It's 6am and I am awake. I have been up before 7 every day this week. Not normal. Especially when you have nothing to get up for. I am lying in a loft bed in a tall thatch-roofed structure with a gauzy mosquito net covering me. I feel safe and cocooned away from all the bugs and critters that I know are waiting to jump on my face upon my emergence. The windows are open and look out onto the swamp, and the air is thick with whirrings and chirpings and bird warblings. Bats live up in the ceiling - I heard them scratching and chattering up there to themselves. Strangely, bats don't bother me in the slightest. In fact, I am comforted by them. They flew off at sunset and the room was quiet until early morning when they stumbled back in like late night party people, murmuring to themselves before passing out.
Yesterday I got a bus from Flores in jungly northern Guatemala down to Río Dulce in the east. My transportation was a step up from a chicken bus - a dilapidated coach that smelled, with musty curtains and a questionable stain on the seat, but still, with acres of legroom by Guatemalan standards and a headrest so I could lean back. Paradise. A small boy had to sit next to me and he sat so far away that he was barely on his seat, hanging out into the aisle. My bedbug bites are fading - am I really that hideous? (Yes I am.)
By some miracle of God we arrived in Río Dulce four hours later, right on time. I loved the town immediately. It is dirty and ugly, little more than one long dusty crowded street backing onto Lake Izabal, where oil tankers jostle for space with bicycles along the two-laned thoroughfare; tarp-covered stalls selling everything you can imagine (and a few things you can't) teeter on the edge of the road, seeming to rock back and forth in the slipstream of speeding chicken buses; and squat concrete buildings hold everything together while a tout with a megaphone crackles incomprehensibly and small children dart through any gap in the seething mass of people that they can find. Río Dulce has character.
This town still gets called Fronteras by locals, which harks back to the days when Río Dulce was the last outpost of civilisation before travellers crossed the river by ferry to make the long and difficult journey into the Petén, a vast jungle province that lacked paved roads (and residents) until a few decades ago. Lake Izabal is also widely held to be the safest haven for boats in the western Caribbean during hurricane season. As a result, it is full of yachts and sailors totter through town on sea legs, weaving in and out amongst the diminuitive Guatemalan landlubbers.
A man with a semi-automatic unlocks a tiny ATM booth for me. You know you've been in Latin America for a while when tiny men with enormous guns no longer faze you. I found a guy on a bicycle with a flier for the hostel I wanted to go to and he led me down the street and down a garden path, taking me to a bar on stilts that was perched on the edge of the lake. He radioed the hostel, which is only accessible by boat, and they sent a lancha to pick me up from the dock.
When the lancha arrived, the driver said, "Dos minutos," and promptly disappeared. My pack and I sat in the boat, bobbing gently on the lake, watching the sun reflect off the expensive yachts anchored further out and listening to the strangely appropriate flute piping of Titanic, just ending on a TV screen in the bar.
Ten minutes later the driver reappeared with another guy, carrying a washing machine between them. It was colossal. I watched in disbelief as they maneuvered it onto the raised platform at the front of the boat, and we dipped a little under its weight. The driver got in and off we went, just him, me and the washing machine, out for a ride on the lake. The machine looked ridiculous but still proud and seafaring, plunked there on the boat.
We shot out across the lake for a couple of minutes and then pulled into a swampy alley of water, slowing right down to negotiate tree roots. It was dark and muted, full of the buzz of insects. We drifted up to the hostel, which sat on the edge of the swamp, raised up on a series of interconnected wooden boardwalks. Two girls were quietly kayaking and three young Guatemalans on our dock were fishing. The air was hushed but for the sounds of wildlife. And they were making a racket.
But that was last night. Now I am awake in my swampy hideout, I have already had to negotiate with an enormous and malevolent-looking spider in the toilet, and it's not even 7am. I have a big breakfast out on the deck and then hop into a canoe. I go paddling out on the swamp. It is quiet as I pass other stilted buildings, and then the waterway opens out onto the lake. I sit on a pontoon, basking in the early morning sun. I want to go swimming but all I can think about is alligators lurking under the platform, just waiting... My overactive imagination and I get back into the boat and I try to steer it back to the hostel but the canoe is not cooperating. It keeps listing to the left and no amount of paddling can get it going straight. I have to submit several times to crashing into tree roots and trying to use that as momentum to try to turn myself around. It's like being in a bumper car. I bounce from one side of the canal to the other, at one point getting firmly wedged under a mangrove that is bowed over the water and seems to take great delight in scratching my face and hooking branches into the prow of the canoe, dragging me back in.
I finally extricate myself and somehow get back to the hostel. Have you ever reverse-parked a canoe? I am proud of myself when I finally stagger out, but I need to take a breather on the deck.
