MICHA.ELMUELLER

Acro Yoga. Comic Convergence Festival. Guatemala

Over the Christmas / New Years Eve period I have been backpacking through México and Guatemala again (for three weeks). Two friends of mine are on a longer travel period and currently stay in Central America. We catched up with one of them in San Cristobal de las Casas and travelled with her to meet up with the other friend in San Marcos (Guatemala). There we stayed at the Lago de Atitlán for several days. We also joined in for the Cosmic Convergence Festival (where I had also been over the new years eve last year). After the festival we went back to México: first to San Cristobal and from there to Mazunte, where we stayed for the rest of our time.

As last year, I got a lot of impressions. Good ones as well as negative ones. Let’s first get over the negative impressions, before we come to the cool stuff. My main negative impressions are corruption (having to pay “special fees” when aiming to cross the border) as well as the water quality. I think a lot about a story I heard: a teacher who is afraid of stating how disruptive corruption and criminal structures are for any society. Just imagine what goes along with this: a generation of kids growing up without the understanding of how bad these things are for society and with the believe that this is “normal”, since nobody tells them otherwise. Oh my.
Concerning the water quality: this is not just a thing of comfort, it is essential. If you are not able to brush the teeth with tap water or shower with a mouth open because of fear of parasites this affects all parts of your life. E.g. you can’t just cook vegetables or prepare a salad. You need to sterilize these things first by letting them soak in a special solution. You also need to be careful about dishes — have they been properly cleaned? Are they still wet? Not paying attention to these things can lead to complicated problems. I suspect that the bad water quality in some regions (where the sewage system was build to cheap) goes along some path related to corruption.

My most positive impressions are the people. Natives as well as foreigners. There is a huge scene of hippies and dropouts in México and Guatemala and I have the impression that such countries — with fewer regulations than in Europe, and not so enforced restrictions — attract a crowd of interesting, unusual people. Maybe because they don’t fit anywhere else. Or maybe because they have more possibilities there. Or maybe because they find people like themselves in those regions.

I have to mention the extremely fertile vegetation — seeing wild cotton and coffee growing…that’s just beautiful. I also met dropouts who own a 2 hectar permaculture farm. This amazes me a lot. I have the impression that whatever you plant within the vegetation in those regions will just grow. The land makes an incredibly fertile impression. In one hostel in Guatemala I drank coffee which was grown, roasted and grounded within a one mile radius of the hostel.

The two friends I met up with are experienced backpackers, whom I have been to Central America with last year. Whilst I continue studying, they have decided to take time off to travel the world. So far this works very well for them. One of them has been hitchhiking through the USA, México and Guatemala with his tent. Staying here and there. Getting to know interesting people. Before we met up with him he had been helping out teaching at a local school. The other one has joined a yoga community in México and is diving deep into yoga, permaculture and meditation.

Even though I travelled with very good friends I needed to sometimes get some lonely time. If this would have been a longer journey I would have needed to split up. I got two main lessons from this journey: travelling alone often yields more personal freedom and speaking the language of a country is key to the people. I strongly feel as if journeys into such countries expand ones worldview and give one a more appropriate picture of ones own situation.

Now that I am back in Germany I am still a bit off. Quite a hard cut to be in deep México one day and thirty hours later in a totally diverse Germany. Quite hard to go back to the ordinary everyday life. Traveling gives life a different feeling. I want to go back traveling.

For three to four weeks I was travelling Mexico and Guatemala with two friends. We started right after the christmas evening and spend the new years eve + the first weeks of January there. I can’t describe all of my memories or the stuff that I have done here but I will try to give some insights.

It was very nice to meet different people with a different view of the world. Especially in Guatemala, where we visited a small festival, this was the case. One of the pictures that stuck most with me: One morning I couldn’t sleep anymore and got up to walk along a lake. The sun was going up and I saw an attractive young lady with long blonde hair who was meditating, while sitting nude on a rock some meters in the lake. This was just iconic.

I have some not-so-nice memories as well. The common way in which is dealt with the environment is just sad…laundries where the washer stands in the grass and all the sewage just drains into the ground. No wonder the supply water is polluted in such a heavy way. We once stayed in a little town in Guatemala where we were told that, in order to prepare a salad, the people have to put it in water and put some drops of iodine into it. After letting this mixture rest for fifteen minutes all bacteria is dead and only then you can eat the salad. The way in which people interact with the environment is unbelievable as well. We were travelling in a little bus and one of the bus guys started cleaning the bus while the other guy was driving. The implicitness by which he threw plastic bottles out of the window was the same by which I throw them in the garbage. I think a lot of this relates to education. If the people would know that garbage in a forest is not just an aesthetic thing, but also rots, attracts animals and could be the soil for diseases, maybe they would act differently.

