Boots in the Oven

Easter in a Big Ol' Volcanic Lake

After the alfombra extravaganza wrapped up and the busses started running again, we tied up our hobo-packs and hit the road to El Salvador.

Crazy-ass chicken bus time!

A shuttle picked us up at 5:30am and took us to Guatemala City, where we caught a second-class bus across the border to San Salvador, where we took a cab across town to another bus station and hopped a chicken bus to El Congo. There we passed this funeral procession-

-then hiked up an on-ramp to the PanAmerican Highway (dodging cars and moto-taxis) , walked a quarter mile down the freeway and jumped on another chicken bus that headed down a long winding dirt road descending the length of a defunct volcano, where we then solved the riddle of the Sphinx, mucked out the Aegean Stables, threaded the labyrinth of the Minotaur, and bested two 4th graders in marbles without so much as a bowler to our name.

Ahh.

Finally we arrived at Lago Cuatepeque. The lake fills a spectacular old caldera and is reputed to be one of the most stunning bodies of water in the Americas. We certainly took a liking to it.

We weren't so much in a town as we were in a small stretch of buildings. The hostel was nice but you would be well advised to think of it more as camping than as a traditional hotel. Our room was fairly open to the elements, with vines growing in from all sides and plenty of geckos and their prey to keep us from feeling lonely.

Dinner the first night was at this hilarious restaurant, across a rickety bridge, perched on teetering stilts. But at least the food was bad.

The benefit of our place was that it backed up to the very beautiful Cuatepeque. After a breakfast of casamiento, eggs and fruit, we grabbed the communal canoe and spent a few hours paddling around the edges and failing entirely to reach the other side. What? Did you even look at the picture? That thing is freakin' huge.

Casamiento is an insanely delicious blend of beans and rice. Even without the weird Dorito garnish.

For Easter Sunday proper, we took the bus back up the hill to have dinner at a comedor with a world class view (see above pictures if it do ya' fine) and none too shabby fish. After sundown we lounged in hammocks and soaked in the traditional Easter karaoke caterwauling of random spanish language cover-songs. Ah small town El Salvador.

Mmmm...feesh...

The lake was certainly beautiful, but our stop here did bring into sharp perspective the precipitous class divide of this country. Most of the shorefront is walled off from view, protecting sprawling villas and glittering mansions. The little bits left for public access came with such amenities as roadside trash heaps, and open sewage lines. The people we met were uniformly upbeat and very friendly, but the rest made for a less palatable juxtaposition. There is certainly room for improvement.

When our time for lake exploring was up, we made a spur of the moment decision to change our departure plans. Instead of heading for San Salvador, we thought we'd haul ourselves and our bag of tricks a little further east to a little town called Suchitoto. Luckily, we didn't have to leave at 5 in the morning to get there.

The Food of Antigua

Rachel has no doubt explained about how we got unexpectedly waylaid in Guatemala for Easter week and how we got to see (and even help out a little with making) the insanely impressive street carpets. What we have neglected to mention is the seriously awesome food that came part and parcel with our fortuitous delay.

Not Food.

The evening of our first night in Antigua, we characteristically botched locating a particular restaurant of choice. Even with the helpful police (huge guns and all) trying to point us in the right direction, the mercurial street numbers of the town proved too much of a challenge.

Luckily for us, we stumbled on Dona Maria and her crew of merry ladies, dishing up fine food on the steps of La Merced. For about $4 we feasted on doblados de chicharrones (oval masa pockets stuffed with fried pork skin), tacos dorados de pollo (fried tacos with chicken), chuchitos (small pork tamales smothered in pickled cabbage and salsa picante), tostadas (these with black beans and a funky queso seco that tasted more like blue cheese than the feta flavor I was expecting), fried plantain patties stuffed with chocolate, and bowls of atol blanco (a thick corn drink, served rather spicy here and including a few bonus frijoles floating in the bottom). I wasn't particularly sorry that we couldn't find the first place on our list.

