Nature's mercy

At the beginning of October a tropical storm hits the Pacific coast of Central America and we lose sight of the sky for three weeks. It rains day and night; thick, oily drops falling heavily from cloying cloud. Several people lose their lives in mudslides and the main road into Panajachel is closed for a week.

By the time I get back from my visa run to Mexico, the lake has risen by almost a metre on top of the half metre or so already gained in the first half of the season. The entire lake edge is littered with semi-submerged houses and farms.

Trees arch gracefully from the water. Everyone has a new dock, and every dock is built precariously over the remains of others. The shops near the water in Santiago are filled to the ceiling.

There being no outlet, Lake Atitlan is vulnerable to weather and follows cycles of growth and recession that the locals meet with ancient acceptance.

If this had happened anywhere else it would have made international news, but the pace of this creep over six months of rain is too slow for today's press.

I arrive home to a considerably smaller farm. Reed islands have lodged themselves on our new dock, shielding the farm front with a wall of green. Kale lurches soggily from the shallows, the leaves of a baby lime tree barely surfacing. The lakeside path has shifted to run around the yoga shala, which used to lie twenty metres from the water's edge when I arrived at the farm in March.


At this rate, the entire farm will be under within a couple of years.


I fall into bed in the dark and wake up crawling in ants. I rip up my mattress and watch as hundreds of red leaf-cutters scatter, desperately collecting waxy white eggs and disappearing between the floorboards. Every surface blooms pale with mould. The eaves are strung with a dense network of dusty white spider's webs and my clothes are full of giant crickets.
My home has been reclaimed by the jungle.


I spend an exhausting day scrubbing and beating as much life from my belongings as I can. The rain beats rivers down the windows and the light fades through a grey imperceptibly tinged with pink.


Nico and I eat in silence in a damp rancho. With no residents at the moment the farm is strangely empty. At some point, the rain stops. I fail to notice exactly when.

I wash my dishes and walk outside.

Above me shines a star.


A small patch of the night sky overhead has cleared. It has been a long time, so I walk down to our new dock to watch from the water. The lake is glossy.


The atmosphere is light with shifting energy, the post-deluge air impeccably clean. A clear line divides the sky; on one side the nothingness of thick cloud, on the other sparkling pinpricks of light. I sit and watch for an hour as our world changes.


Like a magician, revealing his last secret, the sky is gradually unveiled. The line moves across the sky as the black hole recedes.


The wall of cloud slips behind Volcan San Pedro and at once the sky is infinite.

And, just like that, the rainy season comes to an end.

Photography

I am put in charge of the garden. The soil is volcanic sand, hard as stone. As a result, I pass many hours forcing shovels into the ground and fingering through manure.

Scorpions curl quivering tails from underneath bedspreads, erotically poised to sting those who worry about them. Nick has a near-miss with a baby fer-de-lance, one of the most deadly vipers in the world. I continue to walk around in bare feet, worrying more about flattening the tree frogs than about painful death.


I spend days with a seventy-five year old man who says he is releasing so much energy right now that he has to masturbate three to four times a day. Horrified, we ask him how he gets away with it, whilst sharing a room with five other men. He tells us he is "quite effective" as long as he lies on his front.


The rains have started early and the lake is already full of clumping strands of algae, fed by the rushing run-off pulling agro-chemicals from the land into the water. I no longer swim.


I live in the mezzanine attic of a small, wooden cabin called Amor. To get to my bed I have to climb a ladder and duck under the eaves, crawling on my knees until I trip into my futon bed. I ease myself into sleep with candles to brighten the light-less night.


I take my first day off in the town of San Pedro, on the other side of our volcano, two hours away by boat. I first came here almost two and a half years ago and fell in love. This time it feels strange to meet friends who have been drinking all day. I am woken up by the yelps of a couple having sex in our dormitory. My fond memories of before contrast sharply with my discomfort of the memories of today, and I realise how much life has changed.

