Sometimes the most amazing coincidences, luck, fate, or will of some higher being happen. For all indymedia people everywhere, a rule of thumb - when travelling, or at least travelling to a place with an Indymedia Center, always have a patch, sticker, t-shirt or something on you that has the name of your local collective, or at least advertises the fact that you do Indymedia work.

My experience yesterday is a perfect case in point. It was truly incredible. In the morning I went to find the office of Chiapas Indymedia (its address was given me by my friend Marcos from New Mexico Indymedia). It was difficult locating it because I dont seem to understand the way the street numbering system works here. But by asking people on the way I figured it out. The office is in a larger building, which I thought at first was a private residence. There were some sleepy looking people washing up and they told me, after I managed to convey what I was looking for, that no one was in the office yet. (I kept asking, at first, for Chiapas Centro de Medios Independentes and they didnt understand till I said Chiapas Indymedia. heh.) I saw the door plastered with indymedia stickers from various other places and a sign with their hours. They were due to be open a little later so I said I would come back.

So, I went walking around, intending to kill a little time (it was about 11am), have lunch somewhere, then go back and see if anyone was there. Bookstores are always a great place to kill time for me, so when I ran across one I stopped in. Another customer stared at me for a second, maybe he was noticing my coca-cola parodying 'anti-capitalista' t-shirt. I smiled and then turned around to look at books, and when i turned back, the guy and a woman were standing there looking at me and she said, 'perdon, vienes ahorita de Guatemala?' (did you just come from Guatemala?) Astounded I said yes, and she introduced herself as Luz. She was the person from Chiapas Indymedia who I'd been corresponding with for the last few weeks! She had seen my Portland Indymedia patch on my backpack when I turned around, and that's how she guessed it was me. She introduced the guy as Timo, also from the IMC there. Amazing. Luz asked if I'd found a place to stay and I said the hotel I was at was not good and I was looking for somewhere else. So she told me that the place where their office was might have space for me. Then she said she was going to Guadalajara for a few days but would see me later, perhaps. Timo said he'd be at the office later that day, and they left.

After lunch I went back to the place and it turns out that the building is a sort of hostel for volunteers and activists working in San Cristobal. Its called Junax and I would recommend it to any IMCistas or others active in social movements who come here. Its at 17 Ejercito Nacional, near the interesction of Calle Cristobal Colon. The woman that runs it, Carmen, is very nice and the place is super comfortable, clean, and beautiful. There are a couple of dorm rooms and many smaller rooms that are all occupied but I happen to have one of the dorms all to myself. There's hot water and access to the kitchen and a nice sitting room, and best of all the indymedia office is right there.

It reminded me a bit of Postal Station 40 in San Francisco, where 3 indybay people live, a block from the offices of Indybay, Whispered Media, and Enemy Combatant Radio. Its much more legit and less dusty than Postal Station 40, but it has a similar feel, a communal atmosphere with many people around working on important socially helpful stuff.

Later in the evening I met Timo and Adolfo at the office and we talked a bunch and I got online from there.

So, I am just super pleased with my luck, especially after being in a really ratty, moldy, musty hotel the first night. I guess I will knock on wood now and hope I will have a similarly nice and fortunate day today. I think I will wander the city a bit more, do some laundry, maybe get a haircut, maybe try to hook up with a guy from the Chiapas Media Project, and maybe climb up to the church of Guadalupe, up high on a hill to the west side of town. Yesterday I went up to the San Cristobal church, also up high but to the east. It was nice but cloudy. Today it's sunnier so it should be a better view.

Following the example of Jacob, another IMCista blogger from San Diego who is in this part of the world too (and is in fact almost doing the inverse of my itinerary - he was in Chiapas and then went to Guatemala. maybe we'll meet when he comes back to mexico), I am going to blog a bit about what Ive been reading.

