Xelawho? Xelawhat? Xelaprettyawesome.

Hola from Quetzaltenango (or Xela)!
We were lucky enough to take private transport from Coban, as it is an 8 hour drive through mountainous terrain to Xela. Arriving Sunday evening, we were welcomed warmly at the language school Casa Xelaju, and driven (!?) to our individual homestays. The farthest homestay is a 15 minute walk. (I am the lucky one who gets to walk through le Parque Central many times a day, where most of the city´s activity is centered around). I feel I must also mention that these families are fairly well off, and we are living very comfortably. We have hot water showers...inside... for example.
Xela is the second largest city in Guatemala, and with nearly 50 language schools in the downtown area, it is relatively touristy...and gringo-y. We have stumbled upon and sought out a great many hang-out spots where one can easily find tofu, fresh peanut butter, and vegan desserts.
We jumped right into Spanish classes on Monday morning: 8 am. The school is quite large and very beautiful. The staff is helpful and friendly, and the teachers are incredibly talented. We all feel that we have learned a great deal in the last week and a half. When classes become tedious, an inevitability when they continue until 1 pm, our teachers take us on trips around the city. We visit the nearby historical museum, purchase fruit, and go nuts over baked goods in the famous, ¨bake shop¨.
After our classes and lunches with families, we are generally quite busy with activities. Nick took än internship¨ with our friend Danny, making traditional jewelry on the stoop of a grocery store. Some of us took Merengue class, a cooking class, many interesting yoga classes, and an informational session on Popo Vu (the bible of the Maya). Hannah and I volunteered at TRAMA, an organization that supports women through the sale of traditional weavings and the teaching of weaving classes. Our job has been to hand out fliers and promote an upcoming benefit.
Our first Wednesday in Xela we enjoyed a huka, then went out to LaParanda to salsa dance the night away. Thursday is kareoke night at El Cuartito (a cafe that I am particularly fond of...it has a Berlin vibe, and great employees whom we have befriended). Nick, Rachel, and Amanda rocked the place with their many songs, and Amanda won a drink for her first place performance! Jessica was able to attend a jazz concert with her host mother on Friday night, and Rachel, Nick, Amanda and I went to a drum performance. At 6 am Saturday morning, the group (with the exception of Jessica, Rachel, and me), began an adventure to La Luna Chicobal. The spot is supposed to be incredibly sacred, and Mayan priests do many ceremonies there. Those that made the trip say it was a very steep hike up the mountain, then 573 steps (but who´s counting) down to the lake. Clouds rolled in and out, Nick cast ¨the rock¨, and they sat in meditation. It sounded wonderful. In the afternoon, we walked to the stadium for a Xela vs. Peten (the region of our past travels) soccer game. We all bought Xela jerseys, grabbed some good ol´ street meat, and entered the stadium at 5 pm. We then proceeded to sit on the concrete bleachers for over 5 more hours. We all had a blast. At the beginning of the game, fans lit so many fireworks that the residual smoke covered the field and they stopped play until it cleared. Xela won by 1 within the final ten minutes of play. Good time had by all. On Sunday we all gathered at Nick and Amanda´s apartment (located in the same building as our Spanish school and it has a nice little kitchen) to eat, watch a bootlegged copy of Slumdog Millionaire, and eat some more. Julia, our culinary angel, baked fruit pies from scratch. Jessica made fresh guacamole. We all consumed a ridiculous amount of food. Two of our local friends joined us: Danny from the steps, and Jacobo from El Cuartito. This Tuesday, Rudi (or homeboy), a new friend of Amanda´s, invited us all to hear his band practice in a hilariously tiny rooftop room. Him and his bandmate picked us (only the girls that night) up and drove us out. They played a range of songs from U2 to popular Spanish artists, and we sang along as best we could. Rudi´s favorite was titled, ¨fiesta privado¨, which seemed a perfect title for the night. Today, Wednesday, we feasted at Sabor de la India. We had planned to spend the afternoon at Fuentes Georginas, the ¨most beautiful hot springs in Guatemala¨, but took the wrong bus to an unknown location instead. On the trip home we lost Jessica (finding her shortly afterwards, luckily)...and Nick had missed all of the buses in the first place. We plan to take the correct bus to Fuentes on Friday. We meet at 6 am for the 3-day trek of 40 K Saturday morning. Thanks for checking in...and until next time...amor and adios!
--Anjali, on behalf of our super group
Most of us will be out of contact through the end of next week because we will be enjoying a spiritual retreat on Lago Atitlan!

