Obsessed: Central America (and the rest of South America)!

If you check out the labels, or tags, on this blog, you will see that Andy has written 52 entries so far and I have only done 45. Maybe that’s because he writes all the obsessions and finance posts. Well, no more—it’s my turn to tell you with what things the countries we visited on the last leg of our trip were obsessed!

South America:

Peru – Coca leaves. Old men chewing them, breakfaster-eaters brewing them…the dried leaves of the coca plant (which, after a whole lot of processing, can become cocaine) are everywhere in Peru (and Bolivia) and illegal to grow or possess in most other South American countries. In their “natural” state, they’re supposed to be stimulating and help fight altitude sickness. I did try a cup of coca tea one morning—not bad, it tasted like green tea, but it had no noticeable effects on me.

Ecuador – The Galapagos. Based on the number of posters you see at travel agencies for Galapagos trips, you’d think that Ecuador has nothing else cool to visit. That is definitely not true—we didn’t make it to the Galapagos, and Ecuador was still one of my favorite countries!

Colombia – Cheese bread! Or maybe that’s just my obsession when in Colombia. Still, there were many different varieties, and you could find it just about anywhere. There were even people baking it in a hut in the middle of Tayrona National Park!

Central America:

Panama – The United States. With US dollars, English-speakers, and Dairy Queens galore, Panama felt more like America than anywhere else we went on the trip. The canal may be in their hands now, but let’s just say that our cultural presence is still felt.

Costa Rica – Not being like the rest of Central America. The government? Stable. The volcanoes? Quiet. The hotels? Expensive. The public buses? Not school buses, and definitely not blasting salsa music, either. Does this place even still qualify as part of Central America?

Nicaragua – The Virgin Mary. Nicaraguans actually invented a whole new holiday that consists of carrying a giant doll of Maria around town and lining up to sing songs to her. Need we say more?

El Salvador – Malls. San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, has more fancy shopping malls than we have ever seen before in one place. We have no idea how they all stay in business, because the last time we checked, El Salvador wasn’t such a big country, it’s populace wasn’t exactly the richest in the world, and it didn’t have a whole lot of tourists! Still trying to figure this one out…

Guatemala – Volcanoes. They’re everywhere, and they’re erupting RIGHT NOW.

Honduras – Throwing trash out the window of a moving bus (arrrgh!). OK, that’s kind of unfair—I think that every country in Central America is obsessed with doing this. It gave me and Andy little strokes each time we saw it happen (and, even worse, when we saw people encouraging their young children to treat the road like it was a garbage can). But I feel like people did it even more than usual on the buses we took across southern Honduras, and I can’t really think of anything else that country seemed obsessed with (no one was talking about the whole election/coup thing in the more rural areas where we were), so Honduras gets the rap for this one.

Belize – Cruise ships. Apparently, cruise ships have started docking in Belize, and no one can decide whether this is good or bad for the country. Belize City seems pro, as it has set up a whole tourist village in which to sell expensive souvenirs to cruisers, while the people who run the awesome ATM caving tour in the west of the country are con, since they think that cruise excursions there would ruin the delicate artifacts in the cave. The folks at the jaguar reserve seemed conflicted—they’d like the extra revenues, but will more people disturb the jaguars? No, because there aren’t actually any jaguars in the part of the park where people can go!

That’s it for obsessions! If you’ve been to any of these countries, what do you think of our choices?

Blue bread, fried fruits, and a side of cream: Foods of Guatemala and Honduras!

On our first night in Guatemala, we found a lady with a table on the street covered in pies. Jackpot! Andy got strawberry...
...and I got pineapple. I usually hate strawberry pie stuff, but I have to say that his was better. There is something weird about pineapple in pies. Also, I hate meringue, which was on top of the pies. Still, fun for a little more than $1 a slice.
A nearby vendor was selling fried bananas stuffed with some sort of sweet goo we could not identify. I thought maybe chocolate, but we were never able to really figure it out. It lives in Andy's tummy now.
The next morning, we visited a bakery that had fun-looking pastries. Unfortunately, they were dry, disgusting, and overly expensive.

