MEXICO CITY Y EL FINAL DEL VIAJE

We were both sad at leaving our little casa in Antigua.  In spite of the ordeal of my visiting Tikal, we really liked it there.  Our driver picked us up at the door and drove to Guatemala Airport.  It is a relatively small airport and easily managed.  Like every other airport in the world now,  they have kiosks to get your boarding pass.  When I booked my reservation it did not ask for my passport (which was odd since it was an international flight)  I had to enter my name but I do not use my middle name for in Mexico for that is actually your last name.  There were three boxes and I could not move on until something was in the third box.  I entered "Mr."  Remembering that I entered Larry Mr. and sure enough it popped up.  Instead of what we are accustomed to in a boarding pass it spewed out three 8 x 11 sheets of paper.  One was placed inside my checked luggage which I thought was a good idea.  Jennifer was not so lucky as it would not accept her real last name.  She had to go to another window to explain her problem.  They gave her what looked like a grocery receipt.

No problem with the flight and we pulled up to an actual gate so getting off the plane was no problem.  I walked up to Immigration and told the man I understood no Spanish.  He muttered a few words I did not understand and stamped my passport and visa.  Not so for Jennifer.   She got a real bitch who questioned her entry into Mexico just 6 months earlier.  She was told that a mark was going on her passport so unless she obtained a permanent visa, she would not be allowed back into Mexico again.  She was almost in tears.  She spoke perfect Spanish and yet I breezed through with no problem.  That will be our next battle:  getting permanent visas.  We had a nice cab driver who drove to our hotel, but had to let us out at the corner as our street was a pedestrian only street that led to the Zocalo (or main square of Mexico City)  The room was quite small but very clean and very well equipped and it was in a great location (unlike our first hotel).   The Hotel Ritz in Mexico bares no resemblance the The Ritz in Paris, other than it's name.  It is an old hotel, I think it said 1939 (which makes it younger than I am) but the baths had been redone with white marble and frosted glass.

We wandered around the Zocalo marveling at the beautiful buildings all illuminated.  We had arrived just a few days after the earthquake hit.  But the only sign of it were the tents set up in the middle of the square where food and housewares were handed out to the homeless.  We saw no damage at all.
Mexico City is an enormous megalopolis of over 21 million people (most are extremely poor) But around the Zocalo every one looked prosperous and in a hurry (just like all major cities)   On the way back we stopped to watch a little kid playing a small guitar and singing with all his heart.  He was just amazing.  When he wasn't singing he pressed his ear on the guitar listening to the sounds.  We are hoping he will be discovered by someone for he could be the next Mexican Michael Jackson or maybe Ricky Martin.  He was that good and so cute.  I can't remember if we ate that night as both of us were so tired.  I had brought a flask of Scotch with  me and Jennifer bought a bottle of Tequila at a local tienda (I had also brought a flask of Tequila for her, but she drank it in Antigua)  Maybe that is why we never ate.

The next morning I was up early and quickly dressed  in sweats to go to the lobby and get some coffee for my morning coffee and cigarette.  There was no coffee in the lobby and they directed me to the dinning room where a huge buffet had been set up for our complimentary breakfast.  I told the girl I just wanted coffee to take outside to have with a cigarette.  She said I could not take the cup outside so I told her I would take it to my room (a lie of course).  This is all in Spanish.  She said if I took the coffee to my room, I had to sign by my room number and that would be considered my complimentary breakfast.  WHAT??  I will never travel again without my portable coffee pot.  I got a cup of coffee next door and sat on a bench in the middle of the street to have my smoke.  No one else seem to be smoking anywhere.  A couple of policemen walked toward me and I was afraid I would be cited for drinking and smoking in the street.  (Is this Laguna Beach, or what??)  They passed by and I was struck by the fact that they carried only a pistol.  In Vallarta 18 year old kids are sporting machine guns.