The next morning we strolled over to the market. It was rather bustling and contained a few items that we'd never seen before like these pacallas

which are undeveloped palm flowers that kind of reminded me of chicken feet. We later had then battered and fried (they have a pleasant bitter flavor).

We also kept seeing these massive pods called corozos.

When I asked how you prepared them the guy looked at me like I was a particularly slow farm animal and then turned to Rachel to explain that she really shouldn't let me eat them as they were purely decorative, particularly for Semana Santa- 

as they give off a lovely fragrance.

Later we tracked down some sub-ik, a lightly spiced tomato based stew with chicken, pork and beef. It's a rich dish and the vinegary side dishes definitely helped keep it manageable.

In the interest of science we of course had to sample many, many beers. This is Moza- our favorite new beer to date. Dark in color but light and refreshing to drink with a nice balance of caramel sweetness and fragrant hops.

We also learned that like the Mexicans, Guatemalans are masters of beans. This sopa de frijoles was layered with flavor and didn't come across as thick or muddled in the least. Quite a trick when working with a big bowl of pureed legumes.

Fryin' up doblados.

Another benefit to being in Antigua for Easter was the nearly round the clock food market just down the street from our place. We committed ourselves and managed to try a fantastic variety of snacks including more doblados de chicharrones;

custard filled molletes floating in cinnamon infused syrup;

their close cousins the deep fried bunuelos (these beignet-like balls shouldn't be confused with the thin, crispy Mexican version),

custardy empanadas de leche; and great steaming mugs of batido, a delightful blend of coffee, cinnamon, toasted corn powder, hibiscus flowers, pineapple and prunes.

When you're up 'til 5am, you need a lot of batido.

Think of it like a slightly thicker Guatemalan version of chai.

One of the most interesting discoveries we made, were confusingly dubbed enchiladas. Having grown up around heaps of Tex-Mex, these tostadas topped with lettuce, beets and beet marinated cabbage, stewed pork, shredded radish and cucumber, sliced hard boiled eggs, and more of that funky cheese, was certainly not what I was expecting.

Strolling around, we also ran into these ladies selling the most yellow corn I think I've ever seen. They sold it steamed or grilled with a little salt covered lime tucked into the husk. Pure maize heaven.

We're currently in El Salvador up to our eyeballs in pupusas. Stay tuned for updates.

Alfombras of Antigua

We weren't even going to stop in Guatemala.  It seemed easy to take a bus directly from Mexico straight through to El Salvador, and that was the plan right up until we actually looked at a map and consulted bus schedules.  Turns out neither of us relished the idea of 20 hours straight on a bus, so we decided to stop in La Antigua. 

The ride there was great.  It was one of those tourist dealies where you get shuttled from bus to van to minivan with different groups of people.  We started out with a large group of Koreans and ended up with a couple from Canada, who were living in Honduras teaching English, sitting basically right in our laps (the van was short a seat).

Guatemala clings to traditional dress and traditional ways, and we saw some beautiful huipiles and skirts and hats.  Also, there's an election coming up, and symbols were painted all over the roadside (notice the corn cob in the picture above).  Sometimes, rocks or lightpoles would just be painted a series of colors, that being enough to show which party the town supported.

The main mode of transportation (if you aren't in a tourist van) in Guatemala is the chicken bus.  They're repurposed American schoolbuses with added roof racks that sometimes do support actual chickens.

And the main mode of transport of goods is the head.

Antigua is a lovely, kind of surreal town bedecked with tourists.  It's Guatemala's showcase and is full of cobblestoned streets and beautifully detailed churches and gun-toting tourist police.  And by a major stroke of luck, we happened to stumble upon it during its most festive time of year - Semana Santa.  During Holy Week, the town neatens itself up, shines its shoes, and busts out dyed sawdust, fruits, vegetables, and pine needles for a traditional art called the alfombra.