This muffin was filled with strawberry jam, which made it the more edible of our two choices.
Here is Andy drinking some mosh, which is hot sweet milk with oats in it, very popular for breakfast (and tasty). Not necessarily a breakfast food, but enjoyed by Andy at breakfast as well was this suchita, a cornmeal dumpling stuffed with chicken that is like a tamale.
Speaking of chickens, here are some in the back of a pickup truck outside the marketplace. Ready to sell!
One of the most fun street snacks in Guatemala is the chocobanana, a frozen banana dipped in chocolate and sold for less than 50 cents. Why don't we have these in America?
On the day of our six-month wedding anniversary, we took a boat over to San Pedro to check out this other lakeside town. Wandering around, we just so happened to stumble upon a restaurant that has "Smokin Joe" from the southern United States come cook real smoked barbecue every Sunday at noon. It was Sunday at 12:15. We went in, he had two smokers going and bevy of delicious side dishes! For about $6, we got a half rack of ribs, potato salad, buttered corn, green beans, and garlic bread, and it was actually really good!! Happy anniversary to us!

That night, back in Panajachel, we got some hot chocolate on the street. Very nice, as it gets cold at night in the mountains of Guatemala. Also, it had rice in it, which was fun.
From the same street stand, a tostada, which is a crispy corn tortilla, here covered with guacamole, beans, tomato sauce, onions, and cheese.

From the stand down the street, we got some tacos. Check out the huge round taco-cooking aparatus, with different sections for the meat, onions, tortillas, and sauce/grease. The finished product: Messy but tasty.
This coconut jam actually came from Nicaragua, but we busted it open in Guatemala to eat on fresh corn tortillas from the local tortilleria. A tortilleria is a small shop that consists of a griddle and some ladies making about a zillion tortillas a minute on them and selling them really cheap.
Antigua's market brought us into contact with all sorts of new goodies, such as these giant blackberries. Biggest we had ever seen!
Also, blue corn tortillas! When's the last time you ate bread that was naturally this color?
Check out Andy's leisurely pose as he munches on some delicious spicy peanuts from the market. Don't work too hard now, honey.
Here I am on the square in Antigua with booty from my favorite bakery in Guatemala, Dona Luisa Xicotencatl. Amazing banana bread and homemade apple yogurt, among the best yogurts I had on our whole trip. Yum!!
A large coconut candy Andy found in the handicrafts market. Leave it to Andy to find sweets when we were supposed to be shopping for souvenirs...
Some little chicken-filled fried tacos from the market in Antigua. Made healthy by the fresh salad on top, of course.
Ooh, this was bad. It looked good, like a pile of glazed cherries or something, but it turned out to be some kind of gummy crabapples.
Even cheaper than the chocobanana: The chocopapaya! Not quite as good, though.
On to Honduras! We only spent one night there, but we found a great cheap restaurant in Copan called Comedor Mary. Andy got the "plato tipico," which included beef, beans, plantain, grilled veggies, and a little cup of cream. (Honduras and El Salvador are big on cream, for some reason.)
I ordered pupusas, which you can see mostly decimated in the upper righthand corner of the next pic. Pupusas are popular in Honduras as well as El Salvador (kinda like cream!). I got one filled with beans, one with beans and cheese, and one with chayote and cheese. Chayote is a squash kinda like zucchini, and that pupusa was especially amazing.

The pickled cabbage that came with the Honduran pupusas was a lovely purple color thanks to the beets it also contained. And it had chunks of carrot...turns out I love pickled carrot! High marks to this meal from me.
On the bus from Honduras up to Flores, our last stop in Guatemala, Andy bought a bag of fried fruit things. There were fried flattened bananas and there were these pineapple-filled doughy things. Way to turn fresh fruit into an unhealthy snack, Guatemala! (Tasty, though.)
Less tasty was this ice cream from the local parlor in Honduras. Bad fakey taste, crumbly texture, and not so cheap. Meh.
Andy found these tasty juice drinks in Flores: Mango-guava and strawberry-banana. At 20% real juice, these may have been the most natural drinks available in all of Central America.
And I finally tried the national brand of yogurt, Gaymont. I liked that the fruit-on-the-bottom cups were clear so you could see what you were getting, and that they came with a handy little spoon (well, I was torn on that, actually--liked the convenience, disliked the extra plastic waste). I did not like the taste, unfortunately...this was no Dona Luisa yogurt!
And that's what we ate in Guatemala and Honduras! Guatemala definitely had the best and cheapest tortillas we had had so far, probably because we were getting really close to Mexico. And oh man, that banana bread...