Jennifer's main reason for visiting Mexico City was to see the home of Frida Kahlo.  Frida is an icon in Vallarta although she never got near the town.  Our favorite bar is called Un Bar Frida and there are paintings of her all over, including a huge mural that was cut out and moved from their previous location.  Jennifer has written a book on Un Bar Frida and the colorful characters that frequent the place.  The book also discusses the life of Frida and some similarities to Jennifer's life.  I had purchased tickets on the internet for I heard they were lines around the block.  Not so!  I was first struck by the size of the property which was originally owned by her parents.  The house is quite large and the walled gardens even larger.  I commented that her parents must have been rich, but Jennifer said the were not.  Even in the 1950's a property that size must have been worth a lot of money in the middle of Mexico City.   They had not only her paintings, but photos, and in glass cases her wardrobe and jewelry.  She was known for her large collection of precolonial art  (some of which was on display)  Along the way (in English) her life is chronicled as well as describing the use of each room during her life time.  She had many, many physical problems which she overcame.  Her clothing was designed to hide her deformed body.  She was considered quite gorgeous and attracted attention where ever she went.  The gardens are also gorgeous (which was the only thing I was allowed to photograph).  I really enjoyed it, but not as much as Jennifer.

I was still suffering from my cold and ran out of Kleenex.  I wanted out and go to a pharmacy.  I was told there was one 3 or 4 blocks away, but Jennifer thought we should get a cab.  As we headed back to our hotel I said,  "I am dying, get me to a pharmacy"  The driver said they are everywhere and I said,  "Fine take me to one".  It was just a few blocks from our hotel.  For some reason they sold me three boxes of the stuff.  They must have seen I was suffering.  I do not know what it was as it was a Pharmacia Similar.  What ever they worked so we walked to the Zocalo where there is a roof top terrace overlooking the Zocalo.  We started up the stairs, but when we got to the second floor I said, "Find me an elevator"  I think it was the fifth floor.  The food was so so, but the view was nice.

I was not in the mood to do much more walking so we returned to the hotel.  We wanted a really nice dinner for our last night and I had to recover first.  I asked the concierge and he showed me on the map where a nice reasonable restaurant was located.   Later that evening we set off.  He was a few blocks off on the restaurant but Jennifer spotted it.  The manager said they were closed.  Why?  There was no one in the place so maybe that is why.  Discouraged Jennifer looked across the plaza and spotted one on the corner.  It was a Kaiser of Paris which is basically pastry.  But next door was a nice restaurant with outdoor dinning.  We settled in there.  To our surprise and delight there was an ash tray on the table.  The first we had seen in Mexico City.  The food was wonderful and the ambiance even better.  Jennifer said she felt like she was back in Rome.  A perfect ending to our vacation,  I went back the following morning to take a picture of the restaurant and the square where it was located.
It is a short flight to Vallarta and we cleared customs and were out in front in no time.  Over Jennifer's protests, I hailed an airport taxi.  I was dropped off first.  So nice to be home again!  In spite of a few set backs (like Tikal) it was a wonderful trip.  Jennifer is a lot of fun to travel with.   Less than 30 seconds after I opened the sliding door to the balcony, kitty appeared.  She was screaming her head off.  I picked her up and carried her to my desk.  She likes to sit on my lap while I am at the computer.  I needed to check my email and wanted to spend some quality time with her, but also I was delaying going upstairs.  Felipe had messaged me at the M.C. airport.  He had his wife cleaning my apartment and she discovered that a lot of stuff had been stolen from the terrace.  I had only paid Felipe to water my plants and look in on kitty, but he had my apartment cleaned anyway.  That is the kind of person he is.

When I first opened the door I am not sure what I thought I would see, but I was surprised that everything looked the same.  There was no vandalism, nothing broken or even moved.  They just took everything that they thought they could sell.  My fan and ladder may be the most expensive things to replace, but my devil mask with the sheep horns will be the most difficult to find.  They took all my tools, including my garden tools, ash tray, even kitty's brush.  They also took several pieces of Mexican folk art.  Odd! as Mexicans do not like their own folk art, especially the younger ones.  But they were not stealing it for their own use, but to sell.  All the pillow cases to the pillows on my chairs were gone.  That also seemed odd, then I realized that they needed them to carry all the stuff away.  Still, it must have taken them several trips.  They also stole stuff from my neighbors patio and hit the patio of the taco restaurant next door.  Busy boys!

