Ma'alob K'iin!: Aguacate Village Odyssey

The night before heading to a remote village, I recommend rum and guacamole

Last week I spent about a week out in Aguacate village, where I was hiking to potential archaeological sites by day and staying with a lovely local family by night. I'll post a map I recently made (with the help of my lovely editorial assistant, Meg Kassabaum) of the are so you all know where I am.

You should be able to click to enlarge

I arrived in Aguacate on Friday afternoon, since the bus leaves PG at 11:30. It was an uneventful ride, except I felt horrible the whole way. I was coughing a lot and felt mildly nauseous. I spent the afternoon getting settled at Domingo and Ipefenia's home, on a small hill at the very far end of the village. They have eight children between the ages of 21 and 6, all but one of whom are still living at home. I brought my own hammock, because last time I spent the night in the village the hammock I slept in was, of course, Maya-sized, not Claire-sized. Since I adore my hammock and have not gotten a lot of use out of it since 2005 I was looking forward to sleeping in it again. For all the doubters out there, let me tell you that hammock-sleeping is extraordinarily comfortable - the key is to sleep perpendicular across the hammock so that it stretches out and forms to your body, not end-to-end like you are on a pirate ship.

Domingo and Ipefenia's house. You can hear howler monkeys at night

I was eating at a house across the way to "spread the wealth". Ruthelia and Mariano were also very kind and gracious people who introduced me to several new culinary experiences. I'm kicking myself now for not bringing my camera with me, but I promise I will get better at that. Here are a few things that I ate at their house: corn and flour tortillas, of course; salty eggs fried in lard; grilled armadillo!; freshwater fish called machaca; canned sardines (ew); lots of rice; chicken caldo (stew); jippi jappa.
I should really do a longer post about village food, but briefly - the grilled armadillo was delicious and quite meaty underneath that shell; Mariano's dog caught it in the bush. I had it for several meals, including breakfast, which was fine but not ideal. The first evening was the best, when it was grilled and then topped with a tomato-based sauce. The machaca fish had a lot of meat on it too, which was light and tilapia-espque though it had a lot of teeny tiny bones. Jippi jappa is a plant in the palm family, whose shoots can also be dried and woven into baskets. When they cook it is like a very tender heart of palm spruced up with spices and sauce or broth.

On Saturday morning I went hiking with two men from the village. I was feeling pretty terrible but chalked it up to dehydration and pushed on. It turned out that they wanted to show me sites that I'd already seen, which was disappointing. There was one cave site that they knew of, so we explored that. There were some Late Classic period (AD 570-900) sherds scattered outside the entrance to the cave and a few that we found inside. I drew them and took pictures, but there was nothing extraordinary about them. Caves were sacred places and there are often huge water jars, burials, and other ancient artifacts left inside. We hiked up some hilltops surrounding the village so I could see if there were ancient mounds on top, but we didn't see anything.

I was exhausted when I got back to the house, looking forward to an early bedtime. Even though Aguacate has power, the day still starts at sunrise and ends soon after sunset. For some reason, my family didn't have power, so when I would get home from dinner between 6:30 and 7:00pm the oil lamp would be lit and everyone would be swinging in the hammocks, listening to the radio or just chilling. The lamp gets blown out at about 8:30; I would read by headlamp or listen to podcasts for another hour or so until I fell asleep. It was difficult to get used to, but feeling terrible in the evenings didn't hurt!

The second hike was a long one - two hours to my guides' milpa with a stop along the way to look at one mound, and then two hours back. According to my map, I think we walked about 14km roundtrip that day. The one mound had a few sherds but a big looters pit in it, of course. The milpa had some more recent pottery, which was interesting but not ancient, and there were no mounds (btw, when I say mounds I mean the remains of ancient buildings, most likely houses, that are collapsed and now shaped like mounds). So, also disappointing, but I had some interesting conversations with my guides and now I know what is down that long road at the end of the village!

After that day I was wiped out. Everyone I saw in the village looked at me with concern and asked if I was tired, did I feel alright. I absolutely did not. One of the kids accompanied me to the community health worker, who gave me Tylenol and cough syrup, and took my temperature (no fever, though I sure felt feverish). Everyone said I was sick because of the weather - it was getting rainier at night, and they say that when the weather changes you get sick. I think I just picked up a cold at the conference I went to, but I didn't argue!

Monday I had to cancel the hiking and exploring, unfortunately, because I was supposed to go with the school principal who I've really been wanting to get to know. I laid in my hammock all day and read (I was reading The Help - what a fabulous book!) and slept. On Tuesday I felt a little better, but things got postponed again because there someone's house burned down and the whole village picked Tuesday to help them rebuild, so there was no one to go hiking with me. Wednesday I thought I would take the bus back to PG, get healthy, and try again the following week. But then it rained so hard that the two creeks you have to cross to get to the highway both flooded, and stayed flooded all day long. In fact, it had been raining so hard at night that the bus couldn't get through on Monday either; so no one had been able to leave town since Saturday. We were all getting stir crazy - at that point at I had read The Help one and half times. Thursday afternoon we left, though we had to drive through a couple feet of water to get over the submerged bridge.

God willin' and the creek don't rise

It was a good visit in some ways - getting to know people, talk to them about my project, about how it could benefit the community, what kinds of sites I'm looking for, why digging at sites is destructive, etc. I'm also hearing all sorts of interesting stories about the Old Maya, as they are called around here, and the ancient sites. For example, Domingo told me that some guys in town found an old carved stone in the bush, and brought it back to the church. The next day it was gone; the men found it back where it had been originally. They moved it back to the church, but the stone wouldn't stay. So they left it out there - where, no one's really sure now, that was a generation ago.

The bad parts were the sickness, the rain and high river, and the mosquito and fly bites all over my legs. And the blisters from my new rubber boots that I walked 14km in! I feel like this is the start to a really great Maya-bluegrass song....

Very glad I bought these - it's wet and muddy here!

Tomorrow I'm heading back out for another 5 days or so, weather permitting. I've spoken with the alcalde (the mayor) and he is going to help me get access to other parts of the community's land that I haven't been able to see yet (but I can see the mounds from the road, so I know something is there). So this week should be very productive and interesting - I'm just hoping the mounds aren't all totally looted.

The pictures are from one of my walks through town; I haven't posted any of the archaeology pictures, mostly because you can't really tell what they are pictures of, or they are just of random sherds that only the nerdiest would enjoy! If I get some good ones though, I'll post them.