Incidents of Travel in Latin America

by Lars Holger Holm

  But the storm was as short as it was intense and gave way to a sunset in Eden. Over the pyramid, just deprived of a supporting stone, stood a rainbow against a sky as black as coal.14 A herd of tiny, absolutely innocent looking, red brocket deer moved out of hiding into the plaza. Simultaneously appeared on the grass — a deep emerald green after the rain — a pair of snow white cranes and two peacocks, spreading their feathers like Sevillan abanicos, waving a thousand-eyed turquoise, blue and violet farewell to the sun, in its turn taking a spectacular leave of the radiant rainbow arch suspended above the eastern horizon. Being there, still alive, I felt as though I was witnessing an artistic miracle.

  In terrestrial terms the entire drama may have lasted for an hour but I still couldn’t move. Only the patting on my shoulder by the vendor about to close his stand brought me out of the spell. In a waking dream I brushed past darkening trees and through obscure vegetal tunnels eventually reached the check point where the ticket controller had long since called it a day. I didn’t even see an armed guard, only at some distance ahead the second to last visitor merge merged with the embers of sunset. Dusk soon brought oblivion to Paradise. But its treasures and secrets are safe with me, since I was there and then as it pleased the Creator to strike a ray of eternity in my mortal eye!

  *

  San Ignacio, quite pleasant, really is an inland Caribbean town with a wealth of bars, restaurants and guest houses in bright colours. But wherever you go and wherever you pay, the bill is always sprinkled with a mixture of unforeseen and unforeseeable fees and taxes — symptomatically the Belize dollar is worth exactly half of a US one, and you often find yourself in a shady financial borderland where prices are either in half or seemingly doubled.

  I got my room though and it was good for the purpose, namely to serve as a platform for my visit to Caracól. Once installed I began to ask around for tours but soon found out they only might happen if there were enough people signing up for them. In theory they were running every day, but only in theory. Since participation in a tour in my view was also overpriced, I quickly made up my mind about trying to rent a four-wheel drive for a day trip. It took some time but I finally had my man. It was a rental company, duly wanting to overcharge me but agreeing to let me have the four-wheel drive that had windows that couldn’t be closed, and this for a price that seemed exaggerated in Belize dollars but OK in American.

  Now I had the tour vehicle and courteously offered some Canadian girls to come along for free, but they didn’t seem to have much confidence in the Viking edition of Indiana Jones and declared their preference for the monkey bus. So far it was only me signing up for Lorenzo Tour’s Flight 707 to Caracól. But I did as professional tour guides have also learned to do: pick up people around the hotels just before departure. I was up around seven next day and had already had my breakfast as I drove by a potential candidate. British Sebastian, studying Political Science at the University of Manchester (if I remember correctly), said that he actually had made some other plans but I quickly talked him out of them, pointing out the bleeding obvious: the rest can wait, this is opportunity knocking! Since he was both young and intelligent he quickly found his bearings. I gave him an hour to get ready and we then met by the car.

  In the beginning the road through the Mountain Pine Ridge Reserve, eventually leading to Caracól, is paved with good intentions but after passing the last major settlement that quickly changes, and a ride over a dirt road in various stages of oblivion begins. Having driven a fair stretch into the woods, we reached the forest patrol station where we were asked to wait for another hour for the convoy to form. I knew in advance the answer to my question. And no, it was not dangerous per se to drive alone, but all the same better and preferable to stay close together on the trail. While waiting for the monkey bus and other private entrepreneurs to show up, I and Sebastian, not wanting to waste a minute, took off in the car to visit a nearby cave in a forest setting that would make a perfect backdrop to an epic panorama in Lord of the Rings style.

