Guatemala Adventure

I had packed several travel journals written by jaded English aristocrats, contemporary guides from Fodor and Cadogan, and Gore Vidal’s 1949 novel, Dark Green, Bright Red—written during his long sojourn in Central America, but nothing prepared me for the strange beauty of Guatemala. The night my friends and I arrived in Guatemala City, we rented a car and drove 30 miles in the diesel-scented darkness to Antigua, the country’s former capital. A hurricane had just swept through, leaving nothing but misery in its wake, or so we had been told in countless TV news reports. But I soon discovered that, while the devastation was indeed extensive, few of the most popular tourist destinations had been adversely affected and the country was yearning for visitors. It proved an opportune time to explore this majestic country, one of the western hemisphere’s best kept secrets.

The next morning when I opened the shuttered windows of the villa a friend had lent us, I was met with fresh and invigorating air, despite the high altitude (1530 meters). Next door a cock crowed with macho abandon and a block away a church bell pealed, echoing across a carpet of red clay-tiled roofs. In the distance, Agua, the closest of the three volcanoes that surround the city (Fuego and Acatenango are the others), dominated the landscape like a massive ancient deity. The image was so breathtaking that I wanted to throw on hiking boots and scale the cone’s steep slope, but breakfast beckoned below in a garden filled with bougainvillea; it didn’t take long to succumb to the languorous pace that makes Antigua such a revivifying place to while away a week or two.

The 16th-century Spanish Conquistadors selected this site for their capital because of its natural defenses—the volcanoes. And for two hundred years, they went on a spending spree, erecting lavish baroque palaces, cathedrals, convents, monasteries and the world-renowned University of Dom Geronimo. The cobblestone streets were designed on an especially wide scale to accommodate the pomp and circumstance of imperial parades and equestrian military maneuvers. By the mid-1700s, over 50,000 people lived here in high colonial splendor. But in 1773, a catastrophic earthquake rocked the city and left everything in ruins. Agua earned its name by spewing a torrent of water on the city, and the populace was evacuated amidst floods, fires, epidemics and mass hysteria.

In 1776, the capital was relocated to Guatemala City, built in the less tremulous Eastern Highlands, and Antigua was abandoned. But in the 1920’s, adventurous bohemians and scholarly swells, including the English botanist and explorer Dorothy Popenoe, descended in droves to give it a makeover. Fallen arches were fastened back together, apses and naves recalled for active duty. Rubble was swept from the streets, walled-in courtyards, gardens and fountains were restored, and a handful of abandoned convents and monasteries were transformed into elegant hotels—the most impressive, by far, is the 16th-century Hotel Casa Santo Domingo, which remains the chicest address in town—a candlelit hideaway with comfort to spare. Few places in the world rival Antigua’s romantic atmosphere, especially at night when the ruins are drenched in a golden light. Sacheverell Sitwell, the globe-trotting poet and art critic brother of writer Dame Edith Sitwell dubbed it “the most beautiful city in the two Americas.”

Some of the most interesting baroque landmarks have been left exactly as they were the day the temblor struck. The cathedral of San Jose, built in 1680, lies in Piranesian decay, next to the fallen grand palace. The Convento de Capuchinas, with its peculiar cylindrical cloister and eerie crypt below resonates with the ghosts of a long forgotten past. And Iglesia La Merced, a church with ornate stucco work, features a magnificent fountain that almost completely subsumes its dilapidated inner courtyard.

While such sights are the city’s main attraction—Antigua is almost entirely a tourist resort—a healthy trade in language schools lures young students from around the world. CyberMania, a crowded internet message center on the main drag, is a youthful hangout. On weekends, the city is a popular spot for affluent folks escaping the dense smog and hectic pace of Guatemala City, to shop at the city’s upscale boutiques and antique shops by day and step out at night among the stylish restaurants, cafes and nightclubs.

The food in Antigua is deliciously diverse and cosmopolitan. We ate excellent pollo jocon (a spicy chicken mole dish) at Fonde de Calle Real and a mouthwatering pizza at the Frida Kahlo Cafe. Don’t say no to the cuatro leche cake, a sublime specialty of the house, at Dom Martin’s, nor the sweets and espresso at Opera Cafe. In time one learns to bypass the myriad peasant women hawking identical Mayan souvenirs and trinkets under the arcades along Plaza Mayor and to buy the real thing at shops like Textura and Colibris, which feature superb hand-made textiles by local artisans. Artesana de los Vales is an enchanting little shop that sells totally unique and beautiful homemade candles in an assortment of unusual shapes and designs.

