A rare and remarkable finding at an the archaeological site of Xultun in the northeast corner of the country clearly indicates that the Mayan calendar goes on for another 7000 years.

The finding was made when a student at the site sat down to eat lunch and noticed some paint on a stone in a looter’s trench. Investigation led to a older than the other structures build on top of it. The room contained a mural of a king, a second mural of “strangely dressed figures” and a wall covered in astronomical calculations that indicate a calendar extending thousands of years into the future.

The room has been called a “Mayan workshop for astronomers”.

Some have said the room indicates that the Mayan calendar continues for another 7000 years. Some say for only 4000.

Either way, one thing is for certain. That sandwich-eating student is totally going to get an ‘A’.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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Don’t worry about my feelings.  Be ruthless.  Telling me which ones you hate will help more than telling me which ones you like.  But, of course, I hope you like them all.

The post Help Me Pick My Best Travel Photos appeared first on XpatMatt.

When I first moved to Taiwan I was fascinated with everything.  I walked around stupefied, a silly grin permanently plastered to my face, amazed at the incredible world that I had discovered.  That lasted for about three years.

I don’t smile like that anymore.  I haven’t for quite some time.  About a year-and-a-half ago the things that once enchanted me, the incense burning in urns in front of temples, the small aluminum roofed houses, the palm trees that line the boulevards,  became commonplace and I became unhappy.

I thought that I had become too comfortable in Taiwan, so  I went to Guatemala.  I wanted to rediscover the wide-eyed wonder that I felt when I first moved to Asia. But I didn’t. After having traveled around Asia, Central America seemed too similar to home.  It bored me.

The problem, however, wasn’t Guatemala, nor was it Taiwan.  The problem was me.

We travel to feel like children again, to be adrift in a an enchanting world, to discover possibilities beyond our imaginations.  When I first moved to Taiwan I was caught up in this enchantment.  This enchantment is what people speak of when the speak of being bitten by the travel bug.

This enchantment, however, does not come from travel.  It comes from the way a person looks at the world–a special way of seeing things that most of us experience when we first step out of the comfort of our homes and leap headlong into the unknown.

We need not travel to gain this perspective.  It’s simply curiosity.  A willingness to learn.  An openness to everything.  If we can keep that perspective, then it doesn’t matter where we are, we will remain interested, attentive, and excited. But if it’s lost, then everything is lost.  The world becomes drab, two-dimensional, and as stale as a b-grade sitcom.

A travel writer friend of mine recently told me about two wonderful travel books written by a french author. I forget his name.  The first book was about everything that the author could see from his chair in his living room.  In the sequel he gets really adventurous and walks to the window.  My friend said that the books are incredible. That author had it figured out.

Some people travel.  Some people don’t.  That’s of no consequence.  But listen to me now.  This is the most important thing that I could tell you.

Never forget: there’s treasure everywhere.

The post There’s Treasure Everywhere appeared first on XpatMatt.

– A twelve hour bus ride from Cranbrook to the Calgary airport (don’t even ask why it took so long).

– Two hours of sleep.

– Two hours detained by a mongoloid U.S. customs officer for no reason.  The guy said he was afraid that I might try to stay in the USA because I didn’t have an ongoing ticket.  I wittily responded, “Actually, I’m an American citizen,” which I thought would sink his argument.  But he countered with the ingenious rebuttal: “That doesn’t matter,” and sent me off to the Customs Time-Out room to think about the consequences of being witty to a customs officer.  I subsequently missed my flight, and had to take a later one.

– A beautiful, and expensive, but all too short four day layover in LA on Venice Beach.

– A two day car ride halfway across Mexico with Mike Sanchez, who I found on Craigslist, and who turned out to be like the smartest living creature in the universe. Really.  He was Google personified — except for Google stops belching meaningless shit at you if you ignore it.  So, I basically drove halfway across Mexico with an auto audio-Google machine on repeat constantly spewing whatever popped into his little search engine brain to fill the silence of his radioless car.

– A twelve hour bus ride to Mexico City, which arrived at Mexico City Central Station at 1am, and then a 10 hour wait for my next bus during which I didn’t sleep for fear of my bags being stolen, which was still way better than being stuck in a car with Mike Sanchez.

– A twelve hour ride to Tuxtla Gutierrez in Chiapas, which arrived at midnight, just in time to connect with my bus, a six hour ride to the Guatemalan border.

– A 10 minute wait in Guatemalan customs during which I saw a guy ingeniously talk the border guard into letting his buddy cross into Mexico even though he had no passport and was not a citizen, based only on the promise that they’d “be right back”.

– A four hour bus ride on an infamous Guatemalan ‘chicken bus’, during which I really had to go pee.

All to arrive in this beautiful little Guatemalan City of Quetzaltenango, which is situated in the western mountains beneath an active volcano that gushes a beautiful plume of smoke across the sky.  I’ve been in touch with the Lonely Planet writer for Guatemala who lives here, and who I will meet in a couple of weeks to see if he can help me get in with them. And now, I just came home from eating a four dollar steak dinner, and I’m sitting in my six dollar room, which is attached to a Spanish school that’s currently having a graduation party in the central patio.

