Guatemala Part 3: The Mayan’s Face

I carried my Hill Country Cedar Fever with me to Guatemala and awoke to my third day in country with a severely congested head and a dry hacking cough. Back in Texas this would've been apropos for a spring day and simply an inconvenience. In Guatemala, with plans to climb a mountain known as the Mayan’s Face, my less than 100% health could prove to be a matter of life and death.

Okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration. How about my condition would make climbing a mountain extremely difficult? Sure, let's go with that.

My fiancé Cheryl and I awoke at 3:30 AM and both got dressed for what we were told would be a difficult hike. We went downstairs to the garden courtyard of Tul Y Sul, the estate/restaurant where we were staying, to find our host Travis Stinson waiting. Travis lit an extra early morning cigarette and led us out of the courtyard and onto the barely three-person wide road that led to the center of town. This path was constructed cobblestoned laid by hand over a half a millennia ago and wound up the hill that led from the lake to the town center. Although early morning dark, the stars and moon and distant streetlights provided enough glow to admire the bougainvillea, ornamental banana tree, and morning glories that grew among the steep walls on either side of us in the latticework above us. In the day this walkway would be bathed in shades of red, orange, blue, and green. We reached the middle of town just as Travis lit up a second cigarette.

"There he is," Travis said of the small hatchback parked before the church. Cheryl and I walked to the small man standing next to the car.

“Are you Luis Tuy Tuy?” I asked pronouncing his name as “Louie Touie” as Travis had instructed.

The man gestured the huge holographic letters that read “Luis Tuy Tuy” on the side of his car. The back windshield was also emblazoned with his name while the front windshield was emblazoned with his name above the words, “Welcome to The Matrix.”

“How can he see out of that?” Cheryl asked.

I didn't answer (I didn't want to think about it) and instead helped Cheryl into the back seat of the cramped car. Luis got in the front seat, and I took notice that the decal on the windshield wouldn't be a hindrance as our driver was so short he could barely see over the wheel and thus had a clear spot just below the windshield-wide word “Matrix.”

Luis gunned of the car forward and into the darkness. He took the same violently winding road Cheryl and I had taken into town and we both found it no less nauseating in the dark. Just outside of town our headlights illuminated a pair of foxes jutting across the road. Luis said the sight was very rare. As he explained in broken English, "Not a lot to live in mountains. People to have eat it all. No animals left."

We reached the town of San Juan around 5 AM. We exited the vehicle and Luis led Cheryl and I down several dark streets to an open spot and a barbwire fence. The three of us turned on our headlamps and entered a field of cut corn. We snaked through this and to the beginnings of the mountain forest.

And that's when the fun began.

The winding trail was so steep that in spots that it was nothing more than steps carved into the earth and held in place with wooden stakes stamped into the earth. The steps became steeper and steeper, and I began to use small trees on either side of the trail to pull myself upward. Breathing became more difficult. I began coughing. Sweat poured down my back despite the cool air. I coughed.

"Hang on," I finally said.

Luis obliged. "It good. Take time."

I did then we continued onward but I called a Time Out two more times. Cheryl, being my fiancé and a nurse, tried to make me feel better. "You’ve been sick." She reminded me. "You still are."

Hearing the truth didn't change anything. I felt like a wimp. I pushed through and we made it to the summit. Luis said the hike would take an hour. My stopping added 25 minutes to it. I put that out of my mind and sat with Cheryl admiring the dark Lake Atitlán below. Luis made us hot beverages and we sat in the 45-degree stiff wind watching the sun rise over the distant volcanos.

The view from the Mayan’s Face.

“You to be on Rostro Maya (Spanish for Maya Face),” Luis told us. “Not Nariz de Indio (Spanish for Indian Nose). No Indians here. Only Mayans.”

Cheryl and I enjoyed the moment and the view then followed Luis down 2,500 feet in elevation and back to the car. The going down was far easier for me than was the going up.

Read Part one of my trip to Guatemala HERE

Read Part two of my trip to Guatemala HERE

This piece first appeared in the Fredericksburg Standard.

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