Guatemala Days Five and Six: Some Monkeys, a Jungle, a Boat, a Horse, Some Mangoes and Bug Spray (Not a Lyle Lovett Song)

Here is something that you should know. When most people visit Guatemala, they go to see Tikal. Tikal is a massive Mayan ruin. It’s also a massive tourist destination. As I think you know, we do not travel like that. I had left all destination decisions up to Pookie. He chose: Laguna Chicabel (done), Livingston (next chapter), and Aquateca. Aquateca is an alternative ruin to see. It is much further away from anything than Tikal is and much harder to get to. But this is how we roll. And as you may recall from the previous entry (which you likely may have read well over a year ago), our jumping off point was Posada Caribe.

We were actually spending two nights at Posada Caribe, which by the way is run by this man:

His name is Julian Mariona. He speaks no English, mostly. He is a kind soul and a family man who has made this little nest of magic near the Mexican border. He will speak in Spanish with joy about his children, his dogs, the river. His eyes become sad when he talks about how crime has increased along with traffic headed over the Mexican border to the north. His daughter goes to school up the river in Sayaxche, but she takes the boat home frequently because, really, who wouldn’t want to always be a part of this magic?

Our first day at Posada Caribe will be a trip to see Dos Pilas. Dos Pilas is another set of ruins (two really) deep into the jungle. It’s a hike. The day is long, and it is jungle hot, people.

We start out by taking a boat (the same boat we noted we paid a fortune for) to a farm that we can hike through to get to the jungle. It’s a lovely (though hot) morning of hiking through cow pastures and fields of some kind of watermelon or squash. The guides are fast. I mean, they hike fast. You may also remember that I do not hike fast. You may also remember that Ho hikes at the speed of light. However, even our guides from Posada Caribe think that the guides we hired to get to Dos Pilas are hiking too fast. That’s how quickly they’re hiking. This is important, because it is hot, and we are only carrying so much water.

The first stop is the jungle ranger station. Do you know what it is to be a jungle ranger in Guatemala? It means that for over a month at a time, you live in an isolated shack near a stream, drinking primarily collected rainwater and living off of local vegetation and whatever food and fuel you brought in. It sounds pretty perfect, frankly, if you, like me, have a secret desire to go off-grid. We stop for lunch at the ranger station, where the menfolk all spend time catching up and the rest of us make poor judgment calls and drink most of our water.  The jungle dehydrates you, people.

There are also howler monkeys in the distance. We spend all of lunch sitting and listening to them.

Then we hike to Dos Pilas. We get to listen to monkeys, watch a local indigenous tribe hide from us on their way to do their laundry, and enjoy the jungle. I represent for Hoosier nation (number twelve in the nation, baby!). And I can’t do the day better justice than these entirely unflattering pictures can. 

I will tell you briefly that, as we were leaving Dos Pilas, two horrid tourists arrived. They obviously hadn’t wanted to hike the hard hike, so they had a guide drive them there in an SUV. And in that moment, every SUV commercial that you’ve ever seen in which a pristine four-wheel vehicle sits in the middle of an ancient ruin while bolts of sunlight hit it just so came true. It was like commercial magic. But real.

The hike out? That shit is HARD. There’s almost no water left, but it’s really hot and really humid and the hike is really long. We stop along the way to pick mangos, which the guides carry in huge bags on their backs. This makes me feel less badass when I am dying of exhaustion and dehydration and the guides are carrying pounds and pounds of mangoes on their backs.

And then I meet a pink horse. It walks right up to me while we’re resting, and we are in love. And I wish that really falling in love were that simple.

We get back to Posdada Caribe and here is where I learn a very valuable lesson: You have, in fact, never eaten a mango at all in your life until you have eaten a mango that was picked up off of the jungle floor while you were hiking back. I don’t know how to describe them, except that I think that somewhere in Heaven God and Jesus often choose to dine on fresh jungle mangos paired with Mexican Coke. That’s how good it was.

Here is where I make a critical error in travel though. All day long, Ho and Pookie had been complaining about the massive jungle mosquito bites. I was pretty much entirely unbitten. Deet and I are friends, and when I am sprayed up nothing comes near me. (Also, I do not want to hear your anti-Deet commentary. When I am at a casual river, I don’t use it. When I am deep in a jungle with mosquitoes the size of your thumb, there will be Deet). I’m kind of obnoxious, really, about how mosquito bite free I am. I take a shower, and then I step outside into the twilight for literally less than ten minutes without bug spray.

By morning, I am covered from shoulders to ankles in huge, over-an-inch-in-diameter, mosquito bites that are physically crushing me with pain and that won’t entirely heal until well after we return from Guatemala. Fail, Jocelyn. I know better than to do this. I got wrapped up in thinking that I was bite-immune and took a gamble on those ten minutes. I then regretted it for all of the days that followed.

Including the next day, but I was able to forget some of the next day because I had the ruins of Aquateca to distract me.

We wake up. I scratch at myself like a dog for an hour, and then we leave for Aquateca. To get to Aquateca, you need to ride in a little, tiny boat. Why so little and tiny? Because it will need to pass through a little, tiny, canal that was meant as a defense for the civilization.

You see, you may remember that the Mayans were a tribal warring culture. Aquateca was built to protect itself. It’s largely surrounded by water and dense jungle, and the perimeter of the city itself was protected by large crevices. Here’s a picture looking up from the bottom of one.

There was no way up from the bottom if the residents of the city pulled up the ladders, and if you tried to jump across the crevice, you would fall to your death. Of course, eventually, some warring tribe figured out that they should just transport bridges through the jungle with them, and that was the demise of Aquateca. But the ruins and their reconstruction remain, and they are stunning.

My favorite part of the day, though, was the monkeys. See them below. We were the only tourists up there exploring for most of that day, and the monkeys came right out to us and I got to site and watch them play in the wild for a long time. Also, that felt good because it was in the shade and the hike up there was long, hot, humid, and steep. 

I can’t, again, do justice to these ruins in the same way that pictures can. So here you go.

Aquateca is worth going out of your way for. That is all.

We head back to the magic Posada Caribe to shower and get on our way. And the next thing that happens, while it will be a short (very short) blog entry, is my favorite thing that happens on the entire trip. 


Also, this is the best picture of the trip.