A few hours beyond Antigua lies the town of Chichicastenango. It’s home to the K’iche Maya, and along with a number of other neighbouring villages in the hills and valleys that surround it, has preserved the Maya’s unique living culture and beliefs in tandem with European and Christian influences. Over the next two days, and in particular tonight, we will be interacting closely with them and the other two Maya groups - Kaqchikel and Tz’utujil - who inhabit the western Guatemalan highlands.
Our drive from Antigua takes us through the rich agricultural land of the area, which exports vast quantities of flowers, especially roses, to the United States, and we travel along flood plains in the foothills of the mountains, with people working away in fields and vast greenhouses. The road takes us up into the mountains along winding highways, and we stop for a delicious and strong coffee in a lovely mountain lodge on the way.
Much of Guatemala’s coffee production comes from this region, with sister planting of banana and avocado trees to protect the young coffee plants from the sun. As we climb into higher altitudes the road weaves its way up and down spectacular scenery through deep gorges, vast canyons and hairpin bends. Ascending to the huge caldera rim that surrounds Lake Atitlan, the second largest freshwater lake in the country, we get sweeping views of the volcanoes and mountains that surround it, before beginning our descent to Chichicastenango.
It’s a vibrant, bustling, colourful market town, but Aquilino warns us that it’s very easy to get lost in its streets so he will lead us all through its sites and to visit a shaman, before allowing us free time to wander back on our own. We start at the very nice Hotel Santo Tomas with a courtyard garden full of parrots and a restaurant that we will return to for lunch. He takes us from there deep into the heart of the town, working our way through its densely populated warren of little streets and alleys to the central food market hall.
Today (Thursday) and Sunday are the main days for the market and it’s full of people buying and selling fruit and vegetables. Most of the women there are dressed in the traditional colourful woven clothes they have worn for centuries, with the designs reflecting their age, marital status, amount of children, family name and more. The shawls they have wrapped around them frequently have babies and toddlers in them, strapped to the women’s backs for ease of movement.
The market is notable for its murals reflecting Mayan beliefs, as detailed in the famous book, the Popol Vuh, which was discovered hidden in St Thomas’ Catholic church at the heart of Chichicastenango. This was the book that an 18th century Dominican scholar called Francisco Ximénex wrote to transcribe the Maya creation myth of the Tree of Life and how the gods made humanity out of corn. He used Roman characters instead of Mayan hieroglyphs to record it phonetically and then wrote a Spanish translation alongside it. To preserve its secrets, the book was hidden behind the altar of the church of Santo Tomas in Chichicastenango, where Ximénex was the curate, but discovered and became a seminal text to help decode the secrets of the Maya.
Struggling our way through the ordered chaos of the shopping streets surrounding the market we get to that church, which has become a sincretic place of worship with a unique mix of ancient Maya beliefs merged with Catholicism. The church was built on the site of a Mayan temple and on the steps leading to its entrance people are practising rituals, while inside - where no photos are allowed - the icons and altar reflect the mixed faiths.
To really understand a little more of the beliefs of the modern-day Maya, Aquilino takes us down some back streets to the house of Jose Mario who is the local shaman and is going to talk to us about his faith and perform a ritual for us. However Aquilino suddenly gets a phone call and has to leave us for a while so I am left to translate what Jose has to say for the rest of the group, being the most advanced Spanish speaker amongst us.
He tells us how he had suffered for most of his life with a terrible illness and pain in his mouth which modern medicine and science was unable to diagnose or cure, despite many doctors and hospitals. Eventually in his thirties he turned to his ancestors and spirit guides to ask for help and in a ritual they revealed to him that he had to devote his life to helping others through shamanic magic and if so he would be cured. He made the promise and the illness and pain were released from him and now people travel from all over the world to visit him for guidance and healing when medicine has failed, mostly for psychological problems and chronic illness rather than physical injuries.
He cuts a small piece of hair from his head and burns it in a crucible for us and then leads us upstairs and outside into his roof garden where he has a smoke-charred pyre based on the Mayan calendar. Thankfully, with my Spanish skills being stretched to the limit, Aquilino returns and takes over to describe and explain the ritual we are witnessing, which Jose Mario tells us he has devised for the tourist groups who visit him to bless their journeys and to use us, as visitors from outside their community, to spread peace and wisdom to the wider world.
