Mine´s a Tepuzcuintle (no ice)

Ok, been a week or so since I last posted and in the meantime I've loaded up some more photos from Mexico and Guatemala onto the archive which you can see here. We´re now in Antigua about to climb a live volcano (safe, allegedly) having just spent a week on gorgeous Lake Atitlan on an intensive Spanish course (muy bien, por supuesto!). This blog is about Flores however where we did a three day jungle trek into Tikal, the huge ancient city of Mayan skyscrapers jutting up through the rainforest canopy. Assembling an intrepid band of fellow explorers from the drinking partners we’d acquired crossing the border into Guatemala, a lively time was assured.

‘Botz’ was a British guy who’d been a chef in Amsterdam for 15 years and now ran a hostel (www.elrefugiohostel.com) in the mountains of southern Spain. A veritable treasure trove of gags and anecdotes, every story he told seemed to begin with a bottle of vodka and a handful of E’s and end in suitably lubricious fashion in a rubber fetish club. Then there were two bubbly, worldy-wise American blokes, Adam, a Doctor with tasteful tales of ‘rectal de-compaction’, and Stirling who was off to teach English in Colombia (a decision his parents were apparently less than thrilled with). Constantly chattering, when they weren’t dissecting US politics or practicing psychoanalysis on each other they were trading trivia questions. Thus creating a cumulative general knowledge of brain-bogglingly colossal proportions. So relentless and voluble was their banter that a couple of days into the trek Botz drily observed ‘I never knew the jungle would be so full of two Americans’. Finally there was Darcy, a lean, softly spoken Canadian scaffolder who was working on the tar sands in Alberta helping to extract filthy hydrocarbons. We needed to talk about climate change. Seriously.

In the village at the start of the trek we were met by our Mayan guide ‘Cristobal Dos’, and his cousin ‘Cristobal Uno’. Senor Numero Uno was a grinning, gold-toothed geezer in a vest and cowboy hat who spent several minutes briskly extolling the virtues of smoking weed, or ‘crema’ as he referred to it, to enhance the jungle experience. Consummate salesman that he was he bigged up the product then whipped out a package to sate our whetted appetites.

We set off with our pair of mules led by Cristobal Dos’s nephew Ramiro (it was of course all a very family affair) and the usual entourage of yipping mutts. The canine escort included one frail Chihuahua so meek and pathetic in appearance you didn’t really fancy it’s longterm prospects in the, often literally, ‘dog eat dog’ world of Guatemalan villages.

As we trotted along a dirt track towards the biotope reserve we passed the mangled remains of a, thankfully very dead, large black and orange tarantula that hordes of industrious ants were busily dismantling for dinner. Cristobal Dos was merrily pointing out ‘plantas medicinalis’ to us, demonstrating a handy ‘baby sedative’ (well it made babies stop crying and go to sleep anyway), a useful Immodium substitute that caused constipation quaintly called ‘tapaculo’ (literally ‘plugarse’) and a quinine plant which we all nibbled leaves from and began hankering vainly for cool gin and tonics.

At dusk Cristobal Dos led us, like Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred, to the Bat Cave at El Zotz (El Zotz means ‘Bat’ in Q’echi Maya). Just before dark tens of thousands of leather-winged beasts stream out of a crevice in the craggy white limestone cliff. There was an astringent aroma of ammonia from the bat shit on the ground as we watched hungry birds of prey gather on the rock-face ready to snack on the bats as they emerged. Cristobal Dos informed us three bat species co-habited in the cave, nectar-drinkers, fruit-eaters and vampires. I immediately started mentally gauging the thickness and protective qualities of my mosquito net.



After a cold, awkward night’s sleep bent like bananas in our hammocks Cristobal showed us the highly venomous and strangely cute baby snake that was curled up next to the toilet. ‘Muy peligroso!’ (very dangerous!) he exclaimed in his loud, clear Spanish which even linguistically compromised dullards like us could understand. In fact, ‘muy peligroso’ was the way Cristobal described most of the stuff we saw in the jungle from viciously spiked vines and creepers, to hand-sized spiders and stinging ants. Obviously he was seeking to reassure us but the constant reminders of how nasty and brutish everything was tended to have precisely the opposite effect.

We popped into the ruins of El Zotz, a satellite city of the main centre at Tikal, a sort of ‘commuter belt’ ruin. It was wild, wonderfully unrestored and almost entirely over-run by the jungle. We clambered up the steep temples on ladder-like tree roots that gnarled over the rough stones. Looking over a lawn of leafy canopy throbbing with life we could faintly see our final destination of Tikal. Temple IV was poking up above the trees a long, hot sweaty 30km of hiking through insect-infested, jaguar-prowled, monkeyed-up jungle away.

As we trekked the howler monkeys growled out their territory, like the sound of tormented souls echoing through a long drain-pipe. Spider monkeys on the other hand were more direct and lobbed sticks at us, shook the branches overhead and, rather unnecessarily I thought – we’d got the message by this point, twanged their genitals at us.

That night in our deep jungle campsite Cristobal told us some appropriate ‘Historias de la Celba’ (Stories of the jungle) of ‘mal espiritos’ (bad spirits) and man-eating jaguars. The slightly spine-tingling tales of lone forest workers attacked and devoured by big cats were balanced by the bizarre nature of the supernatural stories. These seemed to involve the threat of being seduced by gorgeous ghosts and becoming lost to a world of phantom love. There was a method of protecting yourself from these solicitous spectres however. You had to tie a cross of red cloth over your groin if a woman, or over the end of your penis if a man – which Cristobal ably demonstrated using a handy torch. The Red Cross - a symbol of impartial humanitarian assistance around the world. Or a way to protect your bits from saucy spirits in the jungles of Guatemala.

Ramiro then tried to describe another jungle beast to us, which we attempted to visualise via our broken Spanish. The elusive ‘Tepuzcuintle’ took mental shape as we established it was ‘sin cola’ (tail-less), ‘como café’ (coffee-coloured with white spots), was delicious to eat and rather surprisingly ‘tasted like fish’. We also discovered it was around a foot long as Ramiro demonstrated with his hands apart in ‘one-that-got-away’ fisherman-style. ‘It’s about this big’ Botz, who’d been partially translating Ramiro’s description through a haze of rum and crema, offered rather superfluously.

The following night safely back in Flores we each drew our own interpretation of what we imagined a Tepuzcuintle looked like. The quality of artwork was, to put it politely, highly variable (as you can see below). Later at dinner we asked the Taco restaurant owner if she had Tepuzcuintle on the menu. ‘No!’ she exclaimed ‘Es muy caro!’ (It’s very expensive). We asked her to judge our drawings and once she and her impressively moustachioed husband had wiped the tears of laughter from their eyes she was only too happy to oblige.