The Full Monty in Guatemala

I didn’t know what to expect in Guatemala, but it certainly wasn’t The Full Monty. I’d heard all kinds of bad reports about Guatemala City, which Paul Theroux described as ugly, brutal and dull, which even by Paul Theroux’s standards is rather on the negative side.

As I’d travelled through Guatemala from the Mexican border in the previous week, most Guatemalans I spoke to had added ‘violent and dangerous’ to Theroux’s bleak depiction. I’d anticipated hardly daring to step out of my hotel room in the two days I was there, but I hadn’t imagined lolling back on the bed watching The Full Monty on TV, with Spanish sub-titles. The title translated as Todo o Nado, while every forthright four-letter Yorkshire curse seemed to be rendered in Spanish as ‘Imbecile!’

On a Mexican bus as we looped through Yucatan and headed for the Guatemalan border, the in-bus movie one morning was Black Scorpion, a torrid tale which involved New York detectives gazing out of their windows and wondering to themselves, ‘Who are you, Black Scorpion?’ Black Scorpion was a righter of wrongs, a woman who dressed in her Scorpion outfit to fight evil wherever she found it. On one occasion she slipped out of her outfit and bounced around with a man on a bed in a graphic manner that I have never yet seen on a National Express bus in the UK or a Greyhound in America, causing the English couple behind me to suddenly start pointing out the wonders of the Mexican landscape to their teenage son: ‘Look at the bird, oh, aren’t those flowers pretty?’ The rest of us – male and female – had our eyes glued to Black Scorpion’s bouncing bosoms and athletic skills.

We left Black Scorpion and the Mexican bus behind at the border, as we walked into Guatemala to be greeted by the money-changers. Unshaven guys who made the Dirty Dozen look like a shower-gel commercial all clustered around, waving wobbling wads of money as we waited to go through passport control. It’s easy to get Guatemalan quetzals in Mexico as you near the border, but the rates are very low. These guys were all offering a better rate than the banks in Mexico, but knowing we’d never see them again we changed the bare minimum… only to find that the banks at our first stop in Quetzaltenango were offering the exact same rate. Well, you have to say that these guys weren’t ripping anyone off.

 

Back at the border it was our first encounter with the notorious Guatemalan chicken buses, which chug their way around the country and get their Gringo nickname because you’re just as likely to find yourself sitting next to a chicken as a passenger. Despite their ramshackle nature – most of them are former American school buses, and are positively spacious provided you’re no more than about ten years old – they’re cheap, efficient and fun ways to get around the country. We were faced with two buses, both going to Quetzaltenango, each one leaving before the other one, according to their drivers. ‘But take mine,’ one said, ‘it’s got nicer colours.’

Our luggage was strapped to the roof of the one with nicer colours, and we set off for a bit of bump and grind – the bump of the road and the grind of the gears as the bus groaned its way over the Western Highlands. This southwest corner of Guatemala has some of the most beautiful scenery in the whole of Central America. The humble houses were built of stone or breeze-block and looked, in a modest way, more prosperous than the wooden shacks we’d got used to seeing in Mexico. The land was certainly fertile: vast fields of potatoes and onions, and sizable orchards. Pyramids of apples, red as raspberries but almost as big as basketballs, were piled on stalls by the side of the road. When we stopped for a break people climbed on board the bus, pushing their way down the packed aisle to sell cans of fruit juice, water, biscuits, sweets and white plastic cups packed with juicy fruit slices as if a rainbow had been snipped into little pieces.

In Quetzaltenango, while some of the group dragged themselves out of bed at 5am – or in the case of my room-mate who’d forgotten to adjust his alarm clock by the hour’s time difference from Mexico, at 4am – to climb the Santa Maria volcano that stands ominous guard over Guatemala’s second city, I decided to mooch about the town. Armed guards stood menacingly outside the banks,, though when I asked for directions the tough-looking faces broke into smiles, and the machine-guns were used only to point me towards the counter where they exchanged travellers’ cheques.

My pockets now filled with quetzals – the currency, that is, not the national bird after which it’s named – I pigged out on breakfast at the Café Baviera, a pine-panelled place that looked like something out of Middle Europe rather than Central America. The smiling brown-eyed Indian waitress brought me coffee (‘best coffee in town’ says the Rough Guide), orange juice, scrambled eggs with onion, tomato, fried plantain and refried beans, plus toast, butter and strawberry jam, all for just a few dollars. It cost me even less to refresh my paperback supply at the Vrisa bookshop. Outside the building opposite, a huge queue of people snaked along a balcony, down some stairs, and along the row of shops underneath. ‘What’s that about?’ I asked the bookshop owner. ‘Queuing for a telephone line,’ she explained.

From Quetzaltenango we bussed onwards through the misty mountains, past the turning for Chichicastenango, and down to Panajachel, nicknamed Gringotenango for the backpackers who swarmed here to drop out in the 1960s. You still see the occasional grizzled hippy, tie-dyed as if he’d walked all the way from Woodstock and only just arrived, but many have moved on to sneer in the surrounding villages as Panajachel has turned into a tourist resort and, in their eyes, been ‘spoiled’. The Indians who swarm the streets and make a living selling their embroidery, blankets, jewellery and shirts, don’t seem to mind too much. ‘Pana’ is popular not just with the few western visitors who make it to the Western Highlands, but with holidaying Guatemalans and other visitors from Central America. See its lakeside setting and you’ll know why.