But tomorrow I’m leaving.  I’m going to a small town on Lake Atitilan, which I can probably only get to by ferry, where it’s even cheaper.  Lonely Planet speaks of rooms for two and three dollars per night.  Spanish lessons for two dollars per hour and a bar that servers Cuba Libres for 30 cents apiece!

I can wake up every morning and go swimming in the lake and then I can go for a for a run up the volcano next to town and come home and study Spanish and write.

Where else could I possibly go?

The post Living Under the Volcano appeared first on XpatMatt.

I had been pondering the question while riding in a collectivo, which is essentially a mini-bus crammed so full of Mexican’s carrying children and chickens that it seems ready to burst.  It had been a long time since my last trip, and I’d only been on the road for a few days, so I was still getting back into the swing of traveling.  We were driving from the Mexican city of Tapachula to the Guatemalan border.

“What is it that drives me to explore new places?”  I wondered, as the chicken in front of me flapped its wing into my face.

“I love the freedom of the road.  I love facing the challenges of the road and meeting them.  I love traveling alone.  I must travel for the independence.” I concluded.

We arrived.  I got out of the collectivo, set my bags on the dusty street and looked around.  Where was the border?

“Frontera?”  I asked the driver.  He pointed down the street, which dead ended two blocks away.  I looked at him, confused.  He said something in Spanish. I continued to look confused.  He went back to his work.

A rickshaw driver pulled up. “Frontera?” I asked him.

“Yes, yes.  Lets go.”  He said, grabbing my bags.

“No, no. Uno momento.” I said.  I wasn’t born yesterday.  He was trying to rush me into his rickshaw without setting the price so that he could over charge me when we arrived.  I’d seen this hustle before.  My old travel instincts were coming back.

“Quanto questa?” I asked him.

“Forty pesos.”  He said in English.  That was double what I’d just paid for a three-hour collectivo ride.

“No.” I said.  “Muy carro.”

“Si, forty.” He said firmly.

I looked at the end of the street where the border was supposed to be, but wasn’t.  I looked the other way up the street.  Not a person in sight.

“Ok.”

I got in the rickshaw and we started off down the street.  It was early and the dust rose illuminating the sunbeams.

“I definitely travel for independence.” I thought.  “What my friends would say if they could see me now; the lone adventurer.  I’m all by myself in the South of Mexico, barely a word of Spanish, and I’m getting by perfectly.”

Halfway down the block the rickshaw stopped and a man stepped out of a shaded doorway.
“Money,” said the rickshaw driver.

I bolted upright.  I was being robbed!

Then the man from the shadows pulled his hand out of his pocket.  There were thick wads of bills folded between his fingers.

“Quetzals?” He asked.  He was a moneychanger.

“Un dollar, quanto quetzals?”

“Six.”

I calculated quickly. I wasn’t sure about the exchange, but I knew that a quetzal was worth about two pesos, and that there were about fourteen pesos to the dollar.  So, six sounded low.  But I didn’t know if I would need Quetzals to buy a Guatemalan visa.  And if I did, would there be a currency exchange at the border?  If there were a currency exchange at the border, would they fleece me on the exchange rate like they do in airports?  If I waited until I got to the border I would have no choice.

“OK.”

I bought twenty dollars worth of Quetzals and got back in the rickshaw, doubly pleased with myself for having bought black market currency for the first time in my life, and for probably saving myself from being cheated on the exchange at the border.  I felt very independent.

The rickshaw driver pulled me a couple of minutes farther to the end of the street and stopped.

“Forty pesos.”

“What?”  He had only pulled me two blocks.  “No.” I exclaimed.  “Frontera.”
He gestured to the right.

“Oh.”

The dead end wasn’t a dead end.  The street turned ninety degrees to the right, and there was a drive lined with tall fences and signs for the Frontera de Guatemala.

“Forty pesos.”  He reminded me.

Dammit.  He got me.  Forty pesos was more than ten times what the ride was worth, but I shrugged it off.  These things happen when you’re traveling.  I’d still done OK on the currency exchange.

I took my bags, two large backpacks (one on my back and one on my front) and my guitar and trudged down the road in the hot sun.  Before long I was dripping with sweat.  A rickshaw pulled up.

“Ride?”

I shook my head.  I wasn’t going to get swindled by another one of those guys.  I arrived at the border office soaked in sweat after walking just a couple hundred meters.  I got my passport stamped, and then followed the road to the bridge that crossed the river that separated Mexico from Guatemala.  I walked slowly in the sun straining under my heavy bags.

“It’s all part of the adventure,” I told myself.  “I may have brought a lot of stuff, but I don’t have anything that I can’t carry alone, even under the midday Central American sun.  Now that’s independence.”