From Antigua, one can easily set out for organized trips to Guatemala’s other attractions (Clark Tours is the most established and reliable agency) which include Quezaltenango or Livingston on the Caribbean coast. We opted to drive ourselves up to Chichicastanengo, site of a celebrated Sunday morning market and the Church of Santo Tomas, where primitive Indian rites are observed alongside elaborate Roman Catholic rituals. Here the indigent and handicapped pray for miracles, while mumbling shamans light votive candles and burn incense to assuage intangible spirits. Many of the saintly figurines are draped stylishly in Hermes scarves. The market itself is a labyrinth of brightly colored stalls, bursting with everything from handcarved religious icons to huge baskets of hand-picked avocados. After the frenzy of the marketplace, the elegant Mayan Inn, where we stopped in for a drink, was a sea of civilized calm—and a clever place to park.

The drive grew rougher, but even more spectacular as we headed south to the awe-inspiring, volcano-rimmed Lake Atitlan. The lake is set at an altitude of more than 5,000 feet and gleams like a sapphire in an ebony bowl during sunsets. After making our way around its perimeter, we arrived at Santiago, one of a dozen traditional Indian villages hugging the shore. Home to the mysterious cult of Maximon, a local fertility idol, Santiago is a slightly shabby, but totally authentic Indian village, where daily customs have changed little since Pre-Columbian days. We stayed at the comfortable Posada de Santiago, at the edge of town, with views of volcanos and the local women washing their colorful native garments on rocks in the lake. At dawn, we saw children marching off, machetes in hand, to harvest coffee beans. By noon we had rented a small boat and sped over the high, windblown waves to Panajachel, a less interesting, but better known, tourist trap infested with aging hippies and tacky souvenir stands. But just a mile out of town we discovered Hotel Atitlan, a charming resort with topiary gardens, roomy suites, a private beach and a fine restaurant. We spent the night, enjoying gracious hospitality and heart-stopping vistas.

After a week in the highlands,. we flew to Flores in the northeastern part of the country, close to Belize and drove straight to Tikal, the legendary Mayan city of temples that, until a century ago, had been completely submerged in the jungle. Today Tikal is a national preserve and visitors can walk freely through the thick jungle along a muddy cobblestone causeway. Guides are available for a few extra quetzals, but we decided, doused with bug spray and sun cream, to explore on our own. The humidity was extraordinary and the trek inward towards the Grand Plaza was grueling. But the primordial vegetation, the weird raccoon-like creatures who darted among us, and the howler monkeys outshrieking the parrots made it worth the effort.

Tikal is a veritable city of cyclopean remains from a lost civilization; many of the ancient temples are still unexcavated, swallowed by towering mounds of mud and wild vegetation. The largest, Templo IV, rises to 90 meters and boasts celestial views of the endless surrounding jungle. A steep ladder rises through a vortex of roots and vines, and allows intrepid climbers to look out over an eerie landscape that suggests that, in some places, time actually does stand still. The more famous, excavated monuments, like The Temple of the Great Jaguar, have a spiritual grandeur that hits one like an epiphany. It is hard to believe that these structures, built two thousand years after the Great Pyramids of Egypt and now ingeniously restored, were unknown for centuries.

One could easily spend a second day at Tikal—there are three hotels in the park—but we elected to rest our weary limbs at the campy Camino Real at El Remate, about a half hour away on Lake Peten. We luxuriated in the pool, dined under a thatched- roof terrace, and let the images of the last ten days sift through our consciousness. As I gazed at a bright red sunset over Lake Peten, I was reminded of something I read in Dorothy Popenoe’s history of Antigua. “The sunlit hours of a peaceful old age are passed in dreamy contemplation,” she wrote in 1935. “The calm of today is a fitting conclusion to the tale of a tumultuous past.” Let’s hope the calm is here to stay in Guatemala.

Note: This article originally appeared in Los Angeles Magazine.