Pana stands on the shores of Lake Atitlan, a volcanic crater lake which is the country’s prime tourist attraction. It’s about 18km long and up to 12km wide, and 320m down at its deepest. You would never know that it’s 1562m above sea level as this vastness of water is surrounded by volcanic peaks which themselves rise another 2000m or so from the sides of the lake. Little wonder that the native Indians believe it to be the navel of the earth and the sky, a much more fitting response than that of Aldous Huxley, who visited it in the 1930s and declared it to be so impossibly beautiful that after a few days he was thinking nostalgically of the English Home Counties.

On arrival after a few hours in a chicken bus, we were thinking emphatically about a drink at the Sunset Bar on the edge of the lake. The sun descended slowly, much more slowly than the levels in the bottles of tequila and huge litre bottles of Guatemalan Gallo beer that cluttered the table, occasionally cleared away to make room for more. Steaming plates of chili arrived, dark refried beans, bright green guacamole, volcanic piles of chips. We asked the waiter what the great guitar music was that was on the tape deck, and he wrote the name Carlos Vives on a napkin. In the early hours of the morning – at least seven hours after we had first sat down – the bill arrived and no one had any idea who owed what. ‘Why doesn’t everybody just put in what they think they owe,’ I suggested, and flocks of quetzals fluttered to the table. I counted it up and it was almost spot on.

There followed a few days of lazing by the lake, interrupted by another chicken bus ride, this time to the market at Chichicastenango, perhaps the most famous market in Guatemala. I was a little disappointed, not by the colour and the goods on display, but by the small scale of it. I had expected to see packed streets going on for miles but all the action takes place along a few streets, though what it lacks in size it makes up for in colour.

Indian women sell their dazzling embroidery, vivid reds and deep blues, banana yellows and lime greens, each pattern different depending on the village the woman comes from. There were blouses and blankets, wooden carvings of toucans and leering devil masks, plastic Christmas trees dangling (in midsummer), sacks of red chilis, canaries in wooden cages, stacks of dried fish, beggars, busking marimba players… maybe it’s as well the market wasn’t as large as I’d expected it to be as the sensory overload may have been too much.

On the bus back down to the lake, the lady beside me was breastfeeding her baby and another woman was standing with both a baby and a chicken tied to her back in a shawl. The baby slept on among the racket and crush of people getting on or off, its fuzzy-haired head lolling and flopping from side to side as if its neck was made of rubber. The chicken peered round suspiciously.

Another bus took us to Antigua, Guatemala’s former capital and the most colourful example of the attractive Colonial towns that are part of the Spanish heritage in Central America. Dazzlingly-coloured houses line its long straight streets, and it could be Cordoba or Seville when you stand in the central Plaza, beside the splashing fountain, a palace on one side of you, a cathedral on another. Antigua’s cathedral is different, though, a sham like a Hollywood film set, as I discovered when I took a town tour with Roberto Spillari, a cartographer and local historian.

‘The history of Antigua is also the history of earthquakes,’ he tells me in the Plaza. ‘We have 3-4 major quakes per century in this country. The last was in 1976 when there were 30-35,000 dead in the Highlands. Over there is the Cathedral, which dates from around 1680.’ We enter the Cathedral through the Gate of Forgiveness, a quality much needed in Guatemala where the Spaniards conquered, the volcanoes erupt, the earth cracks and quakes and only in December 1996 did a Peace Accord bring to an end several decades of civil war.

‘Before the great earthquake of 1773,’ Roberto tells me, ‘there were forty churches in Antigua, but afterwards there were none left.’

Behind the rebuilt smaller part of the cathedral is the older collapsed cathedral. A huge column lies where it crashed to the ground. The quake happened at 3pm and many people were killed as they moved around what was then the country’s elegant capital city. I gaze up through the roof to a circle of sky, where one of the giant domes had come thundering to the ground. In those days this was the largest church in Central America. ‘They aim to do a little consolidation here,’ Roberto tells me, ‘but no reconstruction – it’ll take a lot of time and money and then we’ll have another earthquake!’

It was after the earthquake that the capital was moved about 30km east to the Valley of the Virgins to become Nueva Guatemala de la Asunción, or today just Guatemala City. The stories of its horrors, ugliness, squalor and violence made me do a very unadventurous thing, and book a guided city coach tour from my hotel. I was astonished to see wide tree-lined boulevards, impressive statues at almost every junction, and a vast central Plaza that would be the envy of any country in the world.

Beside the entrance gates are red-suited guards with sub-machine guns. Four crop-haired, black-suited, briefcase-clutching steely-smiling Gringos walk by, who could be nothing else but Mormons. Across the street in the Plaza a woman is declaiming something, reading from a Bible and shouting at the Palace, gesticulating wildly. I ask our guide Mario what she’s saying. ‘Oh,’ he replies, ‘she is saying that she wants the President to change his religion, he should become a Mormon.‘

What next, I wondered? First the Conquistadores, now the Mormons. Earthquakes, volcanoes, revolutions. What the Guatemalans have had to put up with.