I got to the other side and walked into the customs office, a small concrete room with a single window.  The officer asked for twenty Quetzals for my visa.  On the wall beside him was a sign that read, “Todays Exchange Rate: $1USD = 7.5 Quetzals”.

I paid the tariff with my overpriced Quetzals and left, cursing myself for not having known better than to buy money from some shady Mexican at the border.  Outside the rickshaw drivers shouted at me as I walked past.

“You go bus?  Twenty quetzals.  Ok?”

I just shook my head and kept walking till I found a quiet shop.  I bought a bottle of water and asked the clerk, “A donde es el estacion de autobus?”

He pointed up the hill, and waved arm to indicate the other side of the hill.  It was a very tall hill.  A rickshaw came over.
“You go bus?  Twenty Quetzals.  OK?”

“No.”

I was drinking my water and wondering if I could make it over the hill on my own when a second rickshaw driver came up to me.

“Where you go man?”

“Bus.  How much?”

“Fifteen Quetzals.  OK?”

“OK.”

Satisfied that I’d managed to get something resembling a fair deal, I got in the rickshaw. The bus station appeared to be very far away.  But the rickshaw took off in the direction opposite of the hill that the storeowner had pointed to.  One and a half blocks later the rickshaw stopped at the entrance to a road crowded with brightly colored old American school busses.

“Fifteen quetzales.”

“Fifteen quetzales!” I said, and let fly a long string of expletives that the driver no doubt understood.  His dark, skinny face broke into a wide grin and he laughed loudly.  Unable to deny the humor of my situation I started laughing too.

I paid him and leaned over and asked him closely, “Autobus a Quetzeltenango, cuanto questa?”
“Thirty quetzales.”  He said, and pointed at a bus.

“Gracias.”

I walked over to the bus.

“Quetzaltenango?”  I asked.

“Si,” answered the stocky albino driver.

“Thirty quetzals.” I said and held out my money.

“No.  Fifty.”

“No.” I said.  “Thirty.”

He looked at me for a moment and then took the money, muttering what I could only guess were Spanish curses under his breath.

I smiled broadly at him.  He looked at me and, after a moment, laughed and shook his head and took my bag for me.

As I boarded the bus I realized why I really travel.  That last rickshaw driver had made me realize it with his laughter. His illumination of the ridiculousness of my anger had forced me to see the situation not as an injustice, but for what it really was, just another small time scam out of a million that happen all over the world everyday; business as usual in the global economy.

Then I understood.  I don’t travel for independence.  I travel for truth.  When you travel you rub up unprotected against the hidden truths of the world that we live in.  You encounter situations and people that operate outside of your everyday assumptions forcing you to broaden your perspective.  These truths are often difficult to accept, but no matter how unprepared you are for them, and how disastrous they may seem, they are nonetheless true and, afterwards, you are better for having encountered them.

“Excellent,” I told myself as the bus bounced across the Guatemalan countryside, “I came up with an editorial and finally managed to get a ride without getting ripped off.”

I reached for my notebook so that I could take note of this revelation.

“Damn!  Where did that guy put my bag?”

The post Why I Travel appeared first on XpatMatt.

The Mayan Nose, a peak that resembles the profile of a person reclining, looms over Lake Atitlan.  When you’re in San Pedro the Nose is a more attractive peak than the volcano because, whereas the volcano always lurks behind you, this nasal peak stares you in the face, challenging you to go up the Nose.

I went up the Nose with a couple from New York.  “Should we get a guide?” I asked them.  “Fuck no!” They replied.  “We’re from New York.  We don’t take directions from nobody.”

I will never let a New Yorker lead me hiking again.

I wanted to find the road that climbs the back of the mountain from the road between San Juan and San Marcos, but Jesse was impatient.  “Here’s a trail,” he said and bounded off.  Soon we were climbing steep barren slopes.  After one particularly steep pitch of loose dirt and rock we began to fear for our safety.  The bushes were too thick to for us to go up.  We couldn’t safely go back down.

I can’t believe that Guatemalans farm this land.  They’re insane.

Luckily, a farmer came along and guided us safely to the road to Santa Clara.  From there we made it to the top easily.

If you want to go up the Nose without a guide, it’s easiest to:

1. Ditch the New Yorkers.

2. Walk (20 min), or a take a pickup (5 min), to San Juan.

3. Continue past San Juan towards San Marcos.  Turn left onto the first, and only, intersecting paved road to Santa Clara.

4. Follow the road to Santa Clara.  Take your first left at the edge of the village and follow the road to the end.  Go right.  The path to the Nose will be about thirty meters down, on the left, marked by a sign.

5. Shout a big ‘ol yodelee-hee-hoo from the peak.

READ THIS ARTICLE ON XELAWHO’S WEBSITE HERE

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I spent five months studying and working in San Pedro.

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The post <a href=http://www.transitionsabroad.com/listings/travel/responsible/articles/lake-atitlan-guatemala.shtml target="_blank">A Guide to Responsible Travel around Lake Atitlán, Guatemala</a> appeared first on XpatMatt.