Local papers are always a great way to get to know a place and here a great way to practice spanish, so I've been reading Prensa Libre a lot. Its the national, sort of slightly left mostly center intelligent newspaper, as opposed to Nuestra Diario, which is the other big national paper but is almost exclusively lowbrow stories about murders and car crashes and photos of pretty girls. Easier to read, but not too interesting. Prensa Libre is actually very interesting, lots of stories you would never see in a gringo newspaper and a usually good, nuanced angle on the TLC (CAFTA) and other important issues. However according to one of my teachers at the Mountain School, their columnists are all over the political map, several are rather conservative.

Today I took the 730 am bus from Tapachula to San Cristobal. It was 8 hours but pretty comfortable except that I didnt eat anything. I guess I expected the bus to take a lunch stop or that the vendors that are ubiquitous in Guatemala that get on the bus and sell food and drink would provide me with something, but none appeared on this one, I guess because it was too first-class. But it was way better than anything I rode in Guate. a bathroom (which worked, unlike Bolivian buses that have them but they're always broken). Air-conditioning. hardly anyone on it. movies (not good movies, but oh well). The only other problem is that the road up into the highlands was insanely curvey and for the first time since childhood i was getting pretty queasy, i wasnt even trying to read. But that passed.

Anyway, I made it to San Cristobal at about 4pm and found a cheap hotel and bought a leftwing national Mexican paper, La Jornada. Its pretty great, though the trade off is that the deeper the political analysis the harder the Spanish is for me to decode. But the greater the motivation is too.

I've been trying to meet up with people from Chiapas Indymedia but the 2 people I have personal addresses for, Paco and Luz, have not answered lately. I think tonite or tommorrow morning I will just go over to the space they have, which I have the address for, and see if I find anyone. It would be great to get a place to crash while I'm here.

To get back to reading material - when I've not been poring over newspapers or my guidebooks, the last 2 books I read were 'First World Ha Ha Ha!' and '100 Years of Solitude.' The first is an anthology I picked up in Xela that collects short essays by dozens of different writers about the Zapatista uprising. Its a great book and I learned a lot, though its now 10 years old and i'm itching to find out more about more recent EZLN events.

The second aforementioned book is the great and famous novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombian Nobel Prize-winning author. Cien A

No, not that border. Mexico's other one, with Guatemala. I just crossed it today and am now in Chiapas.

(Before I continue I should just throw this very important link at you, more wonderful hijinks from those political pranksters the Yes Men.)

Pues si, so anyway, I left the mountain school this morning a little sad. It was such a wonderful experience and I learned an incredible amount. The best thing this week in my spanish studies, i think, is something you cant really put on a curriculum - i feel like i got considerably better at understanding when people are talking to me, which used to be what i considered my weakest point. Of course now that i am in Mexico i'm a little worried that people here will be much harder to understand since everyone says they seem to talk a lot faster and less clearer than Guatemalans.

At this moment I'm in Tapachula - i just wrote all this in my journal in spanish, but for your sake i'll translate- about 20 kilometers into Mexico from the Guatemalan border. I thought, till a few days ago, that I could get all the way to San Cristobal, but then discovered after reexamining my guidebooks that it would be too far to do in one day. So I took it easy and stopped here. It was still a 9 am to 4pm process (I did lose one hour befcause Mexico observes daylight savings time and Guate does not).

1 pickup, 1 minibus, 1 chickenbus, one tricycle-taxi that charged too much biking me across the border bridge, and one airconditioned mexican bus from the border to here (I like mexico already!), and I made it to this raindrenched but muy amable city. the streets are filled overflowing with rainwater but the rain stopped and i am at a cybercafe after having just had a delcious dinner at a place right on the Plaza Hidalgo, the central square of Zocalo as they say in Mexico. 4 mole enchiladas, a cappucino, and a mineral water for about 6 dollars. Cheap but I spent way too much on the rest of the day. It almost happens on travelling days, especially on border crossing days, cuz you dont know where stuff is, and hence whether to pay for stuff like taxis or walk, and then if its rainy of otherwise inhospitable sometimes you stop at a hotel thats more expensive that you otherwise might stay at.

esta bien. its okay.

