The Land of Volcanoes and Roses
The famous French pilot Antoine de Saint Exúpery once wrote, “I should have liked to begin this story in the fashion of fairy tales, as to those who understand life, that would have given a much greater air of truth to it.”
There is something enchanting about such happenstances, when one finds inspiration for a beloved literature piece after surviving an unexpected crash landing in the middle of a strange, alluring land. Antoine had been flying over the region of Central America in the early 1900s when his aircraft went down over the city of Antigua in Guatemala. One of the country's local writers aptly describes the pilot's time there, while in recovery, and observing his surroundings.
“He saw our volcanoes, smelled our roses and lived with our people before writing his master piece. He walked the streets of Antigua, loved a Central American girl, and spent time drawing while recovering from the plane crash. He was particularly taken by two things — first, that there were three volcanoes surrounding the city, two active and one dormant, and second, the fact that the city seemed to have roses everywhere.”
As I believe there is a line connecting the stories we read to the realities that we live, I was delighted to discover Le Petit Prince, the children’s book inspired by the author's time in Guatemala, shortly before departing on my own trip to the land of banana trees, cornfields and sheep herds laid out farther than the eyes can see.
The Aerodynamics of Airplanes
“The doors on the wings keep opening,” said the little girl who sat beside me.
“It means the plane is about to turn, and getting ready to lift off the ground. When the doors open like that, it slows down the wind passing over, spreading it out and making it lighter than the faster moving wind below it. The thicker air pushes against the plane, lifting it up, and making it fly,” her dad answered. “But you’ll learn more in science class.”
“Ohhh… I get it!” she exclaimed. “Planes are cool. I like them.”
“It's fun to learn new things.”
“I also like apples. They are healthy for you…except the seeds, you can't eat them, but you can bury them to grow new trees.”
She looked about four or five, and her use of the word fantastic made me smile. I admired the way her father took the time to answer every inquiry in great detail. They spoke as if there was little to no age difference between them.
Conversación de Coche: Uno
I could barely contain my laughter. The jovial Guatemalan driver with boisterous cheeks was displacing an overflow of positive momentum, leaving me with high hopes for the trip. He was commissioned by my friend from Story International to ensure safe passageway from the airports to the bus stations.
“No way… she didn’t tell you the pee story?”
“Unfortunately not...although I'm starting to feel like this is the story that should have been told —” I said, shaking my head.
“Ohhhh man! That was the best part! Her friend had to go so bad, she made me stop right in the middle of traffic, before jumping — straight — outta the door,” his words barely making it out of the crowd of his own chuckles.
I was horrified. “But wasn’t her leg broken?”
“Yeheeheeheas!”
Then, he wrapped his story up with this revelatory gem of a statement, “When you need to go pee and set your mind to it…nothing in the world can stop you.”
Conversación de Coche: Dos
“When I first met Alecia, she had this wild, red hair. It was fierce — like a tiger. I felt like I knew her for many years, probably because she spoke a street version of Spanish.”
Bilaz' description of the founder of the orphanage led me to believe that she hardly bothered with any sort of polite or well-mannered version of the language. Rather, she was known for dropping an impassioned “¡Eso!” at the end of every phrase, a peculiarity which allowed the two of them to build a quick rapport between one another, and eventually, over a long period of time, a deeper kind of friendship.
I think the best kinds of friendships not only take time to build, but are the ones that expand our views of the world, challenging us to dive deeper than the shallows and to soar far past our comfort zones and most of all, the kinds that inspire us to become better people in the process.
Mirror Twins
The white triangle-shaped building had a rainbow of colors cascading down its walls, as if someone lined a row of paint buckets along the roof top and gently knocked them over, one by one. The prismatic-looking coffee shop stood there, beaming, like an enormous art installation beckoning city dwellers into its vibrant lair.
My friend Nicole had moved to the remote city of Huehuetenango about three months prior to run this coffee shop — and it took an arduous 6-hour bus ride to get here. I peered in and looked around at the collections of framed paintings hanging on the walls and the colorful doodles clothes-pinned along the window railings.
Once inside, she kindly offered me a beverage — a fresh latte, perhaps?
“Oh! That would be nice…although, if I may venture to ask, is there any chance of dairy-free milk?”
“Definitely not. Whatever warm milk we’re able to get out of the cow is what we use. If she’s even making enough for the day.”
I decided to have mine black. Near the top of the spiral staircase, there was a scattering of rooms. I wandered into one that held an assortment of photographs on the walls — these were the faces of the orphanage, tiny portraits which made me think Maya Angelou's The Human Family.