September is the slowest month of the year in Vallarta.  The foreign tourists have not arrived and all the Mexican tourist left when their kids went back to school.  There is no business,  no jobs and they have no money: so they steal.  They mean us no harm they just need money for food and they believe that anything they take an American can easily replace.  To a Mexican all Americans are rich, even someone like myself.   Tracy (my neighbor) and I have gotten together and made up a plan to stop the theft.  We now think they use the tin roof of the taco stand below her balcony on the side street as it has new dents in it.  We are going to put razor wire on their roof (with their permission of course) then install motion detection flood lights on her balcony and lower patio.  This I have offered to pay half of the cost.  They cannot reach my deck except from hers.  She also wants to put in a motion detection camera.  That may work as a deterrent, but even if it captured the face of the thieves, what can you do with it?   It is a hazard of living in a poor country, but I would not consider living anywhere else.

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TIKAL

The main reason I wanted to visit Guatemala was to see the ruins of the Mayan empire in Tikal.  I have been to most of the pyramids in Mexico (Mayan and Aztec) as well as Cambodia and Egypt (which dwarfs all of them)  What I did not know is how far it was from the house we had rented in Antigua.  I was told it was an eight hour bus ride.  I could do that in one day I thought.  I would take the over night bus, hopefully sleep a little.  Then spend 3 or 4 hours touring the pyramids and return to Antigua.  It did not work out as planned.
Yes, It is eight hours from Guatemala City to a town near Tikal.  But you have to get to Guatemala City and then from Flores to Tikal.  I decided to do it anyway.  The flight was too expensive and I still would have the problem of getting from Antigua to the Guatemala airport (wait God knows how long for the flight) and then get from the airport to Tikal.  I did find a one day tour from Antigua that would fly me there and provide transportation and a guide.  It was $639.00! (but it did include a lunch).  Out of the question!  Our round trip from Puerto Vallarta was $200.00 less than that.  I did consider staying overnight, but where?  I was traveling by myself and was a little worried about staying in a town I knew nothing about.
I booked the tickets for the bus ride and contacted my guide about when I would arrived in Flores.  He answered that he would meet me at the bus terminal in Santa Elena.  Was that the name of the depot? I arrived in Flores and as people were getting off, I asked the driver if this was called Santa Elena.  He said, "No, it is the next stop"  Thank God I asked.  We arrived about 5:15am.  I had not been able to sleep on the bus at all.  Two "gang banger types" sat in front of me and immediately threw their seat back.  The tray table banged into my knees and suddenly I realized I had no place to put my legs.  The Guatemalans (of Mayan descent) have very short legs.  My vertebrae has shrunk by almost two inches, but my legs are still long.  It was impossible to get into a comfortable position.  Plus the guy in front was either texting or talking on his phone for hours.  Two ambien did not help.

The bus station in Santa Elena was scary, but I got some coffee and settled down to wait.  About 6:30 my guide walked up to me.  He said he had been there in 6:00 looking for me.  I was outside smoking, of course.  But we still had to wait until 8:00 for the first van to Tikal.  The van kept letting off and picking up people so we did not get to the park until 9:30.  I had been up for 27 hours at that point.  The walk through the pyramids is four miles.  He insisted I climb the highest temple which is 194 steps.  Somehow I did it.   The temple is 781 feet tall.  Once I reached the top there was a stone ledge about four feet wide and then a shear drop.  It terrified me and I placed by arms against the stone wall fearful of fainting.  My guide wanted to take picture of me at the top.  But as you know I do not allow photographs of  myself.  From the photo I took from there you can only see two of the pyramids sticking up above the jungle.