Tommorrow, a 9-hour bus ride into the highlands and to San Cristobal, which is sort of the cultural capital of Chiapas, sort of a hip city, i hear, and where Chiapas Indymedia has an office. I hope to hook up with them this week. Then next week back to studying spanish, this time in Oventic, the Zapatista spanish school.

Hola from Coatepeque, Guatemala. I had to come here, a medium sized city about a 50-minute ride from the school, because i need more cash to pay for next week's classes, and the nearest ATM is here. Its quite a bit lower in altitude so its hot and steamy and has a different culture than the mountain highlands towns.

Everything is going absolutely great at the Mountain School, except for the small detail that my stupid cough, my mystery respiratory thing that happens to me once a year and holds on like a claw around my lungs for months, is still with me. it receded while i travelled in the hot humid atlantic coast area, but getting back to the highlands brought back the cough. it started feeling better a few days ago but then wednesday it got worse again when i went on a hike to this cool volcanic lake on top of a mountain where sacred stuff was happening for Ascension Day - the day Jesus supposedly ascended to heaven, 40 days after Easter. Mayan people gather at the lake and burn stuff and set up little altars and stuff. Very holy stuff. It was super beautiful, fog rolling in and out of the crater above the lake every few minutes. But the ride and the hike up and in were brutal, and my lungs just hated me for it.

So since then the cough is bad again. I dont feel like its really bad aor painful or serious. Its just annoying, needing to cough all the time and annoy people around me like my roomate trying to sleep, for example.

It just really really sucks something like this to mar what is a challenging situation already but ultimately one that, if I was fully fit and robust I would get more out of it.

But, I am learning a lot of spanish. Theres tons of stuff pouring into my brain i have to keep practicing and reviewing it all or it will go no where. but i think i can do that. its really really great.

I'm writing this from an internet cafe in Columba, a little town in the coffee-producing western highlands region of Guatemala. This is my second full day at the Mountain School, a project of PLQE, the school in Xela where I was before. They started this second school out in the country at what used to be a finca, a coffee plantation. The income from the school helps the 2 little villages that are right next to the school, called Fatima and Nuevo San Jose. Its an incredibly poor community, only about 40 or so families total. Many of them make less than minimum wage for Guatemala, and almost all the men work on coffee plantations nearby.

The school is great. Classes are like at the school in Xela, one on one, either 4 hours in the morning or 4 in the afternoon. The classes are in these cute little huts with thatched palm frond roofs out in the 'yard'. The school also has a little building it uses for special events and meetings for the community, and it raises chickens to sell the eggs.

We students at the school sleep at the school, 2 per room, but we have meals with different families in these villages. Its an incredible experience, getting to know these people who live in a totally different way than most of us have ever seen up close. The family I eat with lives in a cinderblock house with a corrugated steel roof. It has a little front room, a kitchen in back, and about 3 bedrooms off to the side. There's a grandmother named Pabla who does most of the cooking, her daughter, Wilma and Wilma's husband, Eddie, and Pabla's son Carlos. Then there's a little boy, francisco, and a little girl, Yasmi, who are Wilma's, and then 2 little cousins, a boy and girl, but I'm not sure whose kids they are or if they sleep there or just hang out and eat.

The men, like i said, work at the plantations, and are gone all day, from 5 am to about 5:30 pm. Meanwhile the women cook, clean, make tortillas (Pabla and Wilma said they make about 100 a day between them), and haul wood. This wood hauling is the most amazing thing. You see women all day walking down the road with these HUGE bundles of sticks, probably waying about 80 pounds, on their backs. ropes from the bundle go around and to a little piece of cloth that goes on the woman's forehead, and that's how they haul the wood. The need so much wood because that's what they use to cook with. All the cooking is done over a wood fire with a big metal plate over it that they put pots or pans on.

The kids who are 7 or older go to a little school right in the village, and i think older high school age kids go somewhere else, like maybe here to Columba, about 10 km away. younger kids run around in the dirt streets and are very friendly and entertaining. Everyone is really friendly, actually. apparently the language school has really done good things for and has established a great rapport with the villages.

