Guatemala is one of the last countries where you can see indigenous people and their customs and modern life at the same time. The country, with its range of landscapes, serves as home to an enormous number of species - flower and wildlife. Even its people, with all its differing languages, provides endless fascination to visitors. This is a beautiful country with lots to see and lots to experience.

Guatemala City - Your first stop in this intriguing city should be the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Here you will find wondrous collections of Mayan art which will be very difficult to find anywhere else. For Indian handicrafts see the exhibits at The Museum of Popular Arts and Crafts and The Museum of Natural History. The Ixchel Museum features Indian textiles including costumes. In spite of earthquake damage, the Cathedral is a very good example of colonial architecture. The National Palace is a well known landmark and the Eiffel Tower looking Torre del Reformador is an easily seen landmark.

Chichicastenango - The town is of no special note except for the remarkable markets held on Thursdays and Sundays when the Indians come form the surrounding hills to trade.

Tikal - The Mayan ruins here rae some of the most remarkable in Central America. The entire site has only been slightly uncovered but has yielded some great treasures. The civilization here was very well advanced and had a surprising understanding of mathematics and astronomy. The area is teaming with miles of temples, pyramids, pillars and various structures that are exciting to explore.

Antigua - This town is the former capital of Guatemala until it was destroyed by the earthquake of 1773. Some of the original Spanish flair and grandeur are still in evidence. 16th century buildings and ornate churches are still found here but in various states of ruin.

Lake Atitlan - The mile deep turquoise water of this lake is not to be missed. Waterfalls and the surrounding 12 Indian villages make this one of the most beautiful lake areas of the world.

Capital: Guatemala City

Population: 10,330,000

Area: 109,000 square miles

Language: Spanish

Time: -1 hours from New York

Electricity: volts

Geography: The country is bordered in the north by Mexico and Belize, in the west by the Pacific, east by the Caribbean Sea and to the south by Honduras and El Salvador. The west highlands are dotted with 30 volcanos, many of which are active. The country is also an active earthquake area with major quakes occurring in 1773, 1917 and 1976. The pacific slope area is filled with plantations coffee, bananas, cacao and sugar cane. Due to the volcanic activity, many of the beaches are black sand.

International Airport

Guatemala City - Aurora International Airport is located about 5 miles south of the city. Busses ( very inexpensive and uncomfortable) and taxis are available.

Tipping: 10% is expected in larger establishments. In smaller restaurants tipping is optional.

Shopping: Shops are open from 9 am until 12:00 non and from 1:30 pm until 6 pm. On Saturday shops are closed by 1:30 pm. Open markets can provide interesting experiences. You can bargain here until you read a mutually agreeable amount for the item. Most places are, however, already reasonable. The best markets are on Thursdays and Sundays at Chichicastenango and daily at Panajachet. These places have just about everything there is of value to be found in Guatemala. Small villages also have market days but crafts are not guaranteed to be found.

Food and Drink: Guatemala's cuisine is not as colorful as one might expect. If you've just traveled from Mexico, you will find your choices fewer. Nevertheless, food is good and includes familiar fare such as tamales, enchiladas and guacamole and occasionally outsider favorites such as burgers and fries. Oddly, Chinese restaurants are unusually abundant, are inexpensive and are often very authentic. Guatemalan coffee is world famous. In the larger cities a rich grade is served. In the countryside, however, the drink will be a little watered down and not be as tasty. "Gallo" is a light beer that is popular with visitors but "Moza" is, a darker beer, preferred by the locals. Beware of something called "Quetzalteca" which is a real "firewater" that comes in a deceptively tiny bottle. With the profusion of sugar cane, rum is found everywhere and is usually quite good.

Social: The Mayas are disappearing from the main cities. They are gradually returning to the forests and distancing them selves from the rest of society. Mayan children speak no Spanish at all until they reach school. The rest of society is of European origin and so the customs are familiar. Handshaking is the usual form of greeting and the usually expected niceties of the cosmopolitan world are customary. Special note - If purchasing clothing which is obviously Amerindian, do not wear it in public. It is an affront to the Maya as if they were being mocked. Outsiders should be extremely careful about approaching children in the rural areas as rumors of white people abducting native children are quite strong. Do not offer children candy anywhere with out getting the permission of a parent first. Take care to not have the appearance of lots of money. Jewelry, expensive watches etc. provide a display that can only get you into trouble. When traveling, ask ahead where it is safe to go and make sure that you have understood correctly. Armed thieves and thugs are found in the outskirts of many towns and in the highlands.

Business: Suites for men and dress suits for women are expected. The knowledge of Spanish is highly recommended.

Banking: Banks are open 8:30 to 6 pm weekdays and until 1 pm on Saturdays. Closed Sundays.

Currency: The Guatemalan Quetzal (Q)

Money Exchange: Banks are best place to exchange currency. Many places accept US$ rather than Quetzals. However, Quetzals are very important to have in the countryside. You will not be able to exchange travels checks outside Guatemala City. If coming into Guatemala from surrounding countries, you may find that currencies from those countries may be nearly impossible to exchange.

Credit cards: Visa, Master Card. American Express in larger establishments.

Climate

The coastal areas (lowlands) are tropical and rainy with temperatures usually 85-95 F. The dry season is from October to May when the humidity is lowest. Rain will fall on the Caribbean coast at any time. December and January are the coolest months while March and April are the hottest. Bug repellent is recommended.

Our correspondent Mark ventures into the forests of Guatemala to spend a night on the Great Pyramid of the Lost World and recalls an amazingly sophisticated culture only beginning to be unveiled by today’s society.

A Guatemalan radio station once ran a brief news report on a team from a certain European museum which was, with full government approval, transporting artefacts from the ancient city of Tikal to the airport in the capital. The announcement excited little interest in Guatemala City.

A museum spokesman said later that out in the jungle the “confrontation” was almost eerie. No threats were made, no shouting and apparently no formal organisation. The Indians simply stepped out of the forest and stood together, silently blocking the road. “They were prepared to wait forever,” the spokesman added.

The trucks turned around and lumbered back up the jungle track. Los Indios had calmly, but decisively, closed the door out of the ancient Mayan capital. In the time frame of Tikal the whole incident took just a fraction of a heartbeat.

Although the site was originally settled around 400BC, the six huge temple pyramids that are the hallmark of Tikal were built about a thousand years later, at the height of the Mayan civilisation.

Excavation has been going on almost continuously since the 1950s and the jungle has, so far, been coerced into giving up over a hundred of Tikal’s structures. Walk 20m in any direction though, and you enter the gloom of the tropical forest. The buildings lying off to the side of the temple courtyards are still strangled with centuries of rioting vegetation and even a cursory investigation into the forest reveals mounds of half-buried dwellings — “hillocks” that strike you as being obviously out-of-place under the rainforest’s otherwise un-crumpled carpet.

It’s the brooding nearness of the jungle — far more enduring, far more patient even than the Indians — that gives Tikal a power that even the Great Pyramids of Egypt, as they become an annex of Cairo, may have lost.

It wasn’t thoughts of this kind that occupied me however, as I climbed the stone face of the Great Pyramid in the area known today as El Mundo Perdido — The Lost World. I was beginning to appreciate the theory that these temples were once used as sacrificial altars from where victims were hurled directly into the lap of the gods by the high priests. The gods still claim their due — in recent years several visitors have died falling down the bloodthirsty flanks of Tikal’s pyramids.

In semi-darkness I felt cautiously for each step as I climbed out of the forest canopy. On the pyramid’s flat summit, the sky was sprinkled with a more dizzying array of stars than I had ever seen. The Lost World was originally aligned as a celestial observatory and reeling under this glittering blanket that seemed to be draped purposefully over the Great Pyramid, it was easy to understand the Mayan preoccupation with the cosmos.

I fell asleep some time after the last calls of the birds had been replaced by the buzz of tree frogs. When I awoke the harsh, roaring choke of a cold engine was still echoing through the last patches of dawn mist.

The call of a howler monkey once heard is never forgotten. To say that they “howl” doesn’t do justice to their unbelievable roar. More reminiscent of a dinosaur than a primate.

The hazy dawn had revealed Gran Jaguar (the tallest of Tikal’s pyramids at 44m) and its sister temple. They looked hauntingly alien as their vertical altars reared up, out of a world that as far as the eye could see was nothing but greenery.

My drowsy sentiments on “the dawn of time” and “lost civilisations” were quashed by a momentous realisation: I was perched on the very spot from where the rebel fortress in Star War was filmed.

I eased my way back down the stairway as spider monkeys swung through the trees on the border of the ‘Northern Acropolis — the heart of the city. The priests were the real rulers of the Mayan Empire. As their power increased they developed an authority that few dared to question.

Tikal was far more than merely a religious complex, though. During the period of the city’s supremacy (about 700AD) it contained palaces, steam-baths, market places, work-shops and homes for up to 100,000 people. Its inhabitants were craftsmen, traders, agriculturalists and involved in the policing and administration of a region so finely tuned it was capable of supporting ten-times the number of people who struggle to carve a living out of it today.

Then, over 500 years before the arrival of the Spanish Conquistadors, Tikal and with it the whole of the Mayan Empire, mysteriously collapsed. The jungle keeps its secrets as securely as the Indians and in a short time it had cloaked the 48 square kilometres of the city to such an extent that it was not “re-discovered” for another thousand years.

The Indians who stopped the museums convoy still worship many of the same powers that controlled the inhabitants of Tikal and they still make sacrifices to the Mayan calendar. As the museum employee noted, there is all enduring patience in the expression and posture of the indigenous people of Guatemala — an almost disturbing serenity that seems to say “time is on our side”.

Mankind may never “relearn” much of the great store of knowledge that disappeared with the Mayan civilisation. Because they left records in the form of reliefs and hieroglyphics though, translation is revealing some of their knowledge of astronomy, geology, agriculture, mythology and mathematics. Hope exists that, as the jungle is forced back, the naked stone face of Tikal will reveal some of the secrets that remain locked behind the impassive eyes of Los Indios.

Indian life in Guatemala

In a patch of sunlight at the end of Chichicastenango’s cobbled main street a bus spilt its colourful human cargo on to the pavement. It was a typical up-country Guatemalan bus — a canary-coloured hand-me-down from good ol’ Uncle Sam.

Sent as envoys to Guatemala, dozens of these school buses have served out their last years shuttling Indians between the villages of the Quichè Mountains. This old “Bluebird” was still emblazoned with a sun-bleached inscription of “Oakwood County High.”

Chichi is a market town of an estimated 20,000 Indians. Every week a large proportion of these swarm into the town to trade everything from hand-woven cloth and blankets to turkeys, chickens and goats, to farm tools and handicrafts.

I weaved my way across the plaza, past yelling Indians who were hurriedly erecting the wooden frameworks of their stalls. Some were already trading, with light-hearted haggling in Quichè being volleyed between the captains of industry — mostly portly women in bright, voluminous skirts, and experienced shoppers who know that there are bargains to be had on the eve of the market. Nobody took any notice of me.

Although attitudes are changing, as the tourist dollar provides an ever-more attractive alternative to farming, Chichi’s is still essentially an Indian market. Drifting with the crowd you get the impression that you are so far removed from the Indian’s sphere or comprehension that for them you practically don’t exist. In fact, to the Quichè Indians foreigners are simply ‘ghosts into whose hands has fallen the possession of the world.’

I paused briefly at the edge of the plaza to gaze up at the dignified white facade of the church of Santo Tomás. It was built shortly after the Spanish Conquest on the site of a Mayan temple-pyramid and perhaps more than any other monument in Central America it illustrates the confusion that Catholicism fostered in the New World. The Spanish padres directed their religious zeal into delivering the greatest number of souls from purgatory rather than wasting valuable time in instructing them accurately in the new doctrine.

When Aldous Huxley visited Guatemala in the early 1930s, he found communities who, in their misguided fervour, actively worshipped Judas Iscariot as a god. Huxley also described a bizarre local festival based upon the belief that, on the night of the crucifixion, Saint John and the Virgin Mary had a love affair. To prevent a repetition of this shameful event, the Indians locked images of the lovers in separate cells of the town prison on Good Friday. The next morning the two fraternities would come and pay a fine to bail them out of captivity until next year.

The religious beliefs of many of the faithful at Santo Tomás have (to the eyes of an outsider at least) always been hopelessly confused. Nobody has ever been certain where pagan idolatry ends and Catholicism begins. On the church steps you can frequently see Indians burning incense for their ancestors and chanting prayers in honour of the Mayan calendar — just as their forefathers did on the steps of the old pyramid.

Entering the side door of the church you’re faced with three statues — Madonna and saints. On to the robes of these, worshippers have pinned quetzal notes, or even dollar bills. The floor is littered with rose petals, maize stalks, pine needles and bottles of corn-liquor wrapped in husks. These are offerings to the ancestors who, it is believed, are buried beneath the cool stone slabs of the floor.

From here I walked down to the House of Masks where for generations the family at Casa de las Mascaras have carved and painted the masks for most of the region’s festivals.

After washing away the road dust at a rusty rain water tank behind my room, I sat in the dappled courtyard watching the patriarch of this little craft community as he hacked the beginnings of a jaguar mask. He turned the chunk of hardwood carefully in his hand studying the grain and with each thud and twist of his machete a wedge fell away and another angular feature was revealed.

As the afternoon cooled I climb the hill to visit Pascual Abaj, the shrine to the all-powerful Mayan earth-god. About 90cm tall and resembling one of the uglier Easter Island heads, Pascual Abaj is believed to be over a thousand years old and stands in a clearing high above the House of Masks.

The last time that I had visited the shrine, I had been travelling with a girlfriend and we had arrived just before dusk to see wisps of smoke curling from a small fire. Five Indians were in attendance at Pascual Abaj. We sat down quietly and watched as an older man with a strip of tasselled cloth around his head and the scuffed clothes of a farmer appeared to bless or cleanse another younger barefoot man. He stroked him with the flat edge of his machete while three women sat nearby, patient but apparently disinterested spectators.

The older man began swinging a censer made from a punctured tin can. Heavy blue-black smoke gathered in clouds, evoking spirits, around the idol. His face looked strained as he begged blessings for the earth’s fertility. I noticed that even to the Mayan god his conversation was peppered with words that had been imported from Spain.

The younger man bowed low and held out two eggs whilst the shaman farmer shuffled forward and broke them on to the mouth of the stone idol, his assistant hurried (it seemed important not to keep Pascual Abaj waiting) to their bundle of possessions.

My girlfriend gasped as he dashed back into the centre of the clearing swinging a fat brown hen by her feet. Between them, the two men struggled to pour some clear liquid into the struggling chicken’s throat (probably corn liquor, to calm it). Then, chanting under his breath, the farmer started to saw off the hen’s head with his machete.

When the last tendons were severed the assistant dashed, with the body still twitching in his hands, to rub the gushing stump across the idol’s mouth. They were physically feeding their god. The two uneven hollows that were Pascual Abaj’s eyes seemed to stare icily and the jagged gash below them was soon hideously streaked with scarlet rivulets of blood which ran on to the ground.

I realised we were seeing a ceremony perhaps twice as old as Christianity. If a poor campesino family will sacrifice a fat, healthy chicken, then it is it is easy to imagine that the great Mayan Empire once regularly honoured the gods with the blood of their greatest warriors.

To us, sitting in silent fascination amongst the trees, things became almost surreal when the old man stooped forward again to rinse the blood from Pascual Abaj’s pouting lips with two bottles of ‘Gallo’ beer.

Since the arrival of the “true faith” the Mayan religion had been consistently persecuted and suppressed. For centuries Christian fanatics have periodically ransacked the shrine of Pascual Abaj. Each time his devotees wait until the trouble has passed before returning to patch up the idol.

The Indians of Chichicastenango have had to learn to roll with the punches. Now, after almost 500 years underground, their true beliefs have re-emerged and they are free to worship as their ancestors did. Pascual Abaj is once again king of the hill.