At 1.30pm, only half an hour late, a covered boat comes to the hostel to pick up me and five others. We are crossing the lake and following the Río Dulce all the way to the Caribbean town of Lívingston on the coast, which is accessible only by boat. The ride is beautiful - we speed across the lake for an hour or so, the water becoming clearer and more aquamarine the further out we go. We pass an old stone castillo, float down a tranquil alleyway of lilypads, and arrive at the Lívingston docks about two hours later.
Guatemala has twenty-three ethnic groups: twenty-one are Maya, one is ladino, or of European descent, and the last is Garífuna. The Garífuna are descended from Africans brought to the Americas as slaves in the 1600s. Lívingston has a unique flavour, being part African, part Carib Indian, part Maya, part English and part mestizo European. Their language and culture are very distinct. The town feels more Caribbean and laid-back from the moment we pull up at the dock. In fact, this is one of the greatest things about Guatemala - no two towns feel the same, and Lívingston feels like nowhere else I've ever been. It is a surprise to see black kids running around when the last town I was in was full of indigenous women in traditional dress, and it can be hard to reconcile the two.
I convince a Swiss girl to forget her plans of visiting Guatemala City and we book ourselves into a tour for the next day, visiting a series of seven waterfalls and a beach accessible only by boat. The convincing was too easy. So of course, when we wake bright and early the next morning, we find an oppressive flat grey sky raining steadily on us and not stopping any time soon. So much for the beach.
We head over to the hostel down the road for breakfast and the manager greets us. "You're staying at the Maya Hotel, right?" he says. "Is your stuff okay?" What do you mean? We ask. "They were robbed last night. You didn't hear? A few of the rooms were broken into while people were sleeping and they had money and passports and credit cards stolen." Swiss Companion and I look at each other. Nice to know our accommodation is so secure... how did we miss this?
I join a group of guys on the deck watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall. I am enjoying the film until I hear a rustling noise behind me and turn to find an enormous raccoon trying to destroy my umbrella. WHOA! "What the fuck is that?!" I'm sitting next to an Australian guy. "Oh yeah," he says casually, "That's the wanking raccoon." The raccoon is huge, bigger than a cocker spaniel. I thought they were supposed to be small and adorable. He has intelligent bright eyes and would be cute if he wasn't clinging to the chicken wire taking swipes at me with his sharp little paws. "Fuck off," I tell him, and turn back to the movie.
A little while later the raccoon ambles back over. He makes himself comfortable. "Oooh, get ready, he's going to wank," says the Australian, and the other boys all turn to get a good look. No he's not, I protest. "Oh he is, we've seen this routine a thousand times. Are you ready?" A thousand times no. But also, yes, a little bit. Is that wrong? The raccoon finds a good spot right near me on the other side of the wire, lays back, spits on his paws, and goes to work. At first he masturbates with an animal fury that would thrill David Attenborough but then he catches my eye and slows right down, giving himself the slow and sensual treatment while staring at me. It is unbelieveably creepy and almost impossible to look away. "He better not spoof on me, is all I'm saying." The boys claim never to have seen the money shot. I return to the film and the next time I look at the raccoon he has sated himself and fallen asleep.
Swiss Companion and I head out to wander around town. As the rain has abated the residents have emerged, sitting on the front porches of their colourful dilapidated weatherboard houses, shooting the breeze. We find a cafe and order, listening to the African drumming troupe outside and watching Lívingston life pass by. A Garífuna guy sitting outside catches my eye and grins widely at me, so I smile back. A minute later he comes over to us, effusively kissing us hello and shaking our hands. He has gold-edged teeth and arms full of tattoos. "Hola chicas, welcome to Lívingston, I have some wonderful ganja if you would perhaps be interested in purchasing?" He says all this so quickly in a kind of patois that for a minute I don't follow but I politely thank him and decline. He shrugs easily and smiles. "Eres muy pretty," he says in hilarious Spanglish before loping off.
I have ordered tapado, which is a local stew made from coconut milk and seafood. It is served in a huge bowl and contains one whole fish, skin intact, several poorly beheaded prawns with their shells intact, some shellfish that are all shell and no meat, and an entire crab. The soup itself is tasty but the seafood is hard to eat. All I have been given is a spoon. Needless to say, I make a colossal mess of myself. How does one eat a crab, anyway? I ask the waitress for some kind of implement and she gives me a butter knife. The crab is abandoned.
Shortly after this I develop an upset stomach and spend the next several hours making mad dashes to the bathroom. It's the Lívingston welcome.
That night we go to the Iguana hostel. It is pouring with rain and a ginormous thunderstorm has rolled across the sea to us. The lightning strikes are more violent and louder than I have heard in a very long time, far too close to us for comfort. Every now and then the electricity flickers off. Because I hate thunderstorms I am a bit of a whimpery mess. Fortunately, I am distracted by the hostel's guests who are all dressed in drag and clambering into the rafters, gyrating upon one another and doing nudie runs out into the rain. I am encouraged to take a medicinal Sambuca shot and what do you know - it works!
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