Chocolate, coffee and Dengue Fever
Our family vacation to Guatemala and Belize was coming to an end. We arrived in the southern Belize town of Punta Gorda around 9:00 pm. Punta Gorda is where the road ends. This sleepy fishing village is not on the typical tourist itinerary. It’s the kind of town people go to when they don’t want to be found. There were men wearing long khaki pants with button down short sleeved shirts, thick black rimmed glasses and hard plastic briefcases, definitely not locals and definitely not tourists. There was a mysterious air here but for us, it is where we hitched a ride on a boat that would take us to the Garifuna town of Livingston.
We found a hotel that had one room with eight beds. In fact, we were lucky, as it was the only hotel that we could find. Hungry from our 10-hour journey from Ambergis Caye, the hotel served rice, beans, chicken and plantains. The next morning we woke up early and headed to a small office where we gave a women money for the boat. She gave us our tickets and told us to be at the dock by 8:30. We passed through a small customs area and were soon heading south to Livingston on a calm Caribbean Sea. The boat held our group of eight, two other passengers and two crew members. We were handed a life jacket which we placed at our feet and each row given a large plastic black tarp. Within minutes the rain came crashing down with the wind whistling between our heads. We covered as best we could with the tarps. As the boat pitched back and forth I wondered if it was time to put on the vests. I heard nervous laughter coming from the tarp behind us, the kind of laughter one spews out in a life and death situation mixed with a little disbelief.
As we arrived safe and sound in the village of Livingston, my wife gave me the look. I gave a look back that simply said, without saying it, ” it’s all good”. In Livingston, the beat of the drums echo through the town. The Garifuna people came from West Africa. Their history is unique, beautiful and convoluted and involved the slave trade and French and British colonizers. The Rio Dulce empties into the Caribbean here and small villages line the banks and tributaries of the “sweet river”. In this neck of the jungle one eats fish. The locals wrap it in the leaves of the plantain and steam it over coals. It was exquisite. Once we explored this jungle paradise our goal was to head to the ancient city of Antigua.
Antigua is situated in a stunning valley in Guatemala’s central highlands and is well-known for it well-preserved Spanish Baroque influenced architecture. The town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the word itself translates to “ancient”. Three large volcanoes surround Antigua and as the afternoon rains began to close in on us, we watched in awe as one of the peaks was continuously hit by lightning. As we began to turn stones in this beautiful city, we found two common themes: coffee and chocolate. Here in the highlands, both are taken seriously, and our daily explorations included several stops at local shops for our daily buzz.
From Antigua the family headed to the last stop of our two week journey, Lake Atitlan. Magical locations can be found throughout Guatemala, but Atitlan is hard to beat. Here the stars have aligned themselves offering visitors an intense sense of calm. It wasn’t always that way. Eleven million years ago this area was raging as violent volcanic activity subsumed the area, eventually creating the gentle Atitlan about 85,000 years ago. Explorer Alexander von Humboldt was one of the first Europeans to visit Atitlan exclaiming it as “the world’s most beautiful lake.” Our daily explorations here included jumping on boats which traverse the Lake allowing us to jump off and visit small villages whose current inhabitants are descendants of the ancient Maya. Mayan sites are found along the shores edge and four volcanoes rise high above them. Atitlan is the Nahuatl word meaning “at the water” and this is where many of the indigenous spend their time fishing for their daily sustenance.
We flew back to the US well-exhausted. Their is no rest on a McKale adventure. We turn every stone until we are about to drop. In many, if not most, of our past adventures in distant lands, we have had a few mishaps. These include broken bones, monkey and piraña bites, deep lacerations, blood and infection. We arrived back to the shores of the San Francisco Bay and it seemed that we had escaped any such turmoil. I made this silent observation but should have knocked on wood. It seems that my oldest son was bitten by the wrong mosquito and a few days after our return came down with a high fever. Other complications landed him in the hospital and a team of doctors tried to pinpoint the root of this evil. The culprit was a tiny little virus known as Dengue and the ailment Dengue Fever.
As the children get older I wonder how many more of these excursions we will take as a whole family unit. College years are up and coming and my young adventurers will be off turning stones on their own. I wish I could help them avoid some of the pitfalls life has to offer, then again, I think it is how we deal with monkey and piraña bites, broken bones, Dengue Fever and the occasional wrong turn, that somehow makes us better human beings. Happy travels.
