Babies for Sale

I hadn’t been gone but a few hours when my planned itinerary changed. Here is a map. In green is where I went and had planned to go. Blue is where I thought I’d go, but didn’t. Red is where I didn’t think I’d go, but did. Doncha know.

Wherever I go, most people are younger than I am. I’m surrounded by travelers my children’s ages. One man told me he admired the way I travel. How do I travel? I wondered aloud. Most people your age go only where a lot of other tourists go, have fixed plans and stay in fancy hotels—or they stay home.

I got up early and took my tea out to the now-empty dock. I was a contented Little Miss Muffet, until along came a Georgian who sat down beside me. The morning is as fine as a Florida swamp frog’s hair split four ways, he declared. He was right, I think. Little iridescent red and green butterflies fluttered above the water, fish jumped, and red and yellow birds did what red and yellow birds do. I wish I could have seen one of the manatees that inhabit these waters.

I heard a familiar clacking sound as the Georgian removed his teeth to eat his breakfast. Toothlessness didn’t impair his randy banter. I didn’t know a person could flirt with ones lips vacuumed inside one’s mouth.

I’d planned to go down Rio Dulce to Livingston for a couple days, but the co-owner of Hotel Kangaroo, Gary, suggested it’s best seen in an afternoon trip, because of increased crime there. A seaport on an international boundary in Central America is triple trouble.

Rio Dulce connects the giant Lago de Izabal (Guatemala’s largest lake) with the Caribbean. Between the two places, the river changes character, from wide expanse separating plains to bulblike gulf to dark alley between jungle cliffs. Sources say that this area of the Caribbean is the safest for yachters to shelter in hurricane season.

[A slideshow for the following narrative comes at the end of the post.]

A lancha stopped at the hotel dock to pick up a few of us. A few minutes later we passed El Castillo de San Felipe. Lonely Planet says it was built in 1652 to keep pirates of the Caribbean away from the delta villages. Later it was a prison.

Our capití¡n paused to show us Rio Dulce signature sights, most notably bird-infested islands and a hot springs. On one of the islands there was a giant iguana in the treetops.

The prettiest part of the ride was through La Cueva de la Vaca. Its steep, rocky jungle cliffs look uninhabited and uninhabitable, but appearances are deceiving. A few years ago, the other co-owner of Hotel Kangaroo decided to retreat from civilization. She lived alone for two years up there with no electricity. Waterways provide the only access. She encountered some indigenous families who lived so deep in the jungle that they spoke only Q’eqchi and had never seen outsiders.

After two-and-a-half hours on the water, we arrived in Livingston. Its claim to fame are the Garí­funa people who live there. Descended from African slaves who were shipwrecked over 300 years ago, the Garí­funa speak their own tongue (I don’t know if it’s a language or a creole) as well as Spanish. I’d pictured a vibrant Caribbean community with music and arts, and seaside cafés where you could sit and absorb the ambiance. It wasn’t like that.

Disembarking at the dock I dodged the hustlers and climbed the steep main street through town. Kids played basketball in a public park. A crowd of adults gathered at the park’s stone bleachers for a purpose I couldn’t determine, but likely religious. Skeletal starving dogs trotted everywhere. At the crest of the hill, the street dropped down again, terminating in a pile of trash and the Caribbean.

The little old Garí­funa ladies wore thin, flower-printed dresses and straw hats reminiscent of the American South in the 1950s. The indigenous women wore their usual embroidered blouses and long skirts. Razor wire was everywhere, even in some windows. Tin-roofed houses, once brightly painted, were faded, with peeling stucco. I didn’t get to hear any Garí­funa music. There was only Bob Marley and mournful Spanish love songs emanating from restaurant radios. In front of one house on a tiny street, I was startled by loud retching noises, but it was only a goat.

It was fascinating to see such a different cultural blend than elsewhere in Guatemala. There was no social center or opportunity for interaction, so all I could do was look, feeling conspicuous and invasive, and see only the surface culture. I wonder if I would have gotten a deeper sense of the place if I’d stayed longer.

I took a break from sightseeing to go to the restaurant recommended by Gary—The Happy Fish—to order the Garí­funa specialty, Topada. It contains local seafood with vegetables in a coconut milk base. As I waited, a Garí­funa woman approached and touched the back of my hair. She felt strongly that I should have my hair plaited. I didn’t agree. But eventually I thought, What harm could it do? So she glopped up my hair’s understory with some over-scented, greasy, DayGlo blue gel, combed a neat horizontal part, and made a tiny braid adorned with a green plastic bead. Before I could protest, she had done another, but I stopped her before I turned into Bo Derek. I paid her five quetzales, or about 65 cents, and off she went. Only later did I think, Oh my God, she used her own comb. I have a mortal terror of head lice. In the 24 hours that followed, I washed my hair four times.

It was a full hour later that my lunch arrived, during which time I got cranky because I had only two hours to spend in the town, and because the hopeful starving dogs were breaking my heart. Finally, a bowl of dead things arrived: whole crabs, shrimp and a big fish, all of which had eyes lolling out of their sockets. I took a few unenthusiastic bites, but I just can’t eat when I’m being stared at, so I removed the offenders to a plate. At that moment my hair-braiding woman climbed back up the street, saw my creatures set aside and said, Aren’t you going to eat that? I said I was, but that I’d give her half because I couldn’t finish it. I put the remaining carnage into a plastic bag for her. She ate ravenously. I saved a few scraps and gave them to the next passing dog.

With the little time left after lunch, I started up another hilly street, curious about the view from the top. From the corner of my eye I glimpsed a young man who, seeing me, had started my way. There was no one on the street ahead of me so I turned back. The guy probably had no malicious intent, but why find out?

On the return boat ride, a young Southern man made authoritative pronouncements about things he knew nothing about. He said, Did you see that woman in town? I’m sure she was selling her baby. They do that all the time here. I detest when tourists make assumptions about what they see, especially in a way that is so insulting to locals. The fact is that, up until  a few years ago, there were corrupt agents who orchestrated legal but shady adoptions between desperate mothers here and would-be white mothers. A lot of money was involved, and there were tragic consequences for everyone except the agents. That’s regulated and highly restricted now, and even then, people didn’t “sell” babies on the street. Does he think indigenous people have so little humanity? And how does he think a white person can leave the country with an undocumented brown-skinned baby? Stupid buttwad.

My boatmates also said they’d been solicited by marijuana vendors. This, I believe, but I wonder why no one approached me. Probably because I’m over 30. I wonder how many tourists are foolish enough to engage in such a transaction.

With drug dealers on my mind as we returned upriver, I saw a sign that said, Vendo Ganga. At first I read it as I sell marijuana, but later discovered that it meant I sell things at steep discounts.

I reconvened with my two new friends, during which Jenny engaged in a sort of fish-slapping ritual with Asaf, who detests fish.

Here are pix. Remember you can make them big.