Nebaj day 2-4 – the Maya hike

When I got back to the hotel I was lucky enough that there was another gringo that had gotten into town. Johnny DeLello was like a caricature of an american. He was pleasant enough to begin with, but when you spent more than 10 minutes with him, you quickly realized that he was as loud, ignorant and full of himself as they come. Johnny, if you read this, I’m sorry man, but I’ve never met anyone so full of shit like yourself!

Normally I try to distance myself from (north) Americans as much as possible down here (Canadians excluded of course!), and Johnny is the type of American that I would run from, but in this case he had one redeeming quality: he knew Spanish! So I quickly dragged him to Guide Ixil to help me set up a trek. And now that there were two of us, we actually met the minimum number of people to go on an organized trek as well. Unfortunately Guide Ixil decided to close early that evening, so we had to wait until the next morning...

When we got there, we were lucky enough that there were already a Spanish couple and an Israeli couple that had set up a three-day trek, so we quickly decided to join them. Johnny’s main argument was to get the cost of the trek down, but it was so cheap that I didn’t really bother. But two or three days alone with Johnny and I was afraid that I might have to kill him before he drove me insane. :-)

We didn’t have more than half an hour to decide to join them and then pack our gear, but as it turned out the others were really nice people and we had three great days:

Eva, Marc, Efrat, Israel, myself, and Johnny, before we set out for the mountains - we were to be much more tired and less perky three dats later.

Day 1: To the Mayan village
The first day was a relatively light hike (steep at places, but no more than 1000 verticals in total) to a remote mayan village. There were no roads to the village, and since it was a long hike to the nearest road, they had very little contact with the outside world. This was evident when you studied the village: there were pretty much no outside items (like radios, modern-style tools, etc.) that they traded any agricultural surplus for.

Which meant that in our eyes, it was a really backwater place. And since the Maya has their own languages, no one spoke Spanish either, so contact between us and the locals were really minimal. This was something of a disappointment in the beginning, but it did allow us to get to know each other much better, as well as play a lot of Tiki (or something similar, I don’t quite remember the name), a really fun Uno-like card game.

But as always in these situations, the kids got to our rescue. The adults kept their distance, but kids are always curious, so we spent quite some time playing with them. And with kids, you don’t really need to know the language either! But all in all, Guide Ixil needs to improve their relationship with the villagers a great deal. Not only were we not welcome in their homes, this is what greeted us when we opened the door the morning after:

When your neighbour takes a dump at your doorstep during the night, you KNOW it means “get the hell out of here”... :-(

Luckily enough, the view when we lifted our eyes a few feet were much better: the morning fog kept changing in the valleys below at an amazing rate, and made for some exciting morning scenery!

Day 2: To Cotzol

The morning fog thickened, and it got quite spooky at times.

The second day, we continued to climb the mountain, and by lunch time we hit the highest point on our trek. At around 2800 meters we were no more than 900 meters higher than Nebaj, but behind us we now had 1200 really steep verticals. But still not high enough to give me any idea for how Kilimanjaro will feel in eight months or so – I really need to hunt for some real heights in Kyrgyzstan!

Cotzol, the village where we were staying the second night was completely different. When we got there we were greeted by lots of kids cheering us on, and we almost felt like celebrities. These people were also fullblood mayans, but they had clearly embraced modern society in a way that the people in the previous village had not.

Kids very curious to find out how a digital camera works.

First of all, most of them spoke Spanish, very likely related to the fact that all kids actually went to school. Secondly, you could see that they was longing for western-style modernities: even though everyone had dirt floors, quite a few of them had cell phones! And of course, to pay for that you need to trade, so you need to work harder on the fields to produce a surplus, which in turn means that modernities like gasoline-driven mills were suddenly useful.

And so on: the comparison is definitely the best hands-on experience of the advantages of trade I could think of, and definitely put all those boring lessons in business school in a new light!

We were also invited to have lunch (a very late one, but still), dinner and breakfast in a number of different houses in the village. It was very interesting to see the inside of their houses, but also quite sad. To the untrained eye at least, they looked far more unsophisticated and less developed than the houses from the 1700’s that you see in Swedish museums, and it felt sad to know how easy diseases would spread in those environments. I later heard from a journalist in Antigua that child fatalities could be halved in Guatemalan rural villages just by installing stoves with actual pipes to the ceiling instead of just letting the smoke out in the kitchen.

Efrat and Eva having dinner in at a local home in Cotzal.

And just to illustrate that point, me and Johnny had a discomforting experience in the family where we had dinner. When we were almost through our dinner, we heard some incoherent ramblings and cries from the room (all the houses we were in had only a kichen plus one room). When we asked, we got to know that there were a sick child in the room next door, and that the relatives had gathered to pray for her, lead by an old matriarch (or maybe she was a shaman, we did not really know).

I still don’t know whether the girl made it through the night or not, but to be honest my hopes aren’t very high. She had a really high fever, she was rambling, and there simply weren’t any doctors for miles around. Not that I know if these people actually would let a western doctor look at their kid, and even less if they could afford one.

Those who know me, know that I am certainly not a very religious person (to say the least), but that evening I prayed. There was nothing else that I could do (my first aid kit only had things to fix cuts and wounds and could do nothing for a fever) except fall on my knees and prey... Oh, and I gave the family 100 Quatzales (or about 12 US$, more than a week’s salary I guess) for a doctor, but I think that even made less use than the prayer.

All in all the most gripping experience during the whole trip, but unfortunately not in a good way. :-(

Day 3: Back to Nebaj
The third day was definitely the most strenuous. Especially for Efrat, who had forgotten both her asthma medicine, and to tell us that she actually HAD asthma! This irritated Johnny a lot since he wanted to go faster, which strained the relations in the group somewhat, but on the whole I must say that I’m proud that I kept the situation together.

Me? Yes, because unfortunately our guide wasn’t exactly the best there was, and as the oldest of the group I did feel a certain responsibility. That was fine, but the bad part was that our guide was extremely passive the whole time, and instead of him telling us about the history and other facts about the region we had to drag every little piece of information out of him, and that really made for a less than relaxed trek sometimes.

But the trek the third day was excellent! The landscape was even more dramatic, and we were doing on average 6-700 vertical meters per hour the whole day, going up and down the mountains and valleys as we approached Nebaj.

Resting for a few minutes before the final assault of the last peak before Nebaj.

But it had been a hard day, and without any lunch we were more or less starving when we had dinner late in the evening – and never has a pizza tasted as good as that night...
All in all, I was both very satisfied with Nebaj, but also very tired, and quite happy to be leaving for the quieter surroundings of Lake Atitlan the day after…