The Bake Shop! You don't even have to spin round three times and say the password, but it DOES give the impression if you try and go back it won't be there. Like all quests, the rewards were some 'phat loot'(4) indeed. Large fresh baked donuts with hefty fresh fruit filling, strawberry, peach, fig. Pumpkin pies and cinnamon rolls. We collected people's orders and settled on one each for ourselves. The fig donut actually tasted like fig the fruit, not fig the brown stuff in fig rolls. Back at the Quetzaltrekkers office, in return for a custard-filled, chocolate-coated donut, C got a much needed haircut.
With a ample supply of cinnamon buns,(5) we set off to another project. The Chico Mendes Reforestation Project, named after this guy who is very interesting himself, was recommended to us by several people in Arizona(6) and we, in turn, cannot recommend it enough to anyone who is spending any time in Southern Mexico or Guatemala. Although it doesn´t seem to have its own website the link above is a good account of the project. We spent a week there, helping organise and sort lots of tiny trees that will eventually be planted on public land to help reforest areas stripped bare during the difficult(7) times the local population faced in the 70's and 80's. There are several different kinds of trees from pines and cypress to some we don't know the English name for, which thrive at different altitudes and encourage biodiversity.
Armando, who runs the project, welcomed us into his home and we had many chats with all his lovely family over very tasty meals. There was a wedding on the weekend we arrived and we also got help with preparation and consumption(8) of tasty wedding food, such as spiced meat stuffed tamales, hot chocolate with sweet bread (though after Oaxaca, most hot chocolate anywhere else tastes too sugary) and of course pollo(9)!
We also got to help with the maize harvest, which is collected from the fields and laid out in the sun for 20 days to a month to dry.
After this, the maize is put into a machine (this is the part we helped with)
which separates the kernals from the husk and the kernals are bagged up. Some of these will be sold, but mostly it will provide the year's supply of cornflour for tortillas, tamales and other Central American food staples. Being from the UK, we were really curious about all the different colours of corn, from pale white to a rich yellow which look already cooked and covered in butter. Some were red, black, purple or a mixture of colours. They had different textures too, from big knobbly kernals to ones that were spiky. Apparently they all taste much the same however.(10)
While working we met with various other nice volunteers from numerous different places (Australia to Finland). There are exciting plans to build some cabins in the nearby forest and expand the project to include education on local Maya traditions and history amongst other ideas(11). Our time there passed almost too quickly and we were sad to leave. But after a week of constructive, useful labour the road was calling(12) and we could spread the word after all. Despite some warnings about hitching, the hitch-hiking (called jalón (spelling unsure) here) was in line with our previous Guatemalan experience and we easily cruised into Guatemala City. One lift even bought us lunch of delicious local chorizo and quesadillas, which hasn't happened in a while.
A lot of people asked us if we were here for 'the end of the world'. For those who don't know, this is a theory currently going wild in white hippy circles about ancient Mayans predicting the end of the world at some point this month. Given that we are clearly young, white, and hippies by a lot of people's standards, its a fair question. But it's actually a weird phenomenon. For one thing, as you may have guessed, no ancient Mayan predictions mention the end of the world. Its just the end of one large calendar made out of stone and the start of another. But for another thing, no one who actually follows Mayan traditions or has Mayan heritage is paying attention to this. And there are actually still a lot of these people living in Mexico and Guatemala. For the trendy alternative crowd to ignore this is as insulting as when the conquistadors first arrived and decided a mythical race of gods must have built the Mayan temples because the people they met were simply too small and the wrong colour. We haven't been able to visit any Mayan historical sites, which is definitely a shame, time and money and all that. We would have liked to. And you can't deny that there's a difference between the ancient cities and how people have lived since the combinations of different social problems drove them out of the cities and back into forests and smaller pueblos. Of course its interesting. But having been to Monte Albán and Teotihuacan we're not too sorry it was Tikal and Palenque (Mayan) that we had to miss. The large crowds of white people telling you nonsense about things they don't understand would have been pretty hard to handle. And we have met a few actual Mayan people. One of them taught us Spanish for a week. She was very nice and didn't once suggest we don't bother buying Christmas presents because the world will end before then.
When we got into the city we were immedietly struck by the return to a vast, sprawling mess of humanity and concrete, every square metre covered in advertisments for everything from soda that could 'refresh your world' to a chicken that was 'more chicken than a chicken' selling electronics. On our bus to the centre of town we smashed a lorry's wing mirror and a clown who borded the bus to yell at us stopped because there was already a preacher doing so, so our bus already had its component of madmen.
We are off to meet our host here soon and then will explore the city some more.
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Footnotes
1 - Including one person who slapped 20Q down and wanted "as much as this will buy!"
2 - What with her ankle/knee issues.
3 - Windmills are often linked with bakeries. See? Method in the madness.
4 - C would like to make it clear he has no issues differenciating video games and real life. He just prefers video games.
5 - Which lasted all of twenty minutes.
6 - See our 'No More Deaths' post for more on the project where people told us about this project.
7 - Read 'racist and muderous'
8 - One of which we were better at than the other.
9 - Proper fried chicken, the kind of which Pollo Campero (see last post) is only a poor imatation.
10 - With slight differences. Armando told us the black corn made slightly better tortillas. C wasn't sure of this, but his inner goth loved the black food anyway.
11 - Maya, because the people here are Mayan (see later in post)
12 - And our return to being drifting drains upon society.
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