Tsaiberspace

My friend gets engaged, and now the wedding jokes start coming out of my webcomics woodwork:

This is Jet Li’s final final action movie (wasn’t Fearless supposed to be his final martial arts movie?).

The story has been told many times over; Clint Eastwood’s A Fistful of Dollars (Old West) and Bruce Willis’ Last Man Standing (Irish and Italian mobsters) both come to mind. In War, a mysterious “Rogue” (I’m sorry, but the name is ludicrous) deals with the Triads and Yakuza.

Not much else to say without spoiling what little there is to spoil. War has everything you’d expect:

• Impatient young Asian gangster chafing against the orders of older seasoned gangster.
• Asian gangsters dressed in expensive black suits.
• Asian gangsters riding fast motorcycles and driving fast cars.
• FBI watching the gangs take each other out.
• A half-hearted attempt at a plot twist.

This movie was barely worth the $10 ticket price.

My browsing environment has been Google-fied. My first four Firefox tabs are now:

• Gmail
• Google Calendar
• iGoogle
• Google Reader

Google Reader finally wins after a long love-hate relationship with Bloglines. Google Calendar completely blows away Yahoo! calendar, and from there it was a simple step to switch away from Y! Mail to Gmail for Calendar and Maps integration.

I tried to resist, but I’ve now succumbed.

Today we just woke up, got on a shuttle one last time for Guatemala City, and went to the airport. For me, 9am is the perfect depart-the-hotel time. Some of my friends can go visit museums and stuff in the morning before an afternoon flight, but I’m too paranoid about missing a flight; going to the airport is the first thing I will do of the day, no matter what time it is.

All in all, a good trip. Not too short (we felt that we did a good job seeing everything Antigua had to offer), and not too long (we hadn’t yet started feeling bored of the town).

Lessons for next time:

• Bring the laptop. Even a third-world country has internet access, and it’s funner to blog about things right away instead of a week later.
• Purchase foreign currency at home beforehand (from the bank, not at the airport).
• In a market situation, avoid middlemen, shop around, and deal directly with the boatman or taxi driver. All boat rides, purses, T-shirts, and other goods are all the same, and are all visible by all merchants, so make sure they know you are shopping around.
• Skip the 5-star Casa Santo Domingo (stay there the night of the wedding), and stay at the Hotel Aurora.
• Sample lots of Guatemalan coffee.

Friday was the truly free day. We also moved from the Casa Santo Domingo (US$100+/night) to the more modest but more charming Hotel Aurora (US$50/night). In retrospect we should have just stayed here for most of the week. It’s cheaper, more charming, the rooms are just as good, breakfast is included, and it’s closer to town (Casa Santo Domingo is kind of at the edge of town).

We went back to the main market to do some final shopping and picture-taking, and treated ourselves to some fried chicken at the local Pollo Campero, slowly invading the United States. It is not quite Popeye’s, but it is much better than KFC and Church’s.

For dinner we went to a local cafe. A rat made its way off the street into the compound. We watched it enter several doorways, only to quickly scurry back out after hearing a startling scream from the lady working in whatever store the rat had just exited. Finally, a matronly person took charge, chased the rat into a hole in the ground, and poured a pot of hot coffee into the hole. End of rat.

Today was an unstructured day, but we woke up early anyway, having gone to bed early the night before. Heidi and Jason dressed up to take some nicer photos at the ruins; we went to take pictures with them.

Then it was another bus ride to Flores, a flight back to Guatemala City, and another shuttle ride back to Antigua.

Next on our busy trip was a visit to the Mayan Ruins of Tikal. We had to take a shuttle from Antigua to Guatemala City, and from there take a plane to Flores, and then another shuttle to the Hotel Tikal Inn in Tikal National Park. In keeping with the “early to bed, early to rise” motif of this trip, the national park only has electricity for a few hours in the morning and at night (basically, bathroom/shower time).

The walking guided tour takes a few hours, and takes us through the jungle to the Grand Plaza and all the Temples seen in many textbooks and movies. My pictures don’t do them justice; they really need to be seen. Most of the temples have wooden stairs that allow you to go to the top to see the views.

Our tour guide Annie was actually a last-minute fill-in. The normal guide (bilingual in Spanish and English) had called in sick; Annie is their Spanish and French guide. So Heidi had to do some volunteer work as a translator.

The forest and hotel grounds are populated by many leafcutter ants. It is quite interesting and amazing to watch them bring leaves back to their colonies. During our stay at the hotel, it was always amusing to see a long line of “walking leaves” making their way across the sidewalk to some place on the hotel grounds.

On this day of our very full vacation, we went to Panajachel to see Lake Atitlan and the surrounding Mayan pueblos. On our way out of Antigua, we got stopped by some kind of local children’s parade. There were a few enthusiastic kids hamming it up for the camera:

After that, it was about 2½ hours by van to get to Panajachel. The pictures taken out the window of the van are very grainy because I had to set the camera to a high ISO setting to avoid motion blurriness. Snapping the photos at the right time turned out to be like playing some kind of video game:

Once in Panajachel, we rented a boat to take us to a few pueblos around the lake. Here we received a hard lesson in bargaining. We got suckered by a person who offered to “arrange” a private boat for us for US$35/person. The Lonely Planet guidebook we didn’t read said that a fare should be US$25/person, and Heidi had negotiated a fare of US$8/person for her large ferry boat. There were plenty of idle boats at the shore; we should have been able to cut out this middleman and directly negotiate a decent deal with a boatman. Hopefully we’ll be smarter next time.

The pueblos surrounding the lake are destitutely poor. At every boat landing, we were accosted by children trying to sell bracelets for Q5; when no bracelets sold, they reverted to simply begging for Q1. It was very sad. I didn’t take many pictures.

It rained again during this day; we got soaked on the boat, then got stuck in traffic on our way back to Antigua. At all the construction stops, there are people who make a living walking up and down the stopped cars selling fruit and drinks. It reminded me of one of my trips to New York City. My car had been towed, so I had to go to some DMV building. Outside were lots of people selling pens and pencils for a dollar.

Pacaya is an active volcano. Hubert set up the tour. Patrika and Carmen stayed home. Aaron and I woke up early, picked up sandwiches from the nearby panaderia, and joined everyone else in the tour van (Rachel, Hubert, JC, Patres).

The hike is very strenuous, and Guatemala’s altitude doesn’t help. At the very beginning of the hike, we were given a few offers:

• The bus driver offered to be our hiking guide, to get us through the jungle to the volcano. This was a no-brainer to accept; we didn’t want to get lost in the jungle.
• At the bottom of the trail, we were accosted by local kids offering to rent us hiking sticks for Q5. We hemmed and hawwed, but this also turned out to be a near-necessity.

The very beginning of the hike is a very steep climb up a rock trail. Two locals with horses followed us up, offering horse rides for the hike. When none of us succumbed to the hike, the horsemen turned back. But we’d find that it wouldn’t have been a bad deal, and the numerous horse droppings along the trail ahead was evidence that others had thought the same thing.

At this point, the rock “pavement” stopped, and we were hiking on dirt paths. One thing about the hiking trails here is that the switchbacks aren’t as developed as in “tourist” paths in the States; one hikes much more directly uphill or downhill. This means that the hike is steeper, and that the paths are more slickly dangerous (more mud from erosion and the wet weather). It was a tough climb to the top, but the views were worth it.

Once over the top, we descended into the volcano to look at some lava. It was really neat. Apparently people bring marshmallows to roast over the lava; we hadn’t brought any. The ground was hot; some people had worn regular sneakers for the hike, and their soles had partially melted. Also, the descent emphasized that we were far away from American tourist spots and waiver forms and lawyers. Any slip on the many loose rocks would result in an injury far away from the nearest transport out of the volcano and even further away from decent medical care. As a side note, there were pictures in some other tour agencies in Antigua with photos of nighttime hikes. The pictures they had of people next to lava pits glowing in the dark were really nice, but in retrospect it just seems crazy to do a hike like that at night, with rain, low-visibility, steam, muddy trails, loose rocks, and now a lack of daylight?

On the way back, it started to rain. The rain vaporized into a cloud of steam, which was also really neat. We also lost all visibility, which was not so neat, and also dangerous, when you are trying to navigate your way back out of a lava pit over loose rocks. Once out, we also discovered the rain had made much of the paths very slickly muddy; the hiking sticks proved to be very useful. We all survived to make it back down to the bottom for a picture with our guide Miguel:

We got back to Antigua before dinner, but that hike exhausted me; it was a luxurious relief to end the day at a 5-star hotel for shower and early bedtime. “Early to bed and early to rise” would turn out to be an unanticipated theme of this whole trip.

Sunday was an unstructured day because of the wedding that night. We had toyed around with the idea of a day trip to a volcano, but we didn’t want to risk not making it back in time that evening. So we just explored town some more. We started out the day buying breakfast at the nearby panaderia (it would turn out to be the first of many such beginnings).

We wandered into a nearby plaza/market, then found the very impressive and beautiful ruins of Santa Clara. There are many nooks and crannies everywhere (fun for the children we saw here), and lots of old rooms and crypts. There was a wedding party taking photos here, and we also found a storeroom with lots of plastic furniture, so people must also do receptions here as well.

Here are some photos of me screwing around in a crypt. I probably picked up some dead-people parts on the back of my shirt. Here is also photographic proof that Patrika can also similarly disrespect former final resting places:

Upon exiting Santa Clara, we ran into our first procession. Yesterday, Elizabeth Bell had told us that in these processions, men carry coffins of Jesus, and women carry coffins of Mary. After the procession passed, we walked around town some more. In many towns, there are public cisterns of water where people do laundry:

After lunch, we split up; Patrika and I did some more exploring and eventually found our way to the main market.

Finally, we went back to Casa Santo Domingo for Heidi and Jason’s beautiful wedding and reception.

It rained a lot that night, but the hotel staff was prepared with these huge 6-person umbrellas to escort people from the covered-tent Mass area to the reception hall.