(I'm totally serious about the sawdust.  I still have a bright pink patch on my leg from when we helped.)

Apparently (I'm Jewish, so please cut me some slack when it comes to the Catholic theology), when Jesus rode into Jerusalem ahead of getting crucified, the people laid items out on the street for Him to walk on - like robes, plants, et cetera.  These alfombras are lovingly detailed carpets that are created in the days before Easter, only to be destroyed when massive processions retelling the story of the Cricifiction and Resurrection make their winding, resolute way through the streets of Antigua.

These alfombras run the gamut from large, intricately detailed ones sponsored by businesses or churches,

to ones inside churches, which are sponsored by the Church brotherhoods,

to smaller ones, built by individual families.

It's just like the ritual of decorating the Christmas tree.  Entire families turn out to help, and we often saw Grandpa directing the little ones just exactly where to put their decorations. 

And then, the sound of drumming and trumpets, faint at first, becomes louder until it's unmistakeable.  Spicy incense wafts down the street.  And the first robed men come marching down, as yet avoiding the carpets.

Before Good Friday and through midday on that day, the men wear purple; after that, they wear black.  (The man you see above in the red and khaki is a Church brother; the position is passed down through families, though it can be sold if the family falls on hard times.)

There may be "Roman soldiers" preceding the floats depicting Christ bearing the cross, or a man bellowing Jesus' death sentence through the streets.  The soldiers are quite obviously not chosen for their horsemanship; I was really afraid one of the men might guide his horse directly through an alfombra before its time.

And then, the floats.  On Good Friday morning, we saw the Stations of the Cross and Jesus bearing the weight of the cross; in the afternoon, Jesus was in a coffin.

The float destroys the alfombras, after which they become fair game for anyone to walk on.  There's usually a band following behind the main float that destroys them further, and then often a float carrying a mourning Mary, this one borne by women in heels and black veils.  (This picture is from Thursday night.)

And then they're gone, the alfombras behind them a ruined mess. 

"So much work," I said to the woman at our wonderful guesthouse (the Yellow House) who was in charge of building our alfombra, "for something so impermanent."

She cocked her brow and said "Yes - just like us."

A little deep maybe, but in the streets, feeling the faith of the people, I think I got it.  Just for a minute.

There are more pictures we took of Semana Santa in Antigua, Guatemala over here on Flickr. Click to embiggen them.

Mexican Sendoff

Well, Mexico.  After a month of wonderment and deliciousness and beauty and dust and hammocks and cacti and babies (SO MANY BABIES) and corn, corn, corn and beans and crumbling plaster facades and Coke, we are out to Guatemala. 

We said goodbye to Mexico from San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, where we spent two brief days.  The town is at a fairly high altitude, and we shivered as we got off the bus from the beach. 

Pedestrianized avenues still feel quite nice after almost getting run down, repeatedly, on Mexico City's streets.  I'd like to kiss the person that invented timed crossings, because when they aren't there, scurrying across a 6-lane road is immesurably more difficult.

Traveling during Semana Santa, or Holy Week, in Latin America has been both a frustrating and breathtaking experience.  Everything is more expensive and more difficult to come by (especially hotels and transport) but that's been more than balanced by the cultural experiences to be had, especially here in Antigua.  In San Cristobal, the Sunday before Easter, we saw lots of people fashioning woven decorations out of palm fronds and leaves.

We went to the tiny but neat amber museum, and climbed a hill for a view and a corn ice cream (the guy selling the stuff said it was grape and strawberry flavor, but it was definitely corn).

There was strange, heavy, yellow exercise equipment on the top of the hill.  I can't imagine why you'd climb like 700 stairs and then jump on a rickety elliptical machine - perhaps that's why most of the equipment was broken.