There was a sensitive looking boy with blue and green face paint lining his lower lids.
And then, a goofy one who had closed his eyes while flashing a giant grin behind a fake mustache.
Another, laughing it up while lying on the grass, a Panama hat tilted slightly over his head.
A crowd of young boys gathered, forming a tribe of sorts, to blow raspberries at the camera.
Shy, willowy ones, standing in front of painted walls. Gentle, lovely girls, smiling and glancing from behind the crevices of art sculptures. Others, carefree and happy, hugging and wrestling with one another.
One boy, standing confidently with crossed arms against the background of a crisp blue sky and billowing clouds. He was living in a future of endless possibilities, and looked ready to run that kind of world.
Electric Showers
The rectangular coral-colored cabin peeked out from behind a couple trees lined with hammocks, the place Nicole had called home for most of the summer. She led me through a 19th century style kitchen and towards the shower room to show me how to use it. I turned the dial, but no water came out.
“Oh, looks like it’s out again…” my friend sighed.
The spout hanging overhead had caught on fire just a few days prior, while her friend Megan was inside. I was warned to not touch the shower head, lest I risk getting jolted with some unwanted bolts of electricity.
Besides some of its less-than-functional aspects, I actually found the cottage to be quite charming. The second story housed three beds and featured an attic-style rooftop. There was a male house-cat named Mom I was allergic to, and he loved to trail and cuddle up beside newcomers. It was like a cabin in the woods, where I could look out past the window and peer over the many stray dogs, running freely amongst the fields of withered grass surrounding us below.
When bucketfuls of water began pouring from the sky, I began to watch the droplets, as each one got bigger and louder, splattering on the glass at more frequent intervals. My attention was so entranced by the rain that I hardly noticed the storm clouds begin to close in.
Miniature Dreamers
We passed a carnival circus en route to the orphanage, coaxing foreigners and villagers by way of megaphone to populate their tents and observe a cornucopia of oddities. Dust swirled everywhere as we bounced around town in the bed of the pick-up truck, listening to Megan share about the indefinite amount of time she had committed to raising these orphans.
“What many of the short-term volunteers don’t understand is that you can’t turn your head away from these kids for more than a few minutes before one of them begins to snort paint, drink something they shouldn’t drink, or take a sock at someone’s mandible.”
Far from being shy around the camera, the rowdy group of boys greeted me with photo bombs and requested tapings of hard-earned handstands and somersaults. But before long, I found myself fascinated by one quiet, observant little girl, who was clutching tightly onto a blue laminate star. She rarely ceased in her gaze towards the sky — and often pointed at it, as if wanting to fly into outer space or soar into its farthest reaches.
I wondered how the course of her life might play out, and if anything would ever gain enough dominance to deter her from such dreams . And then I thought of my favorite kind of adults, and how they are also the kind of people that never stop looking up.
Island of the Iguanas
Alduous Huxley, the British intellectual who authored Brave New World, once described Lake Atitlán as touching the limit of the picturesque, comparative to Lake Como in Italy. So, I was excited to discover that speedboating over it would be the fastest, safest and most visually stunning way to get to the village we’d be staying at. It would have been too dangerous to drive or walk, as our friend Megan from earlier had advised. The last time they tried to go on a stroll in between villages, she and her friends were robbed by a machete-packing band of bandits.
We stepped off the boat and into the remote lakeside village of Santa Cruz, where I walked past a group of hostelers gathering around a fire pit. I soon realized there was an entire history to this place, beginning in the the mid-90’s when Sarito, a world-traveling architect, decided to build three modest shacks along the waterfront for friends to holiday here with him. Upon his desire to move back to India, he decided to sell the land to an American diver with interests in mapping out the entire topography of the lake.
Hosteling the place out helped sustain her passion for underwater exploration, and she’d often find herself cooking dinner in her wetsuit for the rest of the team and the handful of people staying there on a good night. The homes had zero electricity or hot water, save for one wood-fired stone sauna, and certainly no internet.
Fast forward ten years later, the hostel has grown to house up to fifty guests and reluctantly added things like internet, electricity and a full-service restaurant. Now named La Iguana, it looked a world of difference from its humble beginnings. There was only one thing that stayed the same, and it was what they would do to entertain themselves when they had not much else — gather around the fire pit to play games, sing songs and share stories with one another.
