The Living Maya

The Guatemala highlands