Another not-so-nice memory was to watch fishermen dismantle freshly caught sharks at a beach. This is highly illegal, but still happens because selling the jaw and the fins is profitable. This was in a secluded, rural village and happened two days in a row. On the third day the marine appeared. Fierce soldiers with big weapons who closed the area off, made the fishermen bring out the shark cadavers and documented everything on cameras. This process went on for about an hour. Then suddenly a guy appeared and took the highest ranking soldier aside. Ten minutes after that all soldiers were gone. Guess why…. Well, about fifteen minutes after they had left another boat arrived and the dismantling process of fresh sharks started all over again. The fishermen who were quite dejected when the soldiers still were there, were now cheering at the newly arriving boat. This was disgusting to observe and made me quite sad.

However, some really good impressions I have taken from the landscape. Wow! So beautiful. Especially in the warmer regions the vegetation sprouts everywhere, everything is green and you can find all kinds of wild stuff growing there. Even saw wild cotton growing. Also you get fresh juices everywhere—it is just so much cheaper to get a fresh juice than to get a packaged carton juice. In Mexico and Guatemala a lot of coffee and fruits are grown. Ironically we found it quite hard to get good coffee or fruits with a high quality. This is especially true for the rural places and can be explained by the fact that the people there are so poor that they export everything they can (especially the good stuff). So the case of a farmer at a coffee plantation who drinks low quality coffee whilst having acres of high quality coffee beans is not implausible.

One thing really surprised me: You don’t get anywhere with English. It is really seldom that people speak English. Even in the center of Mexico-City, where we stayed at an international hostel for a short time, the staff didn’t speak any English–not even right/left/straight. From my impression the population tends to reject the English language due to emotional reasons. Especially in the international hostel case it should be quite unrealistic for the staff not to pick up at least some English words along the way.

Mexico, and especially Guatemala, are quite cheap. I remember that we bought a lot of stuff at a bakery in a rural village in Guatemala one day: sweet stuff, breads and other baked goods. We had a whole basket full of stuff and converted to EUR we payed only about 1.50€ for that.

Especially in the rural areas the opening hours of facilities tend to be quite “flexible”. E.g. in a little town there was a bakery which I frequently visited. Even though the opening times were from 8am-21pm, these specification tended to be rather vague (like +/- 2-3 hours). I once bought something there at around 12pm. I think this relaxed culture has something charming.

It’s quite easy to get to know people and make friends, though from my impression the friendships tend to be more shallow. We ate several times at a certain place and when we went there for the third time the staff (~four people) asked us if we would like to join them on a tour to another beach the next day. In the middle of the week they just spontaneously closed their place down and went on a trip (which we joined). Stuff similar to this happened several times to us. I admired and enjoyed this nice, open and welcoming mentality.

My two fellow travelers mostly eat vegan (or at least vegetarian). One experience which we made was in a very rural town where we arrived late one evening. We just wanted to grab some food before going to bed and went into one of the next restaurants. The guy cooking there was about 20-25 years old and we told him in multiple ways specifically that we don’t want to eat any meat or animal products. He prepared some stuff for us and when he brought it to us there was a certain ingredient which we couldn’t identify. We asked him what it was and described to him again in detail that we wanted vegetarian food. He assured us multiple times that everything was vegetarian. When we looked the ingredient up on the internet some days later it became clear that it was a type of—definitely non-vegetarian—sausage. After thinking about it for some time and talking to other people, I think it is most likely that he had the educational lack of not knowing that sausages come from animals. This lack of education pervades both countries and in my opinion is the reason for a lot of problems there.

In one Mexican village where we stayed there was a cock fight. Even though we didn’t attend you could hear the screams of the animals through the whole town. Incredibly barbaric and residual.

All in all I have a lot of impressions. As described above, good and bad ones. I have only written down a small part of them in this post. I think one of the main reasons for such an enriching journey is that we didn’t do a mainstream trip but were rather flexible and spontaneous and mostly traveled by foreign buses and transport possibilities. It is a really nice feeling to travel in a crowded bus through a rural area whilst being the only foreigners in the bus. We had only booked a flight to Mexico, one hostel for the first night and a flight back some weeks later. Everything else was decided there. In my opinion this is the best way of travelling.
In the case of Mexico my picture of the country before the trip was mainly defined by media coverage on criminality. This has changed now. I feel as if I have gotten a better impression of both countries. Also I feel more comfortable now to return there, after I have seen that the picture in the media does not represent the country in it’s entirety. This may sound like an obvious statement but for me it has much more truth after personally being there.

Besides the photos above I have uploaded some more to my MediaGoblin instance.