Lago Lightinng

Panajachel, Guatemala
Oct 26, 2001


Me overlooking the Mayan ruins at Palenque, Mexico.

The water turned warm then hot. I stepped into the steaming stream and sighed; the first hot shower in ten days. I stood and let the water warm my neck and back for ten minutes before stepping out into my private bathroom and drying off.

I rented an expensive ($20) room in a small house run by Pedro and his wife in Chichicastenango, a trading city in the Quiche (key-chay) highlands. The spacious room sported Mayan wood carvings and a bright patchwork quilt. A yellow wood jaguar with red spots held the lamp by the bed. My private balcony looked out on the mountains behind the city, where a famous market took place on Thursday (the next day).

The previous six days took me from Flores along the backroads of Guatemala, leaving the El Peten rainforest and climbing the spiny central highlands, the Cordillera de los Cuchumatanes. Beat up chicken buses, old US schoolbuses with the same broken window latches, plied up and down single dirt tracks cut into the steep mountains.

With no set schedule, we stood by the road and hailed buses going in our direction, crowded with campesinos going to and from the small villages that became namesakes in our country jaunt: Coban, Sayache, Uspantan, Sacapulus, Quiche, and Chichi.

At each stop, the Mayan descendent women clambered aboard in their fantastically colored hupiles, hawking all manner of food and drink. A chicken wing in a scoop of greasy rice wrapped in three flour tortillas stuffed in a plastic bag became the staple that sustained us for these multi-hour trips.

Road dust floated in as the buses stopped every ten years to pick up or drop off someone. What about some central bus stop for heaven's sake! The rutted roads and worn out springs made for a proctologist's nightmare ride. Horns sounded at every curve and every few minutes the bus slid to a stop, in a standoff with a truck or a pickup filled with people. After a moment, one car backed up off the road. I never figured out the pattern of yielding the right-of-way.

One bus leg finds three of us gringos on the roof of one of the ubiquitous chicken buses. The colorful rides get downright exhilarating on the top as we duck low hanging braches every few seconds to the cry of, "ramas," (which I deduced meant braches). The hue of "libre," brought our heads back up from behind baskets of fish, backpacks, roped firewood, and someone's shiny red new wheelbarrow. Two hours brought some rain as we ascended the Cordillera - note to self: bring warm cloths on bustops. My shorts and shirt did not cut it up there, but we were forced back inside finally by the driver as we approached a police checkpoint, ending our Ramas-ride.

After stuffing my backpack to the brim with cheap Mayan cloth and carvings at the Chichi market the next day, I made my way (after one more hot shower) to Lago Atitlan. The lake fills an old volcano caldera and sits at 5,500 feet in the mountains. Three other volcanos rise above the lake to over 9,000 feet, like Mount Fuji xeroxed. I settle into a room on the lake in Panajachel, a small tourist town.

I have hot water here also, and a TV. I surf the channels and find The Simpsons, in English. I spend the next 30 minutes laughing aloud and surely annoying my neighbors, two Aussie women doctors. Surfing more, I miss ABC World News, also in English, but catch the local news feed afterwards...from WKRN 2 in Nashville! So I don't know the situation in Afghanistan, but I do know it will be in the mid-30's at this weekend's University of Tennessee's Vol's game. Go figure.

Stepping outside into the evening, rising clouds blot out the sunset I hoped to see. Instead, brilliant flashes of lightning begin to illuminate the sky behind Volcan San Pedro, across the lake from me. Shades of gray clouds layer over the black volcanic cone. The clouds light up bright white and gray, rhythmically with the staccato flashes.

Answering the call, Volcan Atitlan and Toliman emerge as solid black shapes, backlit by stoboscopic flashes against the halo of clouds clinging to their summits. The volleys go back and forth, from my left to right and back again as the gods in the volcanoes build to a crescendo. I can almost hear Moussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain in the background. The night grows colder as a wind blows in off the lake, but still no thunder accompanies the lightning. I shiver and pull on my fleece for the first time this trip.

Standing alone on the shore, I lose myself in the light show before I realize that two people stand next to me. It's Rachel and Natasha, my two neighbors from Perth, and bathroom mates. They invite me for drinks and pizza next door. I tell them I will be along in a moment, after a few more minutes of the lightning on the lake.