The natural surroundings are incredible. Its like the classic archetypal tropical mountain jungle thing. The climate is mild, not too cold, not too hot, and it rains every afternoon on and off, sometimes pretty hard, but mostly just a light warm drizzle. Its great to be away from the cities, the pollution and noise and stuff. Its pretty relaxing and I feel like the environment is helping me learn more and faster, or maybe its because i'm not as sick as before.

So, that's the basic lowdown on the mountain school.

Well, I finally had the time and luck to upload a bunch of photos, mostly from this last week travelling about eastern guatemala.

They are all pretty well described on my Flickr pages so just take a look there. I wont really say much more about them, other than to say they are all out of order, because I couldnt figure out how to define the order to upload them. Plus the software I used seems to have not preserved the data for each photo, like the date and stuff. Oh well.

Today I am heading out to la Escuela de la Monta

Buenos Dias from La Capitol, Guatemala City. Yesterday was another long gruelling day of travel. I got up at 5, caught the 6am bus out of El Estor with 2 others travellers I had met there. We got to Rio Dulce and had breakfast, and then they were headed down the river to Livingston, where I had already been, so we said goodbye. It was fun doing the tour of the nature reserve, hanging out in El Estor, and at least a short leg of travelling with some others.

My new friends jumped on a little boat leaving for the river right from the little gringo-owned lakeside restaurant where we ate. I sat there a little longer and finished tea, and then went to the bus station and got a ticket for the next bus to Guatemala City. The bus ended up being an hour late, or perhaps it just never came and I actually got on the next hourly one. At any rate, it was a great example of people who sell services here telling you what you want to hear, especially when there is competition. there was another bus company just across the street, so I think they tried hard to make their service look comparitively attractive. leaves early, cheaper, takes less time. It turned out to leave only a half hour earlier and it took 6 hours as opposed to the 5 that I was told, but if they had told me the truth (assuming they knew the truth), I might have gone with the other company.

Anyway, the trip was pretty miserable. At least the bus was a greyhound style bus and not a school bus, but we drove through the hottest driest parts of Guatemala, and the bus was really underpowered when we got to the mountains leading up to the capitol.

Finally we got to the city, shortly before dusk, and I found the hotel I had planned ahead of time to stay at, just 2 blocks away from where the bus stopped (each bus company has their own terminal in Guate, its strange, but thats privatisation for you...) The neighborhood is really grotty, Zona One, which is the historic town center, but now the most crime-ridden and dangerous place in town, I think, except for maybe parts of Zona Four. I checked in, then quickly hoofed over to get dinner a few blocks away before it got too dark. I ate at Camparo, which is like Guatemala's answer to Kentucky Fried Chicken, because I didnt want to take chances in this neighborhood with searching for a better restaurant and I wanted to get done fast and get back to the hotel, and I knew Camparo, its a chain so like all chains you always know what you'll get.

It was friday night and I was kind of bummed that i felt not safe enough to go out and try to see a little Guate City nightlife. I could have taken a cab to a bar or club, but i didnt want to spend the money. So I just glumly trudged back to the hotel. However once there I realized the hotel room had cable TV, and I ended up watching a bunch of gringo movies, with spanish subtitles so i could justify it as practicing spanish. I saw the end of a jackie chan film about stolen nuclear bombs, and then most of the Ali G movie, which was hilarious in sort of British Beavis and Butthead sort of way, and then most of a Chris Rock and Anthony Hopkins movie, also about a stolen nuclear weapon.

Seems to be a current zeitgeist or fear within the collective imaginary, the idea that there are all these old soviet warheads floating around the former soviet bloc, maybe getting sold by mafia to terrorists. Probably a lot of truth to it, and indeed something we should be worrying about, a lot. In a way the situation is more unstable than before the USSR fell. But no one ever talks about it in public. Everyone thinks ah, cold war over, we are safe. yay. no nuclear holocaust. think again, people.

Here in the Capital its a constant fume filled noisy polluted mess. My cough has gotten worse, logically, again since getting here from the relatively more fresh air of the coast and the Lago Izabal area.

