A Fistful of Vouchers

Somehow my father’s old analog watch knows it’s in Central America. It says SAB 19, and it’s right: it is sí¡bado. Last night I packed my small backpack with a few clothes and a sheaf of papers from the travel agent, ready for my trip north. I woke myself up at 3:00 a.m. for the shuttle to the teeny regional airport in Guatemala City. There, the room filled mostly with Americans with whom, as it turned out, I’d spend the next two days.

We climbed aboard a 30-seat plane bound for Flores, a pretty little town I wish I’d had time to visit. A van awaited to take us to The Jungle Lodge in Tikal. Our guide was a highly articulate, informed man with a gurgling smoker’s cough that punctuated every other sentence. Tikal, he told us, is home to panthers, agoutis and other cool animals, none of which I saw except iridescent turkeys and some spiders.

I almost asked him if I might see a pixote, but then remembered it was a creature I’d made up last time I was in Guatemala.

Oh, and these are leaf-cutter ants.

This area — Peten, in the Yucatan — is a subtropical rainforest that is the world’s fourth largest source of oxygen. Its exports are chicle (for gum, from the zapota tree) and allspice. And here’s the national tree of Guatemala, the ceiba, and those are orchids in its branches:

Our guide’s communication skills diminished as the day progressed. I’m guessing he made some furtive visits to the Gallo Cerveza stand during our breaks.

Once we got to the hotel and set off on our tour, I had my first bout of traveler’s blues. In the group I felt a thousand times more isolated than when alone. And because of the milling crowds of the present, I had a hard time imagining how Tikal might have been in the ancient past; instead, I felt like I was flipping through glossy pages in a beautiful magazine.

But my day began to improve when I had the opportunity to wander off on my own for a bit, into what they call the Central Metropolis where they believe royal families used to live.

Here’s some stuff I gleaned from Lonely Planet and my guí­a:

The Maya originally settled here around 700 BC. By around 250 AD it started to assume the shape we see now. There was a shiteload of leaders with great names: Great Jaguar Paw, Smoking Frog, Lord Water and Moon Double Comb (a.k.a. Lord Chocolate, who was a giant at 5’9″). By 900 BC the civilization (with writing and water systems) had all but vanished. No one knows why for certain, but three possibilities are drought, invasion and exhaustion of natural resources. Also, they were religious zealots whose culture might have imploded by spending too much time praising and not enough time hunting and gathering and cultivating.

We climbed the grandest temple in Tikal, evocatively named Temple IV. In the past people had the unfortunate habit of falling down the narrow stone stairs and sometimes dying, so they’ve built safe, modern wooden stairs up the back, for which I was grateful. Here are views from on top.

After our tour we all settled at a gigantic table where a handful of my companions, with much whining and sighing, seemed to expect Hilton service. “I still don’t see why I can’t check in early!” “That food you just served me, which I just ate and which was very good, was not what I ordered.” “How many times do I have to tell you…?” However, many others were courteous to the locals and a pleasure to talk to.

In the late afternoon I signed up for a canopy tour. What I’d neglected to consider were the mechanics of such an experience: how does a person who doesn’t like heights get into a canopy? Once there, how does one get from place to place? I’ll tell you.

You’re strapped into a harness and you jam your hands into giant leather gloves that keep falling off. You walk into the woods. You climb a ladder. You climb some more, to a narrow platform girding the trunk. Hugging the tree in terror, you creep halfway around and climb to another platform. You wonder what the hell you were thinking. You get about 90 feet in the air. That means the ground is 90 feet below you. That’s not where the ground should be. You don’t look down.

You listen to instructions in Spanish that you don’t understand. A young man clips you to a cable and asks you if you’re lista. You’re not, but you have no choice but to leap.

Luckily, the two couples with me were fun. After several tries I got a little better about keeping myself from spinning as I zipped along at 550 miles an hour, but I never quite got the braking part. For my grand finale I smashed feet-first into a tree and almost disemboweled the poor young man who awaited me.

When it was over, it was a blast.

After we touched down I chatted for a while with the 26-year-old man who’d helped build the zipline structure. He asked me how old I was but I wouldn’t say. When he persisted I asked him to guess. Big mistake. “Sesenta?” he ventured. “Sixty??” I gasped, and thwapped him with my leather glove. “No? Tienes mas, or menos?” Double whammy.

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