Guatemala, Part 2

We stayed at the Hotel Atitlan, built on a former coffee plantation adjacent to Lake Atitlan. The rooms are nice, the corridors and public areas are decorated with all manner of wonderful local art and carvings and the grounds are beautifully landscaped and maintained. We are in a caldera and surrounded by three volcanoes. This is a view of one of the volcanoes from the garden just outside our patio door. The other two were obscured by clouds/mist. The views from the grounds, the beautiful flowers, trees, shrubs, macaws and the volcanoes made this seem a magical place, one not to be forgotten very soon, if at all.

We left the serenity of the grounds of the Hotel Atitlan and its namesake lake and headed toward the colonial city of Antigua. On our way we stopped at a coffee plantation which also was home to a coffee museum and also of a museum of indigenous musical instruments.

The group in this picture come from a village about 14 miles away. They are committed to learning, preserving and playing the music of the Maya. Since music  was not written, but passed on orally, they are trying to keep alive this part of the legacy of  

what is likely the greatest civilization of antiquity in the Western hemisphere. The Maya had no metal and no stringed instruments, and so all of their instruments were either percussion or whistle/flute type instruments. It is truly incredible the sounds that they could reproduce. The small "log" in front of the kneeling musician/dancer is an instrument that when held widely with both hands and upended, produces the sound of rain falling. Several other small "mouth piece" instruments, along with a talented musician produce the sounds of birds or other animal sounds. Ocarinas, other flutes, tortoise shell "drums", regular skin drums, rattles and the marimba are brought together to produce a "music" that is old, and yet is "new" to non-Mayan listeners. It has appeal. In this lush setting that was once jungle, the live music playing and the dancer with the deer head headdress dancing widely and around the space encircled by seated foreign spectators, for a moment perhaps, one can imagine this scene performed a thousand years ago before the arrival of the Spaniards. Tikal then with an estimated population of one hundred thousand, the crowd large and boisterous, the musicians and dancers numerous and performing  full out, the strong smell  of copal incense being burned, the electricity of human energy permeating each living being, the huge stone pyramids watching in the distance, I was there, I could feel it, if only for a minute or two.

The coffee museum was new and very well done. Virginia gave an excellent lecture all about the coffee and filled our heads with more facts than we could ever remember. I´ll share one though, a typical coffee tree yields about 6 1/2 lbs of coffee beans per crop, of which only one pound makes it to market. When coffee trees are first planted it takes between 3 to 5 years before they yield their first crop, as shown in the wonderful movie "Out of Africa", but the process of taking the bean and getting it to the roaster is a lengthy and laborious one. Just take my word for it. I will say this though, Guatemalan coffee is so good. I only had room to bring back one pound of it. We will brew it infrequently and savor it absolutely.

We leave the plantation and head for Antigua.