Anyway, this afternoon after my laundry is done I am hopping a four hour bus back to Xela, staying a night there in town, and then tommorrow getting a bus in the afternoon out ot the Escuela de la Montana, the mountain school, which is another location that my school has, on a former coffee plantation out in the country. So ill be away from the internet for all next week. I'll probably check it one last time tommorrow morning. Then maybe i will come into town the next weekend just to get on the internet, and maybe get a change of pace, and then ill be at the mountain school again for another week.
After that i head out of Guatemala and north into Chiapas, Mexico.

I have lots of good photos I'd love to show you but i am out of time again today. hopefully tommorrow morning. Ive been given a free pro account on Flickr too, so maybe i'll upload a whole bunch. yay.

Hi there, I am writing this from a little internet cafe in El Estor, a block from Guatemala's biggest lake. I have decided that this place feels hotter than anywhere else I can ever remember being. I say feels because I dont know exactly if it technically the highest temperature, etc. I think its somewhere around 38 degrees Celsius. The nearest city that shows up on weather maps is Puerto Barrios, where its supposedly only 33. (91 F). Who knows? the important thing is that its also insanely humid, and unless you're right down by the water, there is almost zero breeze. At least in Livingston, where I was before this, it was just as hot but seemed cooler because there was a nice breeze from the ocean most of the time.

So I found this internet place and walked in and its actually the only place in town that is airconditioned, which at first seems heavenly but the AC doesnt really help much. it might have dropped the temperature by 1 degree, and only when you are standing right in front of the machine.

Constantly dripping with sweat, and even thinking too hard make me seem hotter. Not to mention trying to pick bones out of a fish for dinner. Thats hard enough work to leave you drenched with perspiration.

But, I like it. Its all worth it. I think I last blogged from Copan. Here is what happened since then, briefly. on Monday morning I grabbed breakfast and then caught a bus for the border. I crossed back into Guatemala and got another bus to Jocotan, about 30 kilometers and a half hour away, and then another bus from there to Chiquimula, about 45 km and an hour away. Then I got hustled onto another bus to my next destination, Puerto Barrios, 4.5 hours away.

I noticed that the best thing for short local bus trips is to get on a little minibus, because they fill up fast and then they go faster because they dont stop, because no one else will fit in. Unless someone gets off. If I ever have time to do a not quite so political documentary I would like to come back to Guatemala and do a film about the guys who work on the buses. Not the drivers, their job is pretty straightforward. They just drive. But there is always another guy who basically does everything else. Takes money, advertises the bus and its destination to people on the street (usually by shouting the destination and then 'Hay Lugares!', which literally means 'There are places!' (on the bus, still, for you to sit). Often a 'place' is definied quite loosely here. It might be an actual seat, or it might be a tiny patch of floor on which you are welcome to stand, wedged between 2 other people and a giant sack of potatoes, for instance, for 3 hours.

To make a long story short, the trip on monday was hot and long but I was lucky to get a seat on all the vehicles and none of those vehicles were school buses, meaning they were actually designed with adult-sized bodies in mind.

I got to Puerto Barrios at about 3pm. Puerto Barrios, on the Carribean coast, is Guatemala's main sea port. It used to be basically the monopoly property of United Fruit Company, and the only way to get there was by the railline that United Fruit also owned. Now there's a highway. Theres nothing in Puerto Barrios really but dust and sweat and noise, so I immediately found my way to the boat dock where the ferry and other boats go to Livingston. The usual entreprenuerial spirit is alive and well there, with guys trying to sell you passage on the smaller faster and more frequent launches. i saw that they were the same sort of plastic bathtubs that i experienced at Lago de Atitlan, and I also wanted to save money, so I waited for the ferry. No tengo prisa, I said, I'm not in a hurry. I also noticed a gaggle of 18 or so blonde white gringos get on the launch and I was like, nope, definitely not. I relaxed at a little diner near the pier and had lunch, since I had not eaten since breakfast 8 hours ago.

