Curiosity Roving : V.24 : Lake Life
Curiosity Roving
The Grand Adventures of L Rose Goossen
V.24 : Lake Life
in which we make a splash
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Greetings and Salutations!
Welcome to the twenty-fourth volume of Curiosity Roving. I thank you kindly for your attention. To new subscribers, my finest hi-hello-and-how-d'you-do. If you've missed any of my past volumes, they are always available in the letter archive: https://tinyletter.com/curiosity_roving/archive
I'm leading with gratitude, as is often the best policy. To my supporters: Max, Flossy, Joy, Gloria, Nadège, Jim, Neesha, Ayushmaan, Vincent, Lane, Marcus, and Andrea : my heartfelt thanks for your donations to my cause. I got two very cute emails from the platform with the subject line "Your wish is granted" when my two wishlist items were financed. It's been emotional. I'm safe, I'm comfortable, and I'm feeling the love. Thank you.
I'm leading with gratitude, as is often the best policy. To my supporters: Max, Flossy, Joy, Gloria, Nadège, Jim, Neesha, Ayushmaan, Vincent, Lane, Marcus, and Andrea : my heartfelt thanks for your donations to my cause. I got two very cute emails from the platform with the subject line "Your wish is granted" when my two wishlist items were financed. It's been emotional. I'm safe, I'm comfortable, and I'm feeling the love. Thank you.
all of the aboveI'm also feeling very, very tired. It took two months of high-stakes tightrope stunting to find a place and a set of circumstances that would allow me to stop for a minute. I found it and I'm taking a break. It is a time-honoured truth that my body will wait until I send the "relax" signal to serve the back-taxes on my energetic output, so I'm also recovering from my third bout of yeah-that-was-probably-COVID, taking a break from material vices, reading on the various permutations of good and evil, processing grief and other feelings, watching objectively bad movies with great enjoyment, striving to understand the basic tenets of fair play in this neck of the woods, and allowing myself to be so deeply drained. I observe a semblance of a healthy routine, and every so often I take my trumpet out to play.
Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego?
i live here nowWelcome to Panajachel, Guatemala. We'll probably just call it Pana, because everyone else does. Population 15 000, elevation 1597 meters above sea level, located on the northeast shore of the famed and sacred Lake Atitlán.
This is culturally Mayan territory, ancestral home of the Kaqchikel, the Tz'utujil, and the K'iche'. It was all built by volcanoes, and it carries a fitting sense of grandeur. Aldous Huxley, in Beyond The Mexique Bay, famously described the lake as "too much of a good thing". It is honestly a bit excessive, even for the most indulgent and permissive of aesthetes. Last month, I was stunned by the perfect cone of Volcán Arenal in Costa Rica, then I arrived here and laughed because this looks a whole lot like that, but with two bonus volcanoes and a much bigger, deeper lake. On a clear day, it is a limpid, lucid dreamscape.
soup cauldronThe lake itself is a caldera that was formed by volcanic activity about eighty-four thousand years ago, and it is more than three hundred meters deep. It is fed by two rivers, and it does not drain to the sea, instead finding its equilibrium through seepage and evaporation. The terminology for this kind of isolated water body is a terminal lake, or an endorheic basin. The area is also alive with seismic forces, and the last large earthquake, in 1976, actually fractured the lake bed and caused significant drainage. There is at least one sunken city, preserved from the Mayan settlements of two thousand years ago and recently declared a UNESCO heritage site, which is thought to have been abandoned when volcanic activity caused the water levels to rise.
truly a bit muchFollowing the first supervolcanic event that built the lake, the later, smaller eruptions began to embroider the edge of the ancient caldera. San Pedro came first, and ceased eruption about forty thousand years ago, at which time Tolimán, and its "parasitic lava dome", the Cerro d'Oro, began to grow. Volcán Atitlán, which rubs shoulders with Tolimán, is the only active volcano of the area, last erupting in 1853. These three giants often wear cumulus sombreros in the afternoon, and the peaks are home to beautiful cloud forests that look nothing like the dusty slopes. I recently climbed San Pedro (the "easy one") and my companion patiently endured my breathless game of bromeliad search-and-find. All those hours spent wandering in the botanical gardens of the world finally taught me something!
not bromeliadsThere are eleven towns that circle the lake, with varying degrees of access. Pana is the gateway to the area, the place where all the buses stop. To get anywhere else from here, you generally have to take a boat. This is one of the most charming features of life at the lake: once you're here, there are only two modes of transit. You can take a tuk-tuk to go scooting around the narrow alleys and the steep hills of any given town, or you can take a lancha to go to a different town. The lanchas are covered speed boats that typically carry about twenty-four people (six benches, four bodies to each), plus the driver, who stands at the back, steers the boat, and collects the money, and a sort of conductor who mans the front, calls the stops, and throws the ropes. Your standard ride to any other town is somewhere in the neighbourhood of thirty minutes, and costs about three dollars for foreigners.
