It's early morning in paradise. Birds are twittering, the mist is rising, and I am staring with great horror at my reflection in the mirror. "Honey, looks like you slept in a spider nest," drawls the Quaker Californian from behind me, examining my back and legs with curled lip.
My entire body is red, swollen, and itchy, including my face. My eyes are swelling shut and my arms, legs, and shoulders are a mass of painful red. I am hideous. Again.
I had come to the divinely-located El Retiro lodge in Lanquin village to get a little R and R in the Guatemalan countryside. Lanquin is two hours from the nearest big town, along winding unpaved roads that crisscross the rolling hills of the Alta Verapaz district. I had been instructed in no uncertain terms by many a friend that El Retiro was not to be missed - a riverside property just outside of the village, with stone paths cutting through the trees and wooden thatched-roofed palapas and hammocks scattered across the hill, sloping gently down to the water.
Sounds like paradise, right? Not that I'm in any position to enjoy it.
I spend breakfast avoiding the stares and whispers of the other guests. I am feeling sorry for myself. I am Quasimodo. And far too early in the morning I find myself picking my way down the rock-studded clay road to Lanquin's medical clinic.
The waiting room is already crowded with about forty village women and their various offspring. There is no sign of anyone in charge so I join a haphazard queue and wait. A woman tries unsubtly to push in front of me but I am not in the mood - I remove my cardigan and she lurches away from my bites in all their gory glory. Ha!
The clinic is pretty basic; Chalkboards list the warning signs of swine flu, and there is a simple graphic poster informing women of symptoms of problematic pregnancies and when to seek medical assistance. In these communities in Guatemala home births are still the most common, and many women die every day due to a lack of basic medical care.
I am submitting to the open stares of the sala de recepción and listening to the screams of a baby in the emergency room. I know it's the emergency room because a high-tech chalkboard sign reading "emergencia" is suspended above the open door. The people in the waiting room are craning to get a look at the baby. Privacy is clearly a foreign concept.
A woman emerges and beckons me out of the line, so I follow her in. The whimpering baby is lying on a metal table and no one seems to be paying it much attention. The door has been left open and the entire waiting room is watching with great interest as I display my bites to three fairly disinterested Mayan women. I don't even know if any of them is a medical professional. A doctor comes in and tells them to give me a shot. The hygiene of this clinic os not quite the standard to which I am accustomed but by this point I don't care if we work in a mud pit - my allergic reaction is severe and if they don't do something soon, my eyes are going to swell completely shut. Again.
Seated on a stool considerately located in full view of the waiting room audience, I am subjected to a painful shot, pow! right in the muscle. My audience is enthralled and gets even more excited when I stand and immediately stumble, sweating and seeing black spots dancing in front of my eyes. I am about to pass out - that shot was really something. Yay, Guatemalan medicine. I try to stand again and the Mayan "nurse" puts one enormously powerful hand on my shoulder and forces me to sit until it passes. These women are strong - I've seen them carry up to twenty litres of water on their heads in ceramic jugs, no hands. They are not to be trifled with, so I sit.
When I ask where to pay they inform me that treatment is free. It's amazing that they have the funding. Without clinics like this many campesino Guatemalans can't afford to seek medical help and often die or are horribly maimed by preventable afflictions as a result. I wave goodbye to the waiting room and walk back to El Retiro, passing a few roosters pecking at the road, a small balck piglet, and several machete-wielding men. A typical rural scene. The machetes don't even freak me out much any more.
I get back to the hostel and join 17 other guests for our tour to Semuc Champey and pile into the back of a van, crowded in like a pack of Guatemalans. It is a 10 kilometre ride that takes forty minutes due to the windiness of the road. Holding on is an exercise in itself. We are brought to the Cuevas Las Marias and strip down for our cave tour. Our guide, "Elvis," walks around tying our thongs to our feet with yellow string. It's very fashion, very now.
I am terribly self-conscious having my horrible bites on display. "Oh my god, you're the girl who got bitten," says a Canadian. Somewhat stating the obvious there, sister. I have to tell the story for the umpteenth time. But everyone is very sympathetic... these bites are a great conversation starter. Everyone knows who I am. "That girl." Hooray.
We troop off into the caves, which extend for eleven long, dark, cold kilometres. The water rushing out of the cave mouth joins the Río Chacobón, which runs through El Retiro's grounds. At least this freezing ice water is soothing my bites. We are armed with candles and we wade into the icy water and along in the dark, feeling along the rocky bottom with our seriously inadequate footwear. If there's beasties in here, we are at their mercy. The bottom suddenly drops off and we find ourselves paddling like puppies thrown into water for the first time, candles held with one hand above the water to light our way. The light flickers off the cave walls and casts shadows across the stalactites that drop down towards us. Swimming in thongs tied to your feet with string is extremely hard. "They just sort of flap around uselessly, don't they?" observes an English guy struggling to keep his candle out of the water.
