Central America

So aside from butchering the Spanish language for the week, what else did we get up to?

Each afternoon we found activities to keep busy as well as fitting in our homework. We visited a couple of the other villages nearby, the first of which was San Juan la Laguna which was about a half hour walk away. There we saw the processes of cotton picking, turning it into thread and then it being dyed various colours with natural products such as plants and spices. The other village we visited was Santiago, which required a boat trip across the lake. They had many market stalls there selling the usual arts and crafts, but to be honest it probably wasn't worth our time!

The other afternoons we tried to get more involved in what our families did. Conchita loves cooking and promised to teach us how to make tortillas that they have everyday, so one evening she put us to work. Tortillas are literally just made by soaking corn and water with quicklime, then taking it to a miller the following day to be ground into an almost pastry like consistency. A small ball of this mixture is then flattened out and molded into a small circle just using your hands, transferring the tortilla back and forth quickly until the desired thickness is met. Easier said than done! Conchita would churn out about 5-10 for each of ours, as we battled with ripping the tortillas during the transfer or having the mixture sticking to our hands. The tortillas are then cooked on what they call a plancha stove, which is the most common form of cooking in Guatemala these days. These plancha stoves are a vast improvement on the open fires they used to cook on where breathing the toxic fumes was detrimental to their health. They have a stovetop which is made of steel and covered in chalk with a log fire underneath that's situated in a firebox of sorts and uses a chimney pipe that takes the poisonous smoke out of the house. Some households like Conchita's also have a regular gas stove and oven like we would but she prefers to use the plancha stove for most cooking as it is more efficient. They can fuel this fire with wood that sets them back about 2000 quetzales a year ($384NZD/£220), but at the expense of the Guatemalan forest which is supposedly diminishing by 2% in the same time frame.

The fire in the kitchen is generally lit either in the morning or at lunchtime and then kept on for the rest of the day, so you can imagine the risks this can pose.
One night we learnt that the family had a fire in that engulfed their second floor kitchen about two years back. Conchita was at the market when she found out, but it was already too late. The wood and plastic lined kitchen was extensively damaged as were other parts of their house. Thankfully they had some luck on their side that day, the power happened to be out, their fridge happened to be downstairs at that point and by some miracle their gas cooker didn't explode. While the fire was unfortunate and of course they didn't have insurance, they definitely had someone watching over them that day. Now they have rebuilt the kitchen with concrete walls and you'd never know anything had happened.

Another afternoon I spent learning how to make pachas with Conchita. Pachas are essentially mashed potato mixed with a sort of tomato salsa, packed into a little parcel with usually chicken and some other vegetables (this's time capsicum, chilli and prunes) within a leaf that resembles a banana leaf but is a different plant that I couldn't make out! It was an interesting little process, plus I went to the market with Conchita to buy all the ingredients fresh like she does each day, including the chicken straight from the chicken shed...next to the live chickens...which was probably the closest I've got to becoming vegetarian. At least you know where it comes from I guess... they pride themselves very much here in using fresh and organic ingredients, none of the meat or fruit and vegetables being treated with chemicals.

Like many of the Latin American and South American countries, Guatemalans are crazy about football. Chema and his son Felix were no exception and took great interest in talking about recent games with Mike and really enjoyed when he showed them photos of the Man United game he went to last year and of the Bernabéu stadium that we visited in Madrid a few years back. So when Chema told us he had a game on one afternoon, we said we'd love to go and support! We were surprised to learn that San Pedro actually had an immaculate small stadium with a full size Astro turf pitch, only a couple of years old. The teams also had proper kit and shoes, which when you look at everything else around here, seems almost out of place. I guess it just shows how much they love football! Chema even scored a hilarious goal that had us all cheering from the stands.

That same afternoon, we headed to see coffee plantations and corn farms with the language school owner and Cat and Rich's host, Javier. He took us up the side of the hills/mountains above San Pedro, first nearer the top where there was corn growing. It's crazy how much the temperature can drop just a 10minute drive uphill, but I guess this is why the corn strives up here. Each family seems to have their own lot and harvests once a year, sometimes with enough corn to last them the entirety of said year - which is saying something considering the amount of tortillas they churn through.

As we walked back down the hill, the climate quickly changed and before we knew it we were heading past numerous coffee plantations. We were all surprised to learn that coffee beans actually originate from a red berry that is only a bit larger than a decent blueberry or a small grape. Javier lead us through the trees to his plantation, but how they really know who's is who's I don't really know - they all seem to merge into one another. Farmers pick massive sacks of these berries, then take them back to the roadside for weighing with old school weights, before selling them off for little more than a couple of dollars to buyers who then take them through the next processes of drying and roasting.

Once Saturday hit and our classes were over, Mike headed to work with Chema for the morning to find out more about working in a coffee plantation. He returned a few hours later, grubby and exhausted from what turned out to be a rather labour intensive job. While picking the berries themselves wasn't too strenuous, carrying them out of the plantation is a different story. Piled into sacks and then carried on their backs with a band around their head to help support it the weight, then carried a few km downhill through rugged terrain to be weighed and sold - it was no easy feat. And all that hard work for 5 hours between only amounted to 180quetzals (£19/$34NZD) in payment for the coffee. When you average that out, it's working out to be less than $9 for each day's work. Minus the cost of getting there, you can imagine this can't go far when you have a family at home to feed and kids to send to school.

On our last evening we headed to Conchita's grandmothers house where they were preparing for a fiesta the following day for a couple of hundred people to celebrate her mother's birthday. All the women (sisters, aunties etc) were preparing tamales, which are similar to the pachas I made a few days prior, but made with corn as opposed to potato and not nearly as tasty! The family spirit and community in these countries is so lovely to see. Their families are huge too - Chema told us he has 29 aunties and uncles and roughly 200 cousins. You can imagine his surprise when I told him that in contrast, I only have 6 cousins and that we don't all live in the same country, let alone the same continent or hemisphere! As much as it's sometimes handy to have family spread out all over the world, times like these make me wish my family was closer together so we could do things like this more often too.

I think it's fair to say that this week was one of the best weeks we've had in all our travels. I can't recommend the experience enough. I like to think it's a two-way street for us and this family, because with them opening their home to us it allows us to practice our Spanish and gain insight into the local way of life, in return they can gain hopefully a bit of extra income, plus insight into our way of life at home too, plus that of other travellers they have to stay. This is particularly important given they don't have the money or means to travel, even to somewhere like the US - somewhere that for some reason they long to visit or work in. They can travel there for up to 90 days but cannot get visas to work there unless someone who already lives there, invites them. They have friends who have tried to cross illegally by land, one of whom has never been seen or heard from again, even 10 years later...

All of this makes us feel almost guilty sometimes on how easy we have it and how fortunate we are to be able to travel when there are so many people out there just living day to day. I'm just thankful that we can learn so much about others and meet such wonderful people in doing so. One day I would love to volunteer somewhere like Guatemala, in the hope of giving back and helping in some way.

Unfortunately this is the last chapter of our Guatemala adventure - a country we have now all got a soft spot for. Next up is El Salvador via a quick one night stop in Antigua. Back to the beach life to try our hand at surfing!Read more