Guatemala

In Guatemala, unlike the rest of Central America, rainy season does not just mean that there will be an intense burst of rain in the afternoon. It means that this is the time of year that it rains, and rains and rains and rains. For this reason, in Guatemala we drove by several sites that we should have seen but couldn't.

For a few days we broke out of the mode of motorcycle travel while we stayed in the apartment of a friend of Enric's in Guatemala City. We were so excited by Ignacio's colorful stylish apartment that we felt immediately domesticated and right at home. All of a sudden we were in a car, instead of the motorcycle, being driven places like the colonial form capital of Antigua and Lake Panachal. Enric's Spanish favorites like jamon Serrano and olives complimented Ignacio's homecooked meals, and it was great to finally be guided by someone who knew about which local specialties were worth tasting.

Normally, such a comfortable lodging situation would lend itself to a long lazy night of sleep, but the next morning we were up at 6am! The early rising sun has really affected our body clocks, but the motivation was really to check out what was going on in Jorgen's bakery. Jorgen, a German transplant who has been living in Guatemala for nearly 40 years, owns a chain of shops specializing in fresh breads, sausages and cured meats. 6 am is precisely the hour that the bakers are baking the bread in Jorgen's bakery, so we arrived in time to help them take it out of the oven. We took a peek into how German technique and technology has made its way to Guatemala, from the adaptation of traditional German bread recipes to Guatemalan ingredients to the fascinating process of sausage and cured meat production. Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle, took any appetite away from eating sausage, but the tour of Jorgen's sophisticated factory again peaked an interest in these spicy meats!

We are finding out that much of the world's coffee is grown in Central America (Colombia, Panama, Guatemala, Mexico), but we are having a difficult time figuring out which bean goes where. What bean is good for Espresso? Which bean makes a French roast? Why does an Italian Roast bean look oily and a Sumatra bean look dry? "There is high altitude coffee and low altitude coffee," we were told by a local coffee plantation owner. High altitude coffee is dense (like a hard wood) and low altitude coffee is more porous. He insisted that his high altitude coffee is the best quality coffee that exists. However, its flavor is so intense that it always has to be combined with a lower grade bean - even in the production of espresso. But when we asked him the questions above, he had no idea of the answers. Central America, despite being a great producer of coffee beans, does not consume coffee with voracity or interest. The coffee we have tried tastes little better than Foldger's interest, and what we did learn is that Foldger's and the large majority of American coffees purchase the lower grade coffee beans produced in Latin America, and the higher grade beans go to Europe. I am sure Starbuck's would argue me on this point.

On the long road between the city of Guatemala and the Belizean border we visited the spectacular Mayan ruins of Tikal. It took us half a day to walk through the remains of a large city in the process of being uncovered and restored pyramid by pyramid. Some ruins are completely unearthed: long promenades with buildings on all sides and pyramids at the head and foot, palaces, monuments. Some of the pyramids are still being unearthed; one side looks like a tree-covered hill, and the other a complete manmade construction. After seeing so many half uncovered buildings we realized that each and every hill in the park was an uncovered ruin, that beneath the roots of the trees were stones soon to be unearthed in the complicated discovery and restoration process that we learn takes a minimum of 8 years. I imagine that in 30 years this place will look like Maccu Piccu.