We are going to Rio Dulce and Livingston! Since I first arrived in Guatemala, and especially after I spent time in Jamaica and liked that culture so much, I have wanted to get to Livingston, the home in Guatemala of the black Caribbean Garifuna people. So my primary interesting in going on this weekend tour is to finally get to Livingston. My temporary housemate, Maria Cristina, decided this would be a great way to finish visiting Guatemala and get on her way to Honduras, and then down on thru Central America. So we pile into the tour bus on Friday at noon to find 12 passengers, including us, not the five we had expected. Since we are the last pickup, we get the extra fold-down seats, and I have all the baggage squashed against my feet, although I eventually find ways to use this for comfort. The first part of the trip is ghastly – it takes 40 minutes to get to Guatemala City and then 25 crawling thru the main part of G.C., windows open for air, which lets in the horrible diesel fuel of trucks and buses crawling along with us. I have rarely been bothered by smog, but my eyes are stinging before we get out of there. Then another 35 minutes moving thru the rest of the city at a better pace (it is a BIG sprawl of a city, but in many places interestingly divided by deep thick green canyons with houses perched precariously on their descending walls.) [In Feb 2007 I learn that some of these houses tumbled into the earth when a “sinkhole” developed.] Then out into the country and on our way to Rio Dulce.
This huge river runs thru the middle part of Guatemala, out to the Caribbean. The terrain on the way there – the earth being what it is – reminds me a lot of the area between the Central Valley of California and the Pacific Coast. The trees are different, but look a lot like the low sprawling oaks of the Central Valley, and except for where the brush is punctuated by arms of cactus, higher than the trees, or – as we got closer to Rio Dulce – by banana trees, it looks just like our deer brush-covered foothills, at least in Spring. The towns remind me of the outskirts of cities like San Jose….ugly, sprawling, dirty rows of car body shops and small stores….but here almost the whole town has that look. The rural areas, however, are incredibly beautiful and rich green, even in September, since it's still the rainy season. A tall graceful mountain range follows us to our left, and smaller more spaced mountains rise along the right-hand side of this rich valley that our highway runs thru. Very little commercial-looking farming, except for one area of several hundred acres of parallel strips of plastic on the ground, presumably keeping the weeds down around young strawberry plants, although I couldn’t see them. We take a bathroom break in one town after about three hours driving, and immediately our bus is surrounded by adults and children selling shelled and roasted pecans. The kids are shy but Maria Cristina’s fluent Spanish quickly warms them up, and in her usual way (and mine, when I can speak the language better) she soon learns their names and ages, something about their schools, where they live and so on. With all the beautiful valley land around this ugly, terribly hot town, I am disappointed to learn they live “muy cerca” the parking lot we are in.
The foliage thickens as we approach the river, but by then it is nightfall (which happens just about seven o’clock, here, year-round.) We pull into the “Backpacker’s Hotel” right next to the river, and eat some dinner looking out over the water and up at the HUGE bridge which spans from our side of the river to the town on the other side. This bridge is touted in the Lonely Planet guidebook as one of the few positive things accomplished by the president responsible for so much genocide in Guatemala in the 80s. I make the mistake of ordering something which I think will be BBQ chicken, but turns out to be bad Chinese food, “sweet and sour” with little fried chicken patties in it. However I am very hungry so down it goes. Maria Cristina’s Spanish (as well as her effervescent personality) is attractive to all the other people on our tour – all Spanish students at one or another school – so they come over off and on to join our table. I learn that three young girls in a group are barely 20 years old and from Denmark. Two couples are from Germany. Another single woman of 28 or so is from Holland. One single man is from Quebec, now learning Spanish with a French accent; and one is from New Hampshire. The tour guide also joins us, so I am able to learn a lot listening to the Spanish flow between him and my friend. While we are eating, a small boat with a motor on the back buzzes slowly into the dock and a woman in her late 30s, apparently Caucasian, climbs out and makes her way into the restaurant. She evidently buys something or uses the phone, then returns to slip back into her boat and buzz away into the night. Since I am inclined to imagine living almost any beautiful place I see, this sets up fantasies of renting a river-side home – open to the breezes - and buying a small boat to get around, since there are no roads in this area except for a few from the highway down to the Rio Dulce like the one on which we had come. Livingston and most of the towns in this area are not reachable except by boat because of the thickness of the jungle. After dinner, the younger folks go over to the bar side of the restaurant, out on a dock, and I join them to listen to the music, ending up in a very friendly, joking conversation with one of the young German men. Since there doesn’t seem to be the discouragement of smoking among Europeans that we see in the US, and since Guatemala has no rules about smoking in bars or restaurants, all of these young foreigners AND the American are smoking left and right and the atmosphere eventually gets to me, so I go up to the room I am to share with M.C., only to find that it is about 100 degrees in there, and no fan. The rooms are rather like in a child’s summer camp….only screen above head-level….and the beds, provided only with sheets, are rather like cots. As tired as I am from the five-hour drive, this is pretty disappointing, but I go back down to the dock, get MC from her sitting place and we go to the end of another dock to lie down on the cool planks, very near the water, until the evening cools off enough to go to bed.