"Give me your candle," Elvis shouts over the flow of the water, and swims ahead, leaving four of us in the near-total dark. By the time I catch up I can't hear myself think, due to the thundering waterfall inside the cave. One by one, the people ahead of me swim up and disappear under the cascade. When it's my turn, I see a rope and take hold of it and cling to the rock wall for dear life. The water beats down on me with unbelieveable force as I inch along, and I can't see or breathe. Indiana Jones, eat your heart out. Elvis pulls me out gasping, and I am directed towards a ladder to climb, which passes over the top of the waterfall through a very narrow tunnel that we have to crawl through on our bellies, trying not to get cut or scraped.
We emerge into another chamber with a deep but compact pool in the centre, into which people can jump should they so choose. I do not choose, visions of a broken back being more than enough of a deterrent. There is not a huge amount of procedure in place in terms of safety - if someone was injured, I don't know how they could possibly get them out through the tunnels and ladders and waterfalls. The caverns are dark and the water is cold - we are inside for almost two hours but cover only 400 metres. The guides need to get us out before we get hypothermic.
We emerge into the sunlight and are immediately set up with inner tubes. Everyone else manages to get flowing down the river with no problems. Because I am me, I fall out of my tube and can't get back in. Then my tube refuses to float with the current. With some undignified flapping I finally get it moving but for some reason I am moving very slowly. The current carries the rest of the group around the bend and out of sight.
But it's so beautiful. Weeping willows bend over the water and flower petals float along next to me. I pass frantically waving children and women washing clothes in the river, naked toddlers frolicking beside them. My tube carries me directly into two rocks and then backwards against the current. Surely an impossible feat. We all jump out about half an hour down river and walk back to the bridge. The heat seeps up from the rocky path. Butterflies flitter around all over the place, birds are tweeting, and it is ridiculously picturesque. We arrive back at the bridge, at which point we are cordially invited to jump off. It is 10 metres high above a rushing river - oh HELL no.
After most of the group risks their necks plunging into the river, we finally arrive at Semuc Champey park, the whole reason for me being in Lanquin and getting so brutally chomped in the first place. "Semuc Champey" is Q'ich'e for "place where the river passes underground", and consists of a 300 metre-long natural limestone bridge, across the top of which is a series of stepped limestone pools. The water in the pools ranges from a rich deep green to a pale pale blue. It is ridiculously clear and beautiful and perfect for swimming. The forested valley walls rise steeply above it and the humidity is so thick you can almost see it, solidifying the air.
Three of us go for a difficult vertical hike up several hundred stairs to a lookout. You try hiking in wet thongs. It's like strapping two live wriggling fish to your feet. After working up a sufficient sweat in the steamy heat we decide that that is quite enough exertion for one day, and trot back down again for a swim. We run into California Joe, a guy who would be quite at home if he had to eke out an existence in the wilderness for the rest of his life, whittling poison darts and building thatched-roofed shelters. "Check it out," Joe says, "Under this overhang you can actually see where the river passes under the bridge." It is pretty impressive.
I try to get around the wooden railing to have a photo taken. "Sorry señorita, but you can't go there," says a young park ranger with an enormous roll of rope slung over his shoulder. "It's very dangerous." I give him my best smile. "Please? Not even just here? Just for one little photo?" He shakes his head. "No, really, you can't." I move forward. "But really it will be fine, I promise, just one little photo here, I won't fa--" BAM! My thongs lose their grip on the wet limestone and I fall over hard, cutting up my right arm and smashing my camera. It won't turn on. And don't I feel like an idiot. Why, God? How long are you going to keep punishing me? Weren't the bedbug bites enough?
The ranger takes a look at my bloody arm. "Shit," he says sympathetically in English, presumably for greater emphasis. "Shit, shit." Yes, I agree. All I can do is take a healing dip in the limestone pool. It is raining lightly, rippling the surface of the water, and it is blissfully cool. There are hundreds of tiny fish that, if you stay very still, swim up and nibble your feet and legs, feeding off dead skin cells. Isn't this a beauty treatment in Asia? It tickles terribly.
Joe wants to use his goggles in the pool to do some underwater filming, but for some reason the ranger won't let him. "Will you ask him why not?" Joe asks me. I do. "It is prohibited," the ranger says imperiously. But why? "We don't allow anything unnatural in the park. No smoking, no goggles." Oooookay... Joe is such an American. Just barging into Guatemala and expecting to dirty the water with his poison-dipped goggles. Shame on him. The DEET content of my bug spray would be more harmful to the water than goggles, but what do I know? I'm not a Guatemalan park ranger.
After an hour or so we all straggle back to the truck and rumble slowly up the road to El Retiro. The compound is renowned for its huge buffet dinners -all you can eat will set you back about $6 and the food is scrumptious and bountiful. Everyone eats at three long tables like school camp for adults. The afternoon thunderstorm has lashed the area ferociously and the power is out, so we eat by candlelight.
After dinner I spray my entire body with toxic chemicals and clamber into a hammock - I have moved into a large wall-less palapa where seven of us hang suspended in hammocks, cocooned away from the bugs. Life is pretty good, I have to admit, despite my relentless attacks of bad karma and misadventure. My hammock-mates and I swing gently in the breeze, listening to the rush of the river and the symphony of cicadas as the lighting flashes silently on the horizon.
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