  Well, I almost lost my able assistant right there. The cave is so enormous and its ceiling so remote that these imponderables invariably turn your face upward. Which is quite dangerous since you don’t realise that you’re actually treading on the roof of another level in the cave. That probably wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that these roofs have big holes in them. Luckily not always big enough to swallow an entire university student, but suddenly one leg of his just went straight through such an opening and the young man found himself dangling ten feet above the floor of the cave below. And yes, there are also huge bats hanging in clusters in the Gothic darkness, abnormally long-legged spiders and a veritable subterranean lake, fed by a river running through the bottom of the enormous arches marking up the entrance to and exit from the cave. In these prehistoric waters, reminiscent of one of the three legendary rivers in Hades (Lethe, Styx and Acheron) there must of course also be blind, white lizards and fish that has not been known to exist since the Cambrian period, a mere 500 million years ago.

  Once Sebastian was out of the hole we were both relieved to conclude that he had sustained no serious injury in the fall and that we could continue our expedition unimpeded, albeit henceforth with considerable caution as to where we placed our feet. The fascination the place exerted also kept us oblivious of time and ultimately caused us to run a bit late for the convoy that had just left the forest guard station. But since we promised to catch up with them we were allowed to continue. However, there were far too many natural wonders to see for us to feel any need to step on the pedal solely in order to trail behind the diesel engine monkey bus for another hour and a half, engulfed in a permanent cloud of dust and exhaust fumes. It was such a beautiful day and we leisurely navigated ourselves around the bigger holes in the road, here and there stopping altogether to admire clear rivers and waterfalls embedded in reddish rocks and greenery. We decided to stop a bit longer at these on our way back, seeing that there were other people frolicking in the natural pools created by the cascades.

  We arrived in Caracól before noon. As the car engine came to a halt we exchanged the challenges of the road for a foliage interspersed with sunrays to the lively accompaniment of chirping birds. The sun was reaching for its zenith, the whole place exuding serenity and peace. It was easy to foresee that we were not actually going to step on each other’s toes while exploring the monuments. Judging from the number of cars parked in front of the entrance, coinciding with this day’s total number of vehicles, we were perhaps in all 20 people to populate an area of 200 km2 — well, not that there are paths to walk so far and wide, but that supposedly is the total area of the ancient city of Uxwitza (bigger than present day Belize City), and christened Caracól (meaning shell or spiral in Spanish) by British archaeologists in the 1930s, a name allegedly inspired by the many twists and turns in the one and only road leading there.

  Since the mid 1980s the site has continuously been excavated by teams of archaeologists who spent months at a time living on the premises in wooden cabins especially built to house them. Patient researchers have thus managed to free a great number of monuments from tenacious overgrowth, reconstructed their architecture and, quite especially, restored a wealth of mural reliefs and stelae to almost their former glory — notwithstanding that many of the latter were carried away by early archaeologists to become part of the collection of antiquities in the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

  Whereas a site such as Tikál is actually quite poor in remaining reliefs, stelae and inscriptions, the reverse is true of Caracól, offering the visitor a unique perspective on everyday and ceremonial life in this once thriving Mayan metropolis. Today its enigmatic formal and plastic language, its glyphs, murals and ruins, are shrouded in a beauty and solemnity that has prevailed for more than a millennium, because, like so many other Maya centres, it was abandoned some time during the 10th century CE, while its heyday occurred within the three preceding
centuries.

  The central plaza, being the main attraction, is home to one of the largest known pyramids in all of Central America. The view from its summit is that of a green ocean agitated by a gentle swell. Sebastian was leaping all over the place and I caught up as best I could. I had no camera with me, but he did and with this device he documented everything while I tried to capture some of the frieze work in rough sketches. He later sent me a series of excellent photos to refresh my memory.