One of the guests tries to move seats in the sauna and grabs the metal chimney. His hand sizzles and he leaps outside, naked, screaming in pain. We try to take him seriously as we avoid looking at his swinging ballsack. We pull together our painkillers and smear his hand with aloe cut from the garden.


When in town, I buy twenty metres of black tubing to make and sell hula hoops. As I descend the steep hill down to the dock, tube heavy over my shoulder, a man actually stops his ascent purely to laugh at me. A few weeks later I see the same man in another town. I don't think he recognises me without the tubing. Regardless, he once again begins to laugh. I look down. Huge yellow genie pants, bulging backpack, hula hoop and djembe drum, all balanced awkwardly as I attempt to suck smoothie from a sandwich bag. Forget him. I make myself laugh.


We are working in the kitchen when we notice that fifty or so wasps have entered through the gap in between the windows and the roof. Within an hour they have all spontaneously died. I uncover two of them in my grated carrot.


We have to piss in one toilet and shit in another. We frequently discuss how difficult this is. Once a week Nick has to stir the number 2 toilet tank. It may disgust, but we're some of the only people that don't dump their sewage in the lake.


Twelve ladies and their children walk the path from Chakaya, the nearest village, barefoot and sparkling like jewels in their beautiful woven costumes. They have come to sing for the farm director's birthday. Singing develops into a church service, recruiting us to evangelist hoards. I stay in the kitchen and make mango buttercream.


I am woken frequently by the cries of a dog who has worms and howls as he drags himself along the ground. He was called Gary, until we found out he doesn't have a penis. Now he answers to Gariela.


We get high one night by drinking pure cacao. We drum and dance like sorcerers in strobes of candlelight.


And then we pause… for a moment… in the electricity-free night….

Look up at the sleeping cone-shadow of Volcan San Pedro, silently eating the stars.

Owls bassline the forest symphony with eerie, flute-like notes, toads with cartoonlike feet expanding their throats in reply.

Fireflies flick along the mountainside in dissonant sparkle, spotlighting our secret arena.

The drowsy fantasy moment of every lonely dawn...

I roll over to the 5:30 alarm clock, eyes stuck together, head reacting to the sound like a cat being lowered into a bath.

As I roll over, I catch a glimpse of the morning sky through the giant window in front of me. It is grey, streaked with the bold creationist's strokes of dawn, mere suggestions of the paint to come. Mist curls threads of ideas around bamboo huts and slinks heavily over the still lake surface.

Even at this time, the light hold secrets. It dances on the lake in rounded ripples, winking.

All my life I've been a bed-monster, struggling from its warm folds, battling negativity from the moment I open my eyes. The duvet has been my protector for as long as I can remember, and unrolling myself from it has been like giving birth to myself, complete with blood, tears and the cool punch of morning air.

I've grown accustomed to my introvert self, waking up in the prison of my skull and wrestling with Day for the keys.

But in my twenty seventh year, I have all of a sudden eased into life in a way that makes me, for the first time, want to rise early. In the same way that I prefer the 'getting ready' to the actual night out, in the same way planning a holiday can be more entertaining than the real thing, the anticipation of the unknown fuels me.

Sheer potential hangs with the mist, evaporating with the hours.

Alongside it, the silence purifies me in a way the day rarely can. For that lonely hour, I own my space. I hold in my hands blank potential, pausing, blinking, before the day is apportioned in sweet slices to the rising crowds.

As I sit down to breakfast at nine, having already meditated, jogged and practised yoga, I think perhaps my drive comes from this sense of achievement. Most likely it is the tasks I set myself. I love what I do. I feel my body pliable, under control, as I fold myself up and eat cross-legged on a palapa mat.

On the lake, it is light before we see the sun. The volcanoes shield him behind strong, pointed fingers, until he becomes too strong and peeps blindingly between.

Until then, things pause. The silence before the shift. Everything intense.