It involves candles, herbs, tobacco, incense and plants all being ritually set in place and set ablaze by our shaman and his wife, and then us all ceremonially having cigar smoke blown around us and liquid flicked on our heads and into the fire to discern our auras. Jose Mario seems pleased to inform us that we all have good health and vibrations, and are a very positive group of travellers, but identifies doubts in a couple of people and unexpectedly tells Steve that his dead grandmother is crying for him, which is a little unsettling for the poor man.
After the ritual we walk up to the extremely colourful cemetery where the Maya regularly celebrate their ancestors with rituals and on the Day of the Dead go to commune with them. Aquilino tells us that El Dia del Muerte is misunderstood by most people outside Latin America as it should really be Day of the Ancestors, not Dead. He also explains that the concepts of Heaven and Hell don’t feature in traditional beliefs because there is union and learning in the afterlife. If the dead have been split and sent for eternity to separate places, then there’s no way for them all to gather together, which goes counter to everything pre-Hispanic cultures believe about the family, and the soul.
On our own way back through the streets of Chichicastenango Coman and I stop at a bakery to buy bread and gifts for the Kaqchikel Maya family that we are to join tonight. And once stocked up, and lunch has been had, we all drive for another hour or so to the village of San Jorge de La Laguna, which sits on the mountainside above Lake Atitlan, where we are all paired up with a local family to spend the night in their home.
A man in his late thirties called Timoteo Cook, who we learn works as a cleaner in a tourist hotel in the lakeside town of Panajachel, takes Coman and myself back to his house which sits behind a gate within a little group of ramshackle concrete homes belonging to his wider family members. We are introduced to Lucy, his wife, and are instantly a hit with his three children, David (10), Fabiola (8) and Jose (5), who take us out to play football in the village square in front of the church as it gets dark.
We’re joined for the kick-about by Steve and Tina and David’s classmate Robinson, whose family are hosting them. Due to our age, woeful football skills and the altitude, the children run rings around us adults, who are left weak and gasping for breath within less than ten minutes. So we buy the kids ice creams instead and they show us their village in the dark. It’s very basic with women doing their laundry in communal baths, and steep, winding alleys and streets where cars don’t fit.
Back at the house Timoteo has gone out to play piano at a service for one of the many charismatic churches in the little town, as the Kaqchikel communities have been particularly targeted by the US evangelicals who are trying to take over indigenous communities in this area. So we do our best to help Lucy with the meal by learning how to make tortillas. However we are both dreadful at it, only feeling better when Lucy tells me it took her months to perfect the technique.
We’re far more successful at keeping David, Fabiola and Jose entertained, joining in with rudimentary games involving tossing a coin into rows of little bottle tops and some kind of ‘snap’ game with dog-eared super-hero and princess cards. Coman also draws pictures of animals and caricatures of themselves to keep them amused.
Timoteo returns from church at 9.30pm and we eat around the kitchen table, while they explain that they host visitors once or twice a week and it provides a regular source of income for them. They also show us a bizarre and seemingly never ending video of the festivities for patron saint San Jorge in the village square, where participants dress up in extravagant fancy dress costumes, most of them seemingly from Disney or Pixar movies, and dance for hours to a live band until only one is left standing and declared the winner.
I help Lucy wash up the dishes in a basin on the balcony where we spoon cold water out of a water tank, and she tells me they’re waiting for the next rains to come as the village water supply is getting very low. We keep chatting, thankful that Coman and I have enough Spanish skills to communicate, especially as the family speak Kaqchikel amongst themselves and Timoteo and Lucy slip into it frequently.
There’s seemingly no sign of anyone going to bed and Lucy tells us that the kids are still on school holiday for another week so will go to sleep about midnight, but it’s obvious that Coman and I are both shattered so we retire to the little bedroom next to the kitchen reserved for guests. The family bathroom is cramped and very rudimentary so we just clean our teeth and crawl into the little beds.
It’s been a really interesting, strange and humbling day, spending time amongst the Maya communities. Yet we learn the next day that we have been afforded luxury compared to some of our fellow Intrepid travellers whose families are far poorer than Timoteo’s. Their food was cooked over open fires in smoke-filled kitchens, their beds were on the floor and there was no ability for communication between guests and host families due to a lack of Spanish skills on the tourists’ side.
We’ve all had our eyes-opened and leave richer for the experience.