In the morning we are to take a launch down the river to Livingston. Since it turns out Cristina doesn’t swim either, we talk about small fears of the boat scene, but she says that it will be a big launch like on Lake Atitlan and will of course have lifevests for passengers. When we get up in the morning I quickly learn that neither is the case. Small boat and no lifevests. In the same way I had just sort of given over my life to the very fast bus driver, the day before, I get on the launch and decide not to dwell on my fears. This launch quickly turns out to be non-functional, and when we sputter to a stop – and float quietly for ten minutes a quarter way across this huge river (the bridge span seems about the length of the Oakland-San Francisco bridge to the first island) while the “pilot” frantically tries to get it to start – another, slightly larger, boat comes to our rescue. We jump from one to the other and with a huge roar of the engine we are off down the river. It is a little scarey, exhilarating, and sort of annoying to be going so fast since I want to see EVERYTHING, but there is a lot of water to cover, and the driver does slow down enough for us to see some of the dwellings, grand and simple, on the banks; takes us close to a small island covered with birds – white egrets standing out sharply against the green trees; black cormorants sitting in the tops of all the trees, silhouetted against the amazing sky. He also takes us down a side canal so that we can get really close to several dwellings, where really young children paddle their way alone through the water in dugout canoes which sit in the water right up to the lip of the boat, and mothers hang their wash on lines on the decks of a house on poles at the water’s edge. There are “islands” of lilies all along the river wherever it is shallow. Stopping near one, we watch a 6” tall bird with long skinny legs walk across this world of lily-pads, floating in the water…..bright white lilies on tall stalks, tilted toward the sun. The Hispanohablantes call this La Isla de las Flores. El pilote also takes us into a lagoon where the trees, as all along the river, are thick right down to the water’s edge; vines climbing up into the trees, branches of the some trees dropping directly down 10-15 feet into the water. And of course everything in the forest-scape is perfectly reflected in the water. It is really breath-takingly beautiful, and along with the sensuous breeze from the river on this very warm day, worth any trouble it has been to get here. The driver stops the boat in the middle of one lagoon for at least 15 minutes, waiting for the engine-sound to die away enough that the birds will begin to feel comfortable and start calling again. It is interesting how hard it is for the young people in my boat to be comfortable with the silence. They keep talking or sniggering……but eventually all is quiet, the birds begin to call back and forth, and I begin to cry inside with the miracle and overwhelming pleasure of being in such an incredibly beautiful place in the world.
Then the engine starts up and off we go again, stopping at the riverside crafts shop where hopeful sellers wait with hand-carved and painted coconut-shell bowls, bracelets, small painted-wood animals, and embroidered fabric purses, belts, etc. We also see a demonstration of some of the carving. All of this to benefit a project there (started by another American ten years or so ago) which provides a residential highschool for these far-flung Mayan river-dwellers. Unfortunately the prices for the crafts items are rather high – tho I’m sure warranted – and because we are on a day trip, and therefore not out to carry bags of purchased goods, we don’t purchase anything. Our group is a probably a disappointment to them, though we are all very friendly. It is here that I see huge bamboo groves and hear some strange whistling noises that the guide said were made by large bees. Fortunately we have no personal contact with them. Then on to Livingston.
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