The Mayan civilization began around 900 B.C. and continued until almost 900 A.D.  (Two Thousand years, can you believe?)  They think the city which was built on a hill around 250 A.D. but was abandoned in 900 A,D. because of several years of drought.  They had built reservoirs and canals to serve the city of 200,000 people.  The temples and buildings became over grown by the jungle with trees growing all over them.  The native Mayans still went there to worship but when the Spaniards arrived in the low lands, no one told them that Tikal was on top of the hill.  If the Spaniards had known they would have torn them down and put a plastic Jesus on top.  Thank God they missed it.  In 1848 the government made it a national park. but it wasn't until 1955 that any excavation took place. Wrigley (of chewing gum) had built an air strip there to take the sap from the gum trees and that is how an archaeologist from Pennsylvania  heard about it.  He worked years clearing off some of the temple sites and several other archaeologists followed him.  Yet only 20% has been excavated.  I kind of liked seeing what the temples looked like covered by the jungle.  That is what that mound of trees is about.

It is a huge site of 576 square kilometers and it is all in a dense jungle. It rains 9 months out of the year.  So it is far more than the jungle that surrounds Vallarta.  Lots of wild life.  I got a picture on one of the spider monkeys that are all over the trees.  It was the howler monkey that fascinated me.  He lets out a roar that sounds like a huge lion and yet he is smaller than the spider monkey.  We also saw some toucans and my guide said a black jaguar was passing us.  All of them were too quick for a photograph.  At the information center (where all the trinkets are for sale) there is a stone replica of the original sign for Tikal.  My guide told me what all the symbols meant but I was brain dead by then.  I do remember that the large round thing is the back of a head.  They wrapped their hair in rolls of fabric much like the Sikhs do in India. The model lay out gives you some idea of the size of the city.

 One temple was dedicated to a king and the opposing temple to his wife.  His skeleton was found under the temple (covered with 158 pieces of jade) but they have not yet looked for his queen.  There is no money for any more excavation.  Tragic!!  The royal family lived in the 38 palaces containing 140 rooms.  It was a dynasty, but a woman could succeed as queen.  The long flat building with the people on top is one of the palaces.  One was for a market where the Mayans could buy food and stuff.  The observatory is tall with the flat roof was to study the stars.  Three smaller temples were in front of it to depict the exact time of the summer and winter equinox.  On top of the observatory they followed Venus and the Milky Way trying to determine the length of a complete celestial cycle.  They figured it would take until 2012.  It was not the end of the world, but the end and beginning of a new celestial cycle.  The roads were built of limestone covered with plaster.  The temples were the same, but were painted red, yellow, or blue (the three primary colors).

According to my guide they did not practice human sacrifice.  But since he was of Mayan decent, maybe he was jut trying to clean up their act.  He said the offerings to the Gods were of incense, flowers and chocolate.  Chocolate came from the higher mountains so they traded for it.  They mixed it with honey and a red plant that made it resemble blood. Only the royal family and the priests were allowed chocolate.  After the revolution and the break with Spain, the Guatemalan government allowed the Mayans back into the park to practice their religion and make offerings to the Gods.

 What I still do not understand is how these people obtained such a vast knowledge of engineering, astronomy, and math.  They came up with the concept of the "zero" which few cultures at the time had figured out.  They used only three symbols for numbers.  An oval was the zero, a dot was one, and a short line was a five.  With those three symbols you can create any number you want.  This is how the archaeologists were able to date everything.  Even more amazing they came up with a written language.  One of three independently developed written languages in the world.  How did this happen?  We think man came up out of Africa and walked to Asia and Europe.  Some speculate that they crossed the Bering Straights to get to the Americas.  It must have taken tens of thousands of year to reach the south of Mexico and into Guatemala.  Did they leave all the stupid people behind?  The rest of the people on the American continent were all still living in caves.  Okay there were the Incas in Peru but they did not come along until 600 years after the fall of the Mayan empire.  The Aztecs came into power in the early 1400's.  They had no idea who the Mayans were.