Secret Little Paradises
After asking one of the hostelers for suggestions on where to go, he recommended San Pedro, comparable to Pacific Beach in his native hometown of San Diego — which in effect, prompted me to conduct my own research of the villages dotting the lake. I soon discovered that although every town housed its own hidden paradises, San Marcos seemed to be the most idyllic one to visit.
This quiet bohemian enclave contained, for the most part, new age yogis, holistic practitioners, and a bounty of strange spiritual guides. As we scurried up tree branches and 10-meter ledges to hop off of, swimming waters of dark opal softly met our plunges into the lake. The rest of the day was spent basking on obsidian colored rocks and the occasional dive off the shoreline. It was the first time the two teenage girls we brought with us had ever gone on a boat, not to mention even see this much water in one place.
Back at La Iguana, we took shelter underneath the yellow, vine-covered arches surrounding the patio. Night fell like velvet curtains in surreal shades of indigo. Rainclouds began to close in, and I watched as lightning bolt after lightning bolt lit up the skies. Every strike made the volcanoes jump out, like consecutive camera flashes in the dark.
Where the Tree-houses Roam
The process of creating — and experiencing — something different or extraordinary often tends to make more sense to me than what may actually make sense. So when given the choice between embarking on a path of greater practicality, compared to one that may hold greater excitement, odds are I'll choose the latter. Which is probably why I decided to book a treehouse, nestled up high in the mountains along the outskirts of Antigua, for the remainder of our trip. As impractical as it seemed, I also felt it would be, to the same degree, all the more magical.
Upon arriving in city a little after dusk, we were sent over a pick-up truck from the hotel with only enough room for one person in the front. So Nicole volunteered to sit in the cargo bed, beneath a steel cage surrounding its perimeter. The driver sped up the long, winding roads of the mountain, swerving around steep switchbacks. Darkness enveloped us as we ventured deeper into the thicket, leaving the dimming city lights far behind.
He dropped us off in what looked like the middle of a forest, with nothing much else in sight. I soon saw a man come out of the shadows, and point us to a small clearing in the woods. Unfortunately, my friend wasn't too stoked on lugging three months worth of suitcases down a path of endless planks that seemed to lead to nowhere. So when a woman with two energetic young boys began to pass by, I urgently pleaded with my friend, “Hurry, Nicole — hire them!”
She made an offer in Spanish and the mom gestured her boys toward us, each of them grabbing a suitcase and energetically skipping down the 30 minute trail that eventually led us to a well-hidden commune of majestical looking tree-houses.
The Mysterious Land of Tears
I pushed past thick jungle leaves and wooden cottages on stilts to a grassy knoll that overlooked rolling hills of green. Dreamcatchers and hammocks hung around the bluffs, as the sun emerged from its mountainous slumber. Out here, there was an abundance of the delicate and thorny roses Antoine de Saint-Exupéry spoke of in his stories.
When I returned, I saw my friend sitting on her bed silent, with tears in her eyes. It slowly dawned on me how much of an ordeal the past few months had actually been for her, and like the aviator stuck in the Saharan desert, I was unsure of how to approach it. So I thought about how she might feel, and then just said the first thing that came to mind.
“Hey, it’s okay. To be sad. I think...that the most beautiful things are as strong, as they are fragile. And I know it’s hard to leave what we know behind, but if there’s anything God has promised for us, it’s a hopeful future. We just have to keep our eyes open for long enough.”
“I’m sorry,” I added, “If I made this whole thing harder than it needed to be.”
“It’s okay,” she said, “I mean, you wanted us to be in a treehouse and I admit, it is quite…whimsical.”
The City of Many Colors
Antigua is a city bursting with flowery color, cobblestone streets and brightly painted walls. There were bustling markets, old ruins and xylophone players. When two of our friends from Santa Monica flew in to meet us in Antigua, the Guatemalan experience began to start feeling a little bit more like my hometown of Los Angeles, something I wasn’t too keen on at the time. It was a reminder of a place where I was struggling with the diptych of ethereal happiness and endless diversions, where we were being taught to love the very things that kept us apart from one another.
I sometimes wonder if the urge to explore and the fear of pain, are just two sides of the same coin — two motivations that can lead people to the farthest ends of the earth, one the formula for profound growth and the other, the formula for an empty soul.
On the flight back to the States, I had a layover in Costa Rica. I flipped through a picture book and stopped, as a familiar phrase from Henry Miller glanced back towards me.
Nuestro destino nunca es un lugar, sino una nueva forma de ver las cosas.
Or,
One's destination is never a place but a new way of seeing things.