The I got on the ferry, with the locals, and it was so much better. Over and over I make these kinds of decisions and am so happy with them. At first I argue with myself, thinking, oh wait, maybe you should go where all those other tourists are going... but no. There are so many reasons not to. Usually I get more chance to practice my spanish, to relax, to pay less money, and its usually less stressful. Like in this case - Those little boats are scary!

Anyway, then at 630 pm i found myself in Livingston, a little town you can only get to by boat, where a river meets the Carribean. Shipwrecked African slaves formed their own society with Carribeans natives on the island of St Vincent in teh 18th century, and when the British finally kicked them off they ended up in Livingston and a few other places on the Honduran and Nicaraguan coast. The culture is very different there.

Tuesday I went on a tour around the town and area, went swimming and walking on the beach. Wednesday I left Livingston and took another boat down the Rio Dulce to the town of Rio Dulce. Its classic tropical jungle kind of surroundings. I'll write more, i hope, about my thoughts about archetypal images during this jaunt. Anyway, in Rio Dulce, which is where the river flows out of a huge lake, the aforementioned Lago de Izabal, I then caught another bus to this little town, El Estor. It gets its name from a store that these gringos had here for years. People said 'vamos para El eStore', cuz thats how you pronounce an english word like Store. (similarly they pronounce my name 'Esteev'). So gradually the town that grew up around the store just got called El Estor.

Anyway, I was here to see this huge nature reserve, a river delta that drains into the Lake. Shortly after I got to town, which is really a very small town with hardly any tourists (yay!) i ran into a woman from Holland who had just arranged with a guide to go to the delta. Its cheaper with more people and so i was happy to have met her. it was really great luck. and it was fun hanging out with her. We found 3 other travellers, all from Italy and Switzerland, who also wanted to go, so at 6am we met Benjamin Castillo, local boatman and nature expert, and he took us into the reserve. It was really really great and beautiful.

Ive been sitting here too long already so I will end there for now. Hopefully soon I will upload some of my amazing photos of the tour this morning. Great birds, howler monkeys, turtles, mangroves, manatees... it was super. okay, chao for now....

I just found out that a film called "Bordertown" is supposedly starting production this July and stars Jennifer Lopez (and maybe Antonio Banderas?) as an american reporter from Juarez who goes back to investigate the murders there.

I of course have my misgivings about a Hollywood film treating this issue with any accuracy or respect. But at the same time, wow, imagine how much attention it could bring to the actual situation. It is vital though that they stress that it is based on REALITY. And of course they need to respect the wishes of the families of the victims and not exploit them.

Wow, I can hardly believe it. I need to finish my doc soon!!

In other news I will blog in a little bit about whats up with me. i

next time i form a progressive rock band, that is what i'll name it: yup, 18 rabbit's hieroglyphic staircase. Doesnt that sounds great?

18 rabbit was a Mayan king who ruled Copan in the 8th century AD, or DC as the say here ("Despues Christo" i guess). And the hieroglyphic staircase is an amazing set of steps going up a pyramid in Copan that is covered with thousands of hieroglyphs that tell the story of his dynasty.

I happen to be in Copan right now, just over the border into Honduras. or rather, the little town next to the ruins of Copan. Ironically this little town is called Copan Ruinas. the town is really pretty pleasant. ancient Copan was on of the biggest mayan cities, and has some of the best sculpture and most well-preserved stuff with lots of hieroglyphic texts that have been deciphered to learn about the citys history.

i got here early this morning, found a hotel and then promptly headed to the ruins. they are amazing. i would post a photo but i just dont have the energy to try to hook up my camera. hay mucho calor aqui! and muggy! very tropical. nice. the ruins, anyway, are really stupendous, and fascinating, and theres too many to see in one day. unfortunately the museum where a lot of the sculptures have been moved, to keep them preserved, is closed for repairs till november. but there are replicas out in their original places. The experience has me wanting to read more about the mayans. and the olmecs too.

slight political note: lots of honduran soldiers are about here, with M-16s. many guarding the ruins. others you just see around town.

tommorrow, day 3 of my 9 days off from spanish school: back to guatemala and north east to Livingston, on the carribean coast.