  In the siesta hour even the birds and the monkeys seemed to take a break. After having mounted enough pyramid stairs, I descended and found myself a stone bench shaded by a Flamboyant-Tree at the far end of the plaza and remained there, stretched out, for another hour, in splendid isolation, letting thoughts, feelings and associations freely run their course. In a very thoughtful mood I eventually rose and motioned towards the entrance complex, assuming my traveling companion would be there. The assumption proved correct. The park closes quite early in order for tourists to be able to reach contemporary civilisation before nightfall. By the time we had brought ourselves together we were among the very last visitors to leave. I can only imagine that as the sound of our vehicle died out in what was still only early afternoon, the Caracól known to tourist cameras and the Internet prepared to once again transform itself to ancient Uxwitza: a mysterious place in the midst of nowhere, resounding of ominous murmurs and whispers from an extinct civilisation receding deeper and deeper into inscrutable time...

  On our way back there was no way we could pass the cascading river we had seen in the morning without taking a swim in some of its many natural pools. Indeed we did. It was all delicious save for the minor annoyance of almost microscopic leeches that would sometimes end up sticking to one’s skin. Otherwise the water temperature was just perfect and the sun glorious in its slow descent, casting long shadows behind massive reddish boulders, turning the water into liquid copper. We spent an hour at least basking around in this aquatic paradise and only reluctantly took to the wheel again. The end of the day proved just as perfect as the rest of it and we happily made it back to San Ignacio. Sebastian and I made an appointment for some evening drinks to round off the adventure, but he got stuck somewhere, subsequently leaving a message at my hotel, which I didn’t get until the next day. So the parting from the same spot as where we had met, that is by the car, was my last glimpse of him. But I know he will always cherish in his memory the golden hours we spent on the trail to Dreamland, and where he almost went down to Hades before his time.

  *

  My trip to Calakmúl, on the other hand, was a solitary expedition from beginning to end. I had spent some days on the miniscule but charming Isla de las Mujeres, directly opposite Cancún, snorkelling its waters and enjoying its sights, including some odd submarine concrete sculptures, featuring human figures in dramatic postures, that some local artists had had the foresight to sink into the waters between the island and the mainland. After having satiated my visual imagination with sculptures — there is also a modernist park of installations around the lighthouse on the southern tip of the island which in my opinion would have fared better without such additions — I went from Cancún to the southern end of the state of Quintana Roo, where lies the city of Chetumál. Although strategically placed in a crocodile infested bay in the Caribbean Sea, the average tourist will tend to regard it as a transit town with connections to Villahermosa and Palenque in the west, to Tulum, Chichén Itzá and Cancún in north, or to Belize and its coral reefs in the south. For me Chetumál was the indispensable stepping stone for a trip to Calakmúl.

  The six hour bus ride from Cancún had taken me through a sizeable portion of the semi-arid forests and plantations of eastern Yucatán. In my memory the view through the bus window was monotonous, turning the trip into a great meditative experience interrupted only by our stops at urban bus terminals. From the bus station in Chetumál at the end of the line, I took a taxi to the central market area. I found myself a decent hotel and the following morning turned to the car rental in the lobby of a nearby Holiday Inn. Although I was there at its official opening hour, another half-hour elapsed before any employee showed up. Since the driver’s seat of the car suggested to me was a bit wobbly, I managed to negotiate the price — renting a car in Mexico is neither cheap nor easy in the first place.

  At nine o’clock I found myself behind the wheel of some sort of Volkswagen, which, although it was fairly new seemed to have seen better days. I initially had two hours ahead of me on the Mexican highway, the hazards of which involve a significant number of large road craters. But that’s only half the danger. The other half consists of all the heavy trucks. To avoid the holes, they simply swirl across the dividing line of the road, if you’re lucky enough to have one, and come at you at full speed without the slightest warning. Here too the surrounding nature scenery is quite monotonous and it doesn’t seem obvious that this kind of landscape was once home to a rich civilisation, politically, if not culturally, comparable with the ancient Greek city-states and their colonies in constant commerce and dispute with one another.