Okay, this is already too long and not funny,  Well here comes the funny part (although it was not funny to me at the time).  My round trip ticket included a van which picked me up at our casa at 6:30 at night.  The bus terminal in Guatemala City was a dirty scary place and I had a two hour wait for the bus.  I think I had a couple of beers, smoke a lot of cigarettes and waited.  The bath room was outside and a man at the door collected two Quetzals  for a hand full of toilet paper.  I did not need it for my purpose but decided to keep it.  The toilets had no seats and did not flush.  But there was what I guess was a huge bath tub.  The water was so black you could not see the bottom.   The first bus to Flores and Santa Elena did not have a working bathroom.  They made a pit stop around 1:00 in the morning.  It was a parking lot with a row of three quarter doors that looked like a row of out houses.  It wasn't much better.  Again the toilets had no seats and did not flush.  During two days I only found one flushing toilet with a seat and that was on the bus coming back.  Do people steal the toilet seats?  During the trip I noticed that a little boy would enter the bathrooms with a bucket of water and flush them.

In the park in Tikal the bath room was clean, but no toilet seat and no flushing.  At some point I had to do more than pee.  Nothing could posses me to actually sit on the rim of the toilet.  Imagine trying to hover over the toilet while holding on to my travel bag, camera, and sweat shirt (which was too hot to wear)  You would never dare sit anything on the floor.  To make it even more disgusting, there was a sign (in English) telling you not to put any paper in the toilet.  You were to place the used toilet paper in a trash can in front of you.  I would not attempt to describe the smell.

 After four hours of walking and climbing, I was about to die.  The van back to Santa Elena was at 3:00 arriving about 4:30 pm but my bus back did not arrive until 9:00.  I asked my guide if there was a Mexican restaurant across the street where I could sit and have dinner.  He said that he would not advice me to leave the terminal.  There were armed guards with machine guns outside.  I could not figure out if that made me feel safer or not.   The bus was late leaving. I have now been up for almost 40 hours.  I was sure I would sleep on the way home.

My seat partner was Gargantua.  Mayans are tiny but he was about 6 foot 2 and must have weighed 300 pounds.  He took up his seat and half of mine.  The bus was freezing cold.  It looked like dry ice coming out the vents,  Mind you all day I had been in 90 degree heat and 100% humidity.  The only good thing is that he was warm and I was forced to lie next to him.  I took more ambien and prayed I would sleep.  But the girl in front of me had her seat almost flat so again there was no place for my legs.  Apparently they were building a new road and we were diverted to a narrow rock strewn road that made the bus leap and lurch.  Maybe I nodded off again for the bus took 11 hours so I was more than three hours late for my van to my house.  First I stepped outside for a cigarette.  Not having smoked for 12 hours and being so tired I thought I would faint and put it out.  The lady  at the counter did somehow understand my problem (no one speaks English) and called the number on the ticket.

A van finally appeared but it was already loaded.  There were 12 kids on it plus me.  The van made several stops dropping people off so it was after 10;00 when we arrived in Antigua.  We turned off the main road from Guatemala on Ave 6 Oriente,  I lived just off Ave 7 Oriente.  Why I did not scream to get off, I do not know (I was nearly unconscious by then).  The van continued to drop people off and I assumed he would go back and drop me off at my house.  NO !  He said this is the end of the line and you must get off.  But I do not know where I am.  He said,  "This is Antigua"  Fine but where is my house?  I was too tired to argue more so when  a city bus came by I hopped on.  I figured if I stayed on it long enough I would recognize a street.  Sure enough I saw Ave 7 Oriente, but I was too late is standing up and the bus moved on.  When I got off I was still disoriented and was not sure what street to walk down. Some how I staggered home by 10:30. (52 hours since I had last been to bed).  Jennifer was near hysterical as I was to arrive by 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning.  I showered (it had been two days) had a glass of wine and went to bed.
 When I got up I had a horrible cold.  There were still places I wanted to see in Antigua, but I was not up to it.  Was the trip to Tikal worth it?  Well, I did it so I guess I have to say it was.  But only someone who was stupid or insane would attempt it without staying overnight.  Yes, I know what that makes me, but I never said I was smart.  Mexico City and the end of the trip are next.  STAY TUNED,

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