix of tourist and traditional. Villagers still come into the town on foot the night before the market, and settle down to sleep on their rugs and under their wooden stalls. On market day tourist buses pile in, as well as the local people come to do their shopping. There are lemons the size of melons, piles of red chilis, of smoked fish; there are pineapples and pink bananas, a woman pushes by carrying a basket bulging with peaches, a man has a pile of brooms on his head, another offers me a canary from a wooden cage. In a courtyard a man looking like a tramp plays perky music on the marimba, and in the meat market tripe is dangling alongside… well, every other bit of every animal you can imagine.

The bus back down to Panajachel is packed. A sign above the windscreen says that ‘Jesus Christ rides with us’. If so, he must be on the roof as there’s no room inside. An Indian woman crushed up against me starts to breast-feed her baby. Later the baby stares at me, smiling, and plays with my watch, fascinated. I make the alarm beep and it gurgles happily. I wonder what kind of future it will have in this beautiful but battered land, surrounded by Panajachel’s foreign tourists and Internet cafés, and taking in its Mayan culture with its mother’s milk.