The lake is a different place from hour to hour and day to day. We have a local weather phenomenon called the xocomil - "the wind that blows away sin". It generally stirs up the chop between noon and dusk, so an early-morning boat ride can be spotlessly serene, while a five PM boat ride might have you rightfully fearing for your life. In a fit of truly spirited gusts a few weeks ago, at least one person died when a lancha capsized.
going to a placePeople will tell you that the lake is dirty. It's true that 1) there are probably dead bodies in it, 2) people do laundry on the shores daily, 3) the rivers that drain into it look none too healthy, and 4) there have been troublesome algal blooms in recent years. At the same time, the water where I swim is crystal-clear and I've frequently substituted swims for showers without any consequences. In a sleepy breakfast exchange that I recently tolerated with a new herbalist-in-training, she mentioned that you could easily confuse lake-sickness with food poisoning. I had to wonder if it was, perhaps, the other way around. Of course, two things can be true.
splash zoneTourism in the area has been actively encouraged since the mid-20th century, and it's interesting to see how that has developed. Each town offers a very different experience and ambience. I've only visited four of the eleven, but it was genuinely surprising to find myself in such a different place each time. Pana is home to domestic tourism - boys from the city who hire a boat for an all-day booze cruise, families who come to enjoy a meal and take photos, Guatemalan weekenders making a cheeky getaway. Tzununa is a hotbed of seemingly recent investments by foreigners who bought land and do something wholesome, like run a farm, a BnB, a bakery, or a kombucha factory. San Marcos is all quasi-toxic spirituality, with vaguely appropriative posters for hundreds of workshops in tantra-breathwork-medicine journey-massage-meditation-horse healing-etc. papering the alley walls. San Pedro is backpacker central, equal parts pub crawl, Spanish school, and adventure tour, and it's also the Israeli outpost in Guatemala, with signs in Hebrew that line the main walk and a suspicious prevalence of falafel.
interesting development
Digital nomadism has taken to Atitlán. Most of the English-language resources on Things To Do around here are blogs written by online workers who spend a few months annually at the lake. In the last couple of years, a group of savvy foreigners has created the Lago Bitcoin enterprise, which somehow converts used cooking oil into cryptocurrency, resulting in a prosperous circular economy and improved lake health...or so it says in their propaganda. I have no idea how that's working out for them, and crypto narratives make me queasy, so you can look this one up yourself. All I want to share here is the beautiful and jarring incongruity of finding that life in the setting of the global south now includes Bitcoin signage on every shop.
see what I meanAnd then, running through all of this like a vein, there are the ubiquitous, timeless institutions: the tienda and the ferretería, the boisterous church gatherings, the goats by the river, the signature textiles, the perpetual slap of tortillas, the bare cinderblocks, the two-faced street dogs, the barbed wire and corrugated tin, the entire-family-on-one-scooter, the gold-capped teeth, the bagged water, the stone-cobbled streets, the garnachas and chuchitos; the Guatemala of it all.
I live in a house that has a name instead of a number, in an alley too small to accommodate even a tuk-tuk. We are Casa Shalom (I've also seen a Dental Services Shalom and a Hotel Shalom). In the Judeo-Christian tradition, shalom is wholeness, prosperity, and peace. It is the end to which all righteous people strive, both in this lifetime and whatever happens next. Is it attainable? Does it matter?
don't ask meReader, I love chasing down the facts, but I know that I don't have the answers. In fact, as time goes on, I find that I understand even less than I might have once thought I did, and I'm glad. My questions multiply, my confusion escalates, and my capacity for delight and wonder expands apace. Thank you for being here to dwell in possibility and live the questions with me.
Phones are open throughout March - find me lying around on my brand new mattress in my big old room. We also have a guest room upstairs - you're invited.
Until next time, stay curious. -- Rose
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