August 6th - 10th, 2004

August 6th

We sleep, watch TV, eat, and sleep some more. I think we got dehydrated yesterday in that heat because both of us feel dead.

August 7th

La Mesilla descends behind us as we climb into the mountains but not before it’s busting street-turned-market furnishes us with cheese (wrapped in a banana leaf) and tortillas. The road follows a beautiful little river going upstream. The steep mountainsides are covered in corn that grows at seemingly impossible angles. Everyone we pass calls out greetings to us including people who are working way up on the hillside. We ride through some stunning canyons with soaring cliffs on either side. The road snakes and there are no unused flat spots on which to camp. We stop in a restaurant to ask if they know where we might camp and they say ‘yes’ on their floor after closing. The restaurant Buvi is built on top of a waterfall. A little wooden bridge leads across the moving water to our concrete campsite.

August 8th

We ride through the mountains in the morning and have a ‘funny yell contest’ with some hillside workers for a few minutes, our squawks echoing off the steep cliffs. The afternoon brings wind that slows our progress as we inch by wide hilly meadows and more mountains. Around four we hit a sweet down slope and fifteen kilometers fly by in as many minutes. We phone Nelson who had been eating in the Buvi and invited us to his home. A short while later we are following his car through Hueuetenango. Nelson, Sandra and their three kids welcome us into their home with coffee and cookies. There’s no better way, especially if you own a bakeshop. We have dinner and talk for a long time with our kind and happy hosts before slumping our nodding heads off to bed.

August 9th

Sandra takes us out after breakfast to see some ruins that charge an arm and a leg for foreign visitors and she says it’s not worth it. We can see everything we need to from outside anyway. We drive down some dirt roads to visit some famous mammoth bones. A farmer found this tooth the size of his head here and he tells us all about having swarms of Canadian archeological students dissecting his property. My favorite detail is that the milk and cheese that the farm sells has ever since been called ‘mammoth’s milk’ and ‘mammoth’s cheese’. In the afternoon Nelson and Sandra drive us up to the lookout on the top of the cuchumatanes at more than 4,000m of altitude. The view amazing and we stare at it for a while. We then drive through the high plane. The meadows are divided by stone walls into pastures and each wall is covered in beautiful red flowers called ‘llamas de fuego’ or flames of fire. We are treated to a succulent dinner of mutton and head back down the mountain into a sea of light.

August 10th

I have been having insomnia for about a week now and can’t seem to shake it. This only happens to me when I’ve got something on my mind so Johanne and I sit down with our maps and calculate the kilometers we have left and plan out our itinerary. We figure out that the more time we take to get down south the colder it will be in southern Chili and Argentina.

Our tiredness leaving Huehetenango is accentuated by the mountain road and when we stop to camp on the lawn of a Mormon church after a long day, Johanne is tired and feverish.