Chiapas is famous for its coffee, and we were more than happy to indulge.  At Cafe Museo Cafe, not only did we get to try Chiapecan coffee (brewed with a giant chunk of cinnamon), we also learned about the history of coffee cultivation in the area and about local cooperatives that work with small-farm indigenous producers.  The lesson: there's a lot of very, very hard work that goes into your cup of coffee, and in the past, people were treated extremely poorly so prices would remain low.

Of course I felt a little guilty about my cuppa.

And yes, we stopped by the markets.  The amount of salted, dried fish on offer was staggering. I'm not sure if this is a Lent thing or what.

Lots of chicken, too.  Here head-on, unrefrigerated style (just like the eggs - well, the unrefrigerated part, not the head-on part).

Of course, we ate - this at a comida corrida place already discovered by the NYT called El Mercadito.  Comida corrida means that the food can also be had to go, which actually might be the more popular option; people show up with buckets and get them filled with albondigas or adobo or what have you.  The meal of the day is a steal at 55 pesos, that is, if you get a main and a side... we also ordered a couple of fritters (plantain and chicken - called tortaditas, apparently) and an extra main.

I got all intrigued when one of the sides on offer was described as "sopa fria", or cold soup.  Guess what that turned out to be?

MACARONI SALAD.  Complete with chunks of pineapple and ham.  I felt like I'd stumbled into my childhood cookouts.  Went great with my meatballs in chipotle sauce with plantains, though!

So a big kiss goodbye to Chiapas and its tasty coffee.

Thanks for making booking onward travel to Guatemala such a breeze, even if it did involve three separate vans over the course of a 13-hour travel day.  And it's totes not your fault that the Mexico/Guatemala border crossing is such a bizarre, not particularly regulated to-do (I still don't know how the driver knew to pull over at that nondescript building so we could turn in our tourist card and get our passport stamped out of Mexico, but I'm glad he did).

And I'll just have to blame the sidewalk builders of La Antigua for the theatrical, arms-windmilling-and-legs-kicking fall I took yesterday directly in front of our hostel. 

 

Back from Zipolite

Hey, reader people!  You may have noticed the radio silence of the last few days or so, because I'm a bad blogger who totally dropped the ball.  Or, more accurately, we were on a beach 6 hours from Oaxaca city, purposely avoiding the Internet.

That beach is called Zipolite, and we reached it via a van ride over insanely twisty-turvy roads from Oaxaca.  There's not much to DO in the town (well, we took a snorkel trip one day), so we mostly sat around eating seafood and failing to protect ourselves adequately from the sun.

We stayed at a very cute place called Posada Mexico, where our room looked out directly onto this:

There was no a/c, but we had a mosquito net (which totally failed to keep out the mosquitoes until we sprayed the whole thing down with permethrin).  The shower was one of those camping showers, where you pull a handle to start the flow of water, but the temperature was always perfect.

Plus, we had our very own hammock, where I got to catch up on my reading (thanks to everyone who sent book suggestions on Facebook, and most especially Danielle for emailing me all those wonderful Kindle reads!  Everyone should go find A Visit from the Goon Squad).

We sat on the beach and drank mojitos.

And discovered El Alquimista, which let us use their extremely nice beach chairs for free (unlike Italian beaches, where you pay for the umbrella).

 

Zipolite is a clothing optional beach, by the way, so you're lucky Logan took this pic before the man in the background suddenly divested himself of his shorts.

The food in town was decent, but nothing much to write home about.  But you couldn't beat the view!

Unfortunately, we had to eventually leave, so we took a twelve hour night bus to San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, where you'd find us now.  Tomorrow we head to Guatemala, which will take much of the day.  Travel right now is kind of tough - they take Semana Santa very seriously here, so getting a bus out of Zipolite (and a place to stay in San Cristobal, not to mention Antigua Guatemala) was a bit more difficult than it would be normally.

Poor Logan, though - I hated to drag him away from the beach.  He really didn't want to leave.

Off to get us some Chiapan coffee!