I've fallen in love with Early.

My eyes shiver in half-open ecstasy as I flow through my practise like water. I bask in the space within my head. My mind explores that other world with sticky octopus fingers, contracting swiftly at my command, to re-enter myself from a new door.

The other side

Lago Atitlan is the most beautiful lake in the world.



So proclaim a history of writers and explorers, drawn here by the mystery of the morning mists over the water. Ancient volcanoes sleep at its edges and the Mayans, isolated to the extreme, appear to live as they have for thousands of years. From village to neighbouring village, one's ears prick with completely different dialects. Weak sunlight glints from the sparkling fabrics of the ladies, who keep their spirits alive in the startling threads of the full, traditional costume.

I first came to Guatemala in 2008, on a trip designed as a test for this current journey.


At that stage my hula-hoop loop was just a twinkle in my eye, and the perspective of that holidaying office girl painted a perfectly-proportioned picture of my future quest.


I spent ten dreamy days on the shores of Atitlan in a sleepy village called San Pedro, absorbing myself in the solitude of single travel and the intense peace of the rocks.


I had rarely seen such beautiful evenings.


Today I return, this time in the middle of a moody rainy season that paints the mountain-scratched skies with emotion. We enter San Pedro on one of Guatemala's famous chicken buses, painted beautifully kitch colours and packed eight across.

I barely recognise the town.


From the emptiness of the Christmas weekend two years ago has birthed a town for tourists, crawling with white faces and shamelessly-plugged memorabilia. The locals unsmilingly rip me off at the market and, in sharp contrast to the rest of Guatemala and Mexico, flatly refuse a bargain.


I am shocked at the difference between this town and my memory. Not only that, but I quickly discover that the lake has turned toxic and is only weeks away from a devastating algal bloom.


It is as if this postcard memory has been decomposed by first-world scum.


The worst is the singing. Every morning at 6am, the loudspeaker cries of Evangelist churches echo in symphony across the lake, blasted from each village in a call to convert the few remaining Mayans.


The 1970s left a crater of devastation in the wake of civil war and natural disaster, providing vulture-like missionaries the perfect conditions in which to descend. In the midst of destruction and agony, new religions proliferated and churches, foreign-funded, were often the first buildings up in the most hard-hit areas.

Converts tell tales of miraculous healings. Gifts of money and American trinkets.


Now, perched smugly upon the old houses of San Pedro, a church more like a wedding cake than a building shits over the spirits of the lake.

I am disgusted.


The same thing has happened to virtually all of the indigenous traditions across Mexico and Central America. No doubt to the rest of the world.


While to the untrained eye, the locals may look as they always have, in reality the addition of new religion has divided neighbouring villages, keeping people under strict, unofficial laws (in many villages the church owns the land, dictating where the villagers may work and live and when they may leave).


But (I pathetically justify to myself) this is nothing new. Catholicism, unsurprisingly, is the principal religion of the region, brutally imposed by the conquering Spaniards hundreds of years ago. Indigenous practices survived this steamrollering by learning to adapt and unite in a deeply interesting combination of traditional beliefs and that of the Vatican. Up until the second half of the last century, the music of the ancients continued to sing in this syncretic meld of faiths known as costumbre (custom).

Somehow, however, the loudspeaker ceremonies of the Evangelists seem unbearable in comparison.

The voice of the ancients, crushed under the pretence of development. I am left slightly flustered, wondering what to do.

Nothing can take away the beauty of this lake.

But the changes within myself have been highlighted by my return.

I realise how uninspired I am by the idea of going out to drink in cute, themed bars. I watch old hippies, drawn by the energy of the lake, overtly take photographs of the locals as if they are no more than animals. I see how repulsed I am by the damage the rest of this world has done to the culture of this village.

I do not want to make it worse.

When Eva and Toño leave after a few days, I happily board the boat away from this town.


I seek retreat.