As this “summer” rolled along, the Lenten season in Antigua
incited a barrage of purple banners, street vendors, and heavier-than-usual
traffic. Swarms of people from the City and surrounding towns flocked in to
view the town’s famous Lenten processions. In the words of my roommate’s
brother, Bertram, the processions are, “like a bad school play.” Small crowds
of men wearing long purple robes march slowly through the streets, a
few in gladiator costumes to represent the Romans, with women in white dresses and
veils. A select number (maybe 20 at once) carry a long, heavy platform supporting statues of the day's designated depictions of Christ. Amid dense clouds of incense, they file along to the sound of the band
that brings up the rear. The songs are… theatrical. Think, a 25-member
out-of-key brass band, accented by a few drums and cymbals. At an overdramatic, low-budget school play, performed in your high school's parking lot. But at such a profound level of public reverence. When a procession passed the only Irish bar in Antigua on St. Patrick's Day, for example, the bar stopped the music out of respect. Despite the outsider's impulse to critique, these traditions are part of Antigua's history, its identity. And that we can appreciate.
So, during Lent, the processions wind through Antigua on a
maze-like path, most beginning at 1 in the afternoon and ending around 10 or 11
at night. The route is a mystery, but you will know a procession is heading
your way when you see people preparing “alfombras” - carpets. This is the
coolest part, much cooler than the processions themselves. People create this
artwork in the middle of the street using colored sawdust and a variety of
other materials (grass, wheat, flour, glitter, seashells, flower petals), laid
out in the design of a bright, beautiful, religiously-themed carpet. When then
processions pass, they walk over them, and then what remains of the carpet is
gathered into a bin and burned. It’s like an offering, but the practice also
has ties to indigenous traditions and the theme of impermanence. Where the
processions are, for me, underwhelming, the carpets that precede them display wonderful expressions of personality and community.
Lent culminates in Holy Week, which in Central America
equals vacation. Schools and businesses shut their doors, and everyone takes to
the beach. Other than a couple previous half-day trips (I visited a macadamianut farm and a homemade chocolate operation), Holy Week was my first opportunity to
experience Guatemala as a tourist. My boyfriend, Jon, flew in for the
adventure. First stop: Guatemala City. After a lively, mildly crowded chicken bus ride, we successfully rendezvous’d with Jon’s friend, Delia, who had
generously volunteered to “kidnap” us. She took us to the National Museum of Archeology and Ethnology for a glimpse of indigenous art and history. Then, we
hit a delicious pizza restaurant, and the city’s central plaza. Our plaza visit
fell on the occasion of an annual demonstration, in which students from the
University of San Carlos put on a march in mockery of all things authority-related:
The University President, the government, and the Church. They wore hooded
robes in the university colors and carried statues modeled after the Lenten
processional statues, except with figures portraying, for example, a skeleton
carrying a cross. Very interesting. We followed a few students to the bars to
wrap up the day.
Next, in an attempt to escape the Holy Week mayhem, Jon and
I shuttled out to Lake Atitlán, in the western Guatemalan highlands. We stayed
in Panajachel (or simply “Pana”), the second-biggest lakeside town. Pana’s
docks offer picture-perfect views of the two volcanoes just across the water,
and at night, small clusters of light reveal the other towns at their base. By
day, we explored these towns: Santiago, the largest but ugliest, home of “Mayan
God” turned tourist trap, Machimon. San Pedro/San Juan, where we had a pleasant
lunch of artisan cheese and sangria. San Marcos, the scenic hippie haven. Pana
itself, most notably its nature reserve with rope bridges, waterfall, and spider
monkey playtime. And San Antonio Palopó, most traditional of the towns we saw,
where everyone speaks Kaqchiquel (the native language), and all the women wear indigo
blue “trajes” (woven blouses and skirts).
To get to most of the lakeside towns, it’s most common to
take a public “lancha” – small ferry boat. But between Pana and San Antonio,
the preferred method is to jump in the back of a pick-up truck with the women
in trajes and hold on tight. In either case, the postcard-worthy scenery and
fresh wind in my hair made these rides almost a destination in themselves.
After the Lake, we returned to a people-saturated Antigua for
the final three days of Lent and the biggest, longest processions of the
season. On Good Friday morning, the processions begin at 4 a.m. and go all day
and night. We witnessed the crack-of-dawn carpet artists preparing the streets
for these processions at 5:30 a.m., on our way to catch the shuttle to VolcánPacaya. We climbed the volcano, an easy hike by anyone’s standards, in a tour
group comprised of ourselves, a Spanish couple, and 7 or 8 teenage Israeli
girls who I can only describe as princess types. They all rented horses to ride
up instead of walking. While we made the ascent huffing and puffing, they were
saddled in, smoking cigarettes and taking selfies on their iPhones. Lookin’
cozy. Anyway, in less than two hours, we reached the farthest point our guide
would allow us to go, where the weeds and dirt under our feet were abruptly
replaced by rough, dark volcanic rock. It looked like the surface of the
asteroid in Armageddon. Towering above us, the mouth of the volcano steadily
emitted giant wisps of white smoke that conjured up images of an enormous
cauldron cooking some mysterious potion. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. On
the way back down, we could also see two other volcanoes in the distance – Agua
and Fuego, and Fuego was smoking chimney-style the whole way. It was a
fascinating little adventure.