Three Week Anniversary up in the Clouds

This past week was spent in Chicacnab, an indigenous community high up in the cloud forests of Guatemala. We went there through an organization called Proyecto Ecologico Quetzal, a program that helps to provide sustainable work and incomes for families in the community. Our day of departure from Coban dawned with lots of fog and rain, and to get to Chicacnab we had to take two chicken buses and then hike up a mountain in the rubber boots that the organization had given us to combat the mud. We realized soon after arriving that it was considerably colder than we had anticipated, and most of us ended up putting on almost all of our clothes in order to stay warm. Although some of the men spoke Spanish, many of the people there only spoke their local Mayan language, so communication was sometimes interesting. Every day one or two guys were assigned to gringo duty, and spent the day with us, helping us with the projects that the organization and community had set up. We hacked up a ton of plants with machetes, in order to make room to plant trees- a type of tree that bears fruit specifically for the quetzals.
We stayed in a house built by a past Carpe Diem group, although unfortunately it had no heat source, so on the second day we decided that it would be a good idea to build a fire inside the house. The only problem was that the wood was fairly damp, and when we tried to really get the fire going in order to have some heat throughout the night, we ended up creating so much smoke that Nick ended up dragging the entire fire out of the house and we all evacuated for a little while until the smoke had calmed down. Also, after two of us had been stung, we realized that we had actually smoked out a wasps nest, and there were wasps all over the floor of the house. So we were back to being very cold, and stayed that way for pretty much the entire trip. Even though we had a bit of a language barrier the people were extremely kind and made sure that we were comfortable to the best of their abilities, and fed us so much food that Amanda had to tell them that we couldn't eat so much. The food was definitely more simple than what we've been eating, but it was all delicous and no one had problems with it. Besides planting trees, we spent one morning at the local school and played soccer with the kids on their field (first tie for team CAM) and leveled out an area of land to build a kitchen so that the next groups who come can have a real fire. One evening we went quetzal-watching, and we all decided that it was the best bird-watching we had ever experienced. In the evening they leave the edge of the forest to get food, and it was absolutely breathtaking to see them flying. But by far the best part of the trip was the last day, which was Anjali's birthday. We ended up having a party in our house, with three guys playing the marimba, which is like a giant xylophone that's native to Guatemala, and more and more people from the community kept showing up. At one point they took boards from the ceiling in order to make more benches for everybody. And just as we thought things were winding down, some women showed up with a giant pot of coffee. It was the perfect end to our stay there.
After our trek down the mountain, which was amazing because it wasn't foggy and we could see everything, we returned to Coban and then after lunch got on another bus which took us to a hostel near Semuc Champey, where we relaxed a little and enjoyed being warm again. We spent the next morning exploring the river/waterfalls/swimming holes in Semuc Champey, but in the afternoon spent some time resting up from all the travel, and various illnesses that some of us were experiencing. We returned to Coban in the evening and were all more than happy to take hot showers and crash in the comfortable beds at the hostel there. And in the morning, it was time to return to civilization start the next part of our journey- to Xelaju- the second largest city in Guatemala.
Thanks for tuning in to the CAM blog,
Hasta luego,
Julia

Back in Coban with electricity, internet, and all other trappings of civilization. To catch up a bit, we´re recapping San Andres.
Day one, we all started our homestays, and some hit off well, while the unlucky ones still got warm smiles and a greeting. Not much more happened after that, to my knowledge, and the day ended quietly.
Day two was our first day in language school, which we all enjoyed. In the morning, we had a group meeting to figure out what was going on for the week, aside from school. School was different for all of us during the week, since none of us are at exactly the same level of Spanish as another in the group, so day one class was more or less an assessment by the teachers of what we already knew.
Day three in San Andres. We started the day with a little community work at a local beach, affectionately known as ¨Gringo Beach.¨ We cleaned up a lot of trash, and did a little landscpaing to offset erosion, and finished off with digging a firepit. Though, that doesn´t really seem too necesary in retrospect, as there´s an old out of business restaurant hanging over the water with roof access. Most people build their fires up there. Class continued as it had the day before, and while everyone was fairly satisfied with how things were going, I understand that Rachel´s teacher put her through a lot of material she pointed out to already knowing. I also understand that this is the day that Julia started to make visits to a ¨curandera,¨ a local herbal healer. This day was also Nick´s birthday, celebrating number two in our line of four. We celebrated by having a great pizza dinner at a hilltop dinner, ate some spam (yes Ethan, we ATE the spam), gave Nick a toy motorcycle, and finished up by christening our new fire pit at Gringo Beach.
Day four. In the morning, we visited a zoo run by a foundation called ARCA, although I forget what that stands for. All the animals in the zoo were rescued from poachers. I was kind of sad, because a lot of them were babies at the time, and can never be released back into the wild. The animals included about a dozen spider monkies, some of whom reached out of the cage to offer a handshake, while others rattled the wire fencing and screamed at us; a baby leopard; and a variety of exotic birds, including parrots in various stages of molting, and an interesting larger black bird Edgar Allen Poe would have had a field day writing about. Once again, school as normal, but I think Jessica and another person went on little field trips with their teachers instead of having class in the classroom.
Day five. We spent the morning sweeping a forest path to help maintain a fire line and reduce the risk of forest fires in the area. When we were done, we chilled in the woods for a bit, and had our first encounter with howler monkies. We didn´t actually see them, but it would have been hard to not hear them; until we figured out what was making the noise, we thought we were in Jurassic Park. Class went as usual.
Day six. Our last full day in the homestays, and our last day in class at this language school. In the morning, we drove up the road to a farm outside of town, called La Finca Zacharias. It´s a non-profit farm in it´s beginning stages, and has long term goals of lumber production and providing needed jobs to the folks in town. For class, we all took a fieldtrip together into the next town and met a woman who runs an association of women who hold an interest in alternative remedies. They also make a range of herbal soaps, for which they have recently made a production contract with Sephora in a line called Mayan Mystique, though I understand that the line will not be on the shelves for a couple years.
Day seven, we made a day trip the fantastic Mayan ruins of Tikal, which are heartstoppingly beautiful. The views afforded from climbing up the steep monuments and temples is well worth the scary climb up. George Lucas thought so, too, the Ewok village was actually filmed in Tikal, and you can recognize one of the scenes from the top of a temple.
We made camp for the night at another set of ruins, where Patito was unfortunately lost, presumabely eaten by a jaguar. We later climbed up to the top of a ceremonial temple, and watched the sun set, before heading back to eat canned beans over a bonfire.
We pilled back to San Andres in the morning, to get the rest of our stuff, and begin our drive to Coban.

Tim for the CAM Carpe Diem Spring 2009 group.