Our Trip: Ruined

Okay, a deceptive title, but this post will focus on some Mayan ruins. We visited Copan in western Honduras and Tikal in northern Guatemala. In addition, you can read about our visit to Joya de Ceren in El Salvador in that post. Because Copan is in Honduras, and everyone is afraid of Honduras, we saw about 10 people there. Tikal was rather crowded, but still bearable. Tikal also had good birds and animals in the area.

The Mayans had one of the earliest systems of writing in the world. It was fairly complex, and much of it is still being deciphered. Here is a good example of some writing that commemorated a ceremony of some type. Apparently, they just figured out about a decade ago by comparing these types of markers from different cities that some of the symbols were the name of the city. The name of Copan (from where this one comes) is symbolized by a stylized bat because they have a lot of caves around with bats.
This statues represents the first recorded ruler of Copan, whose name was something like Blue Quetzal Macaw. Not a lot is known about early leaders because it was custom for a long time to destroy everything that had been written about the previous ruler when a new one came to power. Then, some guy needed to claim this ruler as an ancestor to give himself some legitimacy and all the sudden the first ruler was everywhere...
Copan is famous for these giant statues called stellae (singular: stella, no idea why they use a Latin word for a Mayan statue in a Spanish country). They all have leaders in the pose of gods and generally commemorated important events. They almost inevitably have a big round table in front of them where common people are expected to leave presents for the ruling class. Often, the ruling class would sit on high structures and watch who was leaving stuff for them.
Here is another stella. These come from about 600 AD. This area developed what is known as the cult of the stellae. Sounds like a geeky scientist cult, but it was really around the quasi-worship of the quasi-gods depicted in these statues. While stellae exist in other parts of the Mayan world, they aren't very fancy and were often just painted.
Tara took this beautiful picture looking out through one of the temples in Copan. Copan is set among the hills and small mountains. All the temples in Copan are built on top of old ones. Every couple hundred years, a new ruler would order bigger, better pyramids and temples built. Apparently, they shared this with the Incas.
If you look closely, you'll see that's me in the middle of what is known as a false arch. The Mayans weren't quite as good as Greek real arches, but they have held up well over time.
On to Tikal, an even bigger Mayan city. Almost 3 million Mayans lived in the area at the peak of the Mayan empire in about 1200AD. The site is huge, but they have only excavated parts, and even keeping those from being reclaimed by the jungle is challenging. There are 7 major temples in the shape of the Big Dipper. This is one of them. You can see how much moss is growing on the sides, slowing breaking down the pyramid.
A gray-throated woodrail along the edge of a lake at Tikal. Why is it called a woodrail? No idea. But I understand the gray throated part.
Our guide was terrible, but he did grab a tarantula and carry it around for a few minuted. We were cheering for it to bite him. Afterall, he told us all about how it was painful but not lethal. And then we probably would have had a better tour guide replace him.
This is another of the temples. Layers of pyramids with a building on the top. The priests and rulers would go up to the top and look down menacingly at the people. I don't think they sacrificed people in this one, but they definitely did in some of them.
A view looking out from the top of one of the temples. You can see a couple other temples. It also gives a sense of how hard the jungle tries to take over the ruins. In the day of the Mayas, there were no trees anywhere. Not only because it was a city, but because there was massive deforestation for firewood.
Tara in front of one of the temples. I know, they all start to look alike, but this one also has Tara! The stairs going up them are very steep. We climbed a couple of them and were certainly tired by the end of the day.
Last one. This one has both of us with some ruins in the background. A tour guide was demonstrating from the ruins in the background that the acoustics were so good that he could speak in a normal voice and anyone on the square could hear him. They should build more public squares like that today.

Last, but certainly not least, is a picture of the wild turkey that is everywhere in Tikal. It not only has colorful feathers, but a blue neck and head with orange spots. From now on, I only plan to eat this type of turkey for Thanksgiving. I think it will make me prettier.

That's the story of the Mayan ruins. Overall, the Mayans were very skilled. They did a lot of weird stuff, like binding the heads of the ruling class to make them all pointy, and sacrificing a lot of people, but they also invented zero, understood a ton of astronomy, and apparently predicted that the world will end on Tara's birthday, 2012 (actually, their calendar just runs out then--they never predicted the end of the world).