  As mentioned above, the exact cause of the depopulation and in the end total abandonment of these Mayan cities in the 10th century CE is not known. Even though there is no lack of plausible explanations no single factor — war, social upheaval, persistent drought and famine — is in itself sufficient to explain the drama, not to say tragedy, which enfolded in a region that today falls within the borders of four different countries: Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and Honduras. This leaves a lot of room for imaginative speculation. The Yucatán is an ancient cultivated landscape, much of which has lain fallow for more than a thousand years. With the aid of local governments and conservation agencies its southern extreme has today been preserved as a habitat for all feline species of the Americas — the jaguar, the puma, the lynx, the mountain lion — and their prey.

  This I was directly made aware of as the sign indicating the turnoff to Calakmúl turned up along the Carretera Federal 186. Here I was prompted to pay a first symbolic toll. A few miles further into the woods it was time to also remunerate the Forest Rangers. But from their station, the ultimate outpost, there are still 40 miles of dense jungle to cover along a road so narrow that two cars can barely pass each other. Surprisingly it is paved throughout.

  This single umbilical cord, twined by human hand, is the only reminder of the modern world: in all other directions the thicket remains impenetrable. I meet no vehicles whatsoever on my way and as I finally arrive at the ancient site — it too turned into a sublime ruin park by the patient and knowledgeable hands of archaeologists — Nature stands tall around me. But it takes several hours before I become aware of just how vast and omnipotent it is. By taking the longest indicated path to visit the park one initially passes by a number of smaller structures embedded in greenery, that to the fastidious Maya amateur seem rather ordinary. Then, after a couple hours of hiking, the great pyramids suddenly appear. I must of course get to the top of these. It’s hot, it’s sweaty, it’s an effort to ascend the steep stairs and ledges, but as I stand there, on the platform of the sacrificial altar, with the wind gently cooling my bloated face, gazing over expanses of wilderness punctuated by alien-looking edifices, enigmatically abandoned a thousand years ago, then, if not before, it becomes clear to me what man’s struggle with and against nature really means. Luckily, I tell myself, an invisible path leads back out of this natural womb, where the great stillness rules in couple with the great indifference, and wherein man is nothing but an intruder on his own risk. From the top of the pyramids nothing, not even a distant radio mast or a military defence tower, not even a condensation trail in the sky after a plane, remind me of the contemporary human world. Around me there is a 360 degree panorama solely inhabited by the sun, the planets and the galaxy’s other remote celestial actors. To the farthest north I discern the silhouette of some low lying hills; to the south the landscape is almost flat. The tall templ
es — peeking out and dominating the jungle in the same manner as lighthouses dominate the sea — are aligned with geometrical precision along the abstract north-south and east-west meridians.

  I try to imagine what human life could have been like in the city once in the shadow of the great pyramids, with villages and corn fields dotting the surrounding landscape. Beaten tracks, perhaps even paved roads, connect one village with another and eventually peter out to discreet paths into jaguar country, through enemy territory, towards proud conquests and bitter defeats. But as I try to visualise all this I overstrain my sensory capacity. My gaze loses focus and begins to aimlessly wander the indistinct immensity of Heaven and Earth. Even though I’m probably no more than 60 metres into the air, it feels as though I was standing on the surface of a transparent orb, relentlessly encompassing the entire physical universe, and I lose my sense of orientation. Laying down on what remains of the sacrificial altar I fall heedlessly into heaven.

  I eventually managed to crawl back out of there, only to find that during my absence from planet Earth, the Demiurge had decided to play me one of his little tricks. There was originally in this script, from exactly this point onwards, an additional 25 pages (unfortunately not based on a handwritten script which otherwise is usually the case) that I have reason to believe were quite decent, detailing my adventures in Oaxaca, Antígua and Lake Atitlán. But as I was preparing to extend my story the other day, I was forced to realise that, inadvertently, I must have put the current instead of an old and discarded version of my script in the electronic bin and then pressed the button for elimination. Whether or not this too was the by now infamous blessing in disguise remains to be seen. By all means it took me three weeks in a stupor to emotionally overcome the loss and decide to undertake the rather arduous task of copying from memory the gist of the matter, still in the hope, of course, that it might be worthwhile both for myself and the reader.