We experienced firsthand, driving to Lake Atitlán, what I had seen flying into Guatemala City the day before. An entire country riven by watersheds with the high places of the arable areas, some quite steep on the sides of mountains, developed into agriculture. The private transport carried some 9-10 people, couples red from the equatorial sun, warm wind through the open windows while pop Spanish radio, with occasional random international hits, pulsed gently above it all.
The little towns were like the faces of the farms, with bodies stretching away in the distance behind. Some were impossibly perched on steep inclines uphill on one side, or downhill on the other, of the highway. The bus bobbed and weaved through a chaos of walkers carrying giant loads with their heads, around the foot of ladders in the highway where painters worked, or motorbikes pulled to the side with the driver enjoying lunch from the saddle and parked in the road.
The driver either gunned the gas or slammed the brake, adjusting to the constant churn of the towns and the roads that ran up and down the gullies but kept climbing higher into the mountains, spiraling down and up, the frenetic pace interrupted only by a 20-minute stop at a mountain gas station, door open, driver disappeared, with no explanation. At first, at the lower altitudes, we sweated as the warm wind buffeted us through the open windows. Later, we slid them closed as we passed through the cool, damp wind of a cloud that eventually turned into a steady downpour.
As we got nearer to the lake, the roads narrowed, and the building fronts were arm’s distance from the edge of the van. Unexpected exchanges of passengers to other vans happened in the middle of the road, the drivers quickly shuttling bags from the top of one van to the other. At one point, the driver pulled over without explanation as a man approached, slid open the side door, and told a young woman she hadn’t paid. We waited as she understood what was being asked of her and then fished for money in her bags.
The force of a volcanic explosion created this version of Lake Atitlán, the third such lake created in this area in the span of geological time. Such violent force did not create gentle slopes, and so when we reached the edge, the downhill seemed impossibly steep when we started the nearly 2000-foot descent in the rain, the driver skillfully and quickly navigating the switchbacks, obviously having done this before, as dirt bikes and mopeds swarmed past us and negotiated oncoming traffic around blind corners.
Towards the bottom, the roads thickened with people walking in both directions on both sides of the cobblestone streets, many of them women in traditional Mayan dress, as we passed through the outer reaches of San Juan and then San Pedro. Still, up and down nearly vertical hills we climbed and descended, the edges of the streets a solid wall of houses, businesses, punctuated occasionally by an alley the width of a walking path meandering into the distance, or a narrow street about the width of a small car.
Eventually, it stopped raining. The sun came out, and we came to a stop along a lakefront street. The stopped van became a stone in the river of traffic, which bunched and flowed past us in both directions. We stepped out into the humid air, the hot sun on our heads, as we caught the bags quickly handed down from the driver, who immediately drove away. We were left standing in front of the full, open front of the travel agency, perched about 6 feet high on the uphill side of the road.
A number of tuk-tuk drivers announced themselves, and I gave details about where I was going, clarifying my destination through some discussion. We loaded my bags and guitar into the back seat. I crammed in, and we wove through the busy, narrow streets, the tuk-tuk motor straining against the steep grade and weight packed inside the small cabin. We rose away from the busy tourist street into the neighborhoods above. Other tuk-tuks, mopeds, motorcycles, pedestrians, roadside sellers, and stray dogs relaxedly navigated one another within inches at barely diminished velocity.
After a few minutes, the driver pulled over at a nondescript dogleg on a downhill. There was no obvious housing there, and the driver kindly connected me to his personal Wi-Fi. Together, we watched a video that identified my path. The passage was a hallway, about a person wide, that rose from the narrow street starting between a concrete wall and a corrugated metal fence. I wrestled my heavy items up the short concrete walking path that turned immediately into dirt. A small plot of corn grew from terraced land on a rise on the left side. After turning another two corners, I entered the cool passage between walls two stories high and made of a hodgepodge of metal and concrete, each with doors in thresholds inset with beautiful tiles a step up on either side.
Coming around another corner, I followed the path between a wall on my right, inset with windows covered in the stylized metal of security coverings. On my left, I looked through a chain-link fence to the roofs of town descending to the enormous lake, and the layers of mountains rising up beyond. The afternoon breeze was warm and fragrant with woodsmoke, the sounds of tuktuks, barking dogs, crying babies, and conversations softened by distance.
At the termination of this path nestled a carefully placed sculpture that turned a forgotten concrete edge into a grotto. From inside the rough construction recess, a wise, bearded face smiled from the trunk of a green tree while a blue dinosaur flew among its branches. Above, in sequence painted on a glass panel flanked by a painted sun and moon, rose a lighted candle in a skull, a blue and purple bat, and a nude woman dancing with her arms raised in celebration. To the right was the green metal door to what would become my new home for a time, the Santuario.
