And by post again soon I apparently meant in a week or two. . .

My bad.

I'm in San Pedro la Laguna, a very weird little town beside the very gorgeous Lake Atitlan. There are a lot of drugs here. A LOT of drugs. As one young Guatemalteco proudly told me- 'Amsterdam de Guatemala, super-bien onda.' And then he burst out laughing. He also later went on to freestyle rap in the local Mayan language, which, while incomprehensible to me, was way awesome. The language is all consonants crashing like waves on rocks, it has a gorgeous sound.

Maria lives here, the matriarch of a drug dealing family. She's famous all throughout Guatemala. Apparently her kind propinas are the reason that there's such a lack of police here. And it really is a family business. Two nights ago I was playing poker with a guy who told the table that he went to Maria's place to make some purchases and he saw one of her small children weighing out grams of coke.

The bartender, who was playing with us, said 'That's fucked up man, that's real fucked up. That's why, after four months of living here, I've never bought from Maria once.' Later that night, when his other leads dried up, he sent someone out to get him a gram of yay from her without a second thought. He's a real nice guy, but he is an addict. He came here all that time ago planning on just staying for a week or two, and then he was going to continue backpacking through Central America, and then back home to San Diego. Two weeks after his arrival in San Pedro, two weeks of playing the role of Santa Claus de Cocaína, two weeks of acid and grass and mdma, after all that, he had blown through the five grand that was his vacation and his plane ticket home. He went to the bank expecting 1500 dollars, he had less than a hundred. He bartends at the Amadeus now. Nice guy, good card player, pretty good Beirut player, and a tough luck cautionary tale of a fellow. There are a lot of stories like his around here.

I'm giving an overly negative impression of this town, which is unfair. There's a lot of happiness here, bad jokes that get more than their fair share of laughter, a great little pub that plays American sports, charitable hostel owners, and more friendly interaction between US expats and locals than I have yet seen on my few travels. And a lot of people drink deep from the drug scene and come away happy and healthy with some really crazy stories to tell.

The guy that runs the hostel I'm staying at goes by the name of Seth, is a sweetheart and a half, lives most of the time in Seattle, comes down here every once in a while to check up on business (or as he put it, make sure everybody is happy), and consumes a massive amount of intoxicants only to go back home and be sober for a while. You'll see him tripping out on mushrooms during the day, come back that night to see him snorting a few lines of coke and talking about his plans to do E the next day. In a few years or less he's probably going to give completely into this wild excess or into his Seattle-based sobriety, with serious ramifications for his life, but right now he walks that crazy tight rope expertly. And he runs a nice little hostel.

Oh, goddamit, except for the other night, sonuvabitch, argh. I left that poker game, feeling ecstatic about winning almost three dollars (that's the nice thing about foreign currency, winning twenty quetzales sounds much more impressive than a little under three bucks, the night before I lost two dollars, and it was completely crushing), get back to my hostel, and it is shut tight. Knock, knock, wait. Maaaan, I just wanna go to bed. Knock again, no answer again. They've gone. The whole staff is out, no one is opening the one door which would lead me to sleep sleep sleep. It's pretty late, but these cats are very capable of partying past dawn. I walked back to the main area of town, lights out everywhere, knocking on hostel and hotel doors, no luck, no luck.

It's somewhere around two in the morning. A small group of Argentinians are drinking and talking in an abandoned construction site, invite me to join them, explain they're talking philosophy. Pura filosofia. I explain that sounds real nice but that I'm stuck out of doors, tell them my story. Most of them insist that drinking can only help my situation, which I politely disagree with, but one of them tells me he's a hostel owner, but his place is completely full up. Hell, I ask, you got a place where I can throw up my tent? Sure he does, and he leads me to his place, points out his courtyard and gives me a dirty blanket and a worse pillow. I don't want to sound ungrateful, he was very nice and didn't charge me for the space, but I was really wishing that I happened to have my sleeping bag and pad in addition to the tent. Eh and oh well, I pitch it, climb in, use my jacket as a pillow case and wrap the blanket around me, start fading into sleep. And then a group of happy youngsters pile into the courtyard with wine and loud conversation, a few feet from me. They talk for hours. I finally pass out for what feels like thirty seconds, and then it's morning, and it's really really loud. Turns out there's a youth marching band that practices next door, and they make up for their inexperience with volume and gusto. I now know the meaning of cacophony in my bones. Suffice it to say that I slept very well the next night.

Wah wah wah, anyways.

Hey, you folks remember my plan, dashing through Central America and all over the Southern one in only 6 months? Something in the neighborhood of 14 countries, an average of just over two a month? Yeah, not so much. Turns out, I travel really slowly. Also, it turns out, I'm very okay with that. I've been gone just about two months and this is my second country, and I plan on staying in this one for about a month more, if not longer. I like really exploring a city or town. Meeting a local cat in a bar and then running into him/her at a little concert a few days later. Finding a favorite restaurant and patronizing it a few times, trying out the menu. Getting a real feel for why and in what way this place is what it is. My next stop is Xela (pronounced Shay-Lah), also known as Quetzaltenango (good luck), and based on the good things I'm hearing about it, I think I'm going to get a room there for a month. I'll check it out for a day or two first, but if it is what they say it is, I'm really into the idea. Do some volunteering, some writing, make some friends that I'm not saying goodbye to a day or two after meeting them.

And a few kind words about the Alegre Pub. They have a wide variety of beer, drink specials every night, basketball baseball soccer on the many televisions, classic pub food at good prices, friendly Scottish English and Guatemalan bartenders, a terrace above where they show movies and where you can look across the lake to fog and forest covered mountains and volcanoes, and tonight they are going to have trivia. I fucking like this pub.

Oh, and a few words about stray dogs. There are a lot of them all over Guatemala. I've definitely learned the importance of the seemingly cruel practice of castration (I hate the word 'neuter'). They're hungry and unloved and covered in fleas. Last night while walking back to my hostel, past curled up dogs sleeping in the street, I came across three baby baby little puppies. They were goddamed adorable. I put my hand out for one to smell me. He darted forward, sniffed, and tripping rolled over on his side trying to run away. I scratched their bellies and felt very sad about their future, the diseases they will contract, they garbage they will eat. Walking away, they followed me for a while, whining. They will get used to a lack of a love, but that didn't really comfort me or them very much.

Apologies for the lack of photos. I keep taking pictures of the countryside, which is crazy gorgeous, but the fog and the rain, which looks so beautiful on the mountains and lake and jungle, looks totally crap on camera. And the very photogenic Mayans tend to get real pissed when you take pictures of them as though they were artifacts in a museum, which makes sense to me. To prove that this place is as stunning as I say, here's what Aldous Huxley wrote about it-

Lake Como, it seems to me, touches on the limit of permissibly picturesque, but Atitlán is Como with additional embellishments of several immense volcanoes. It really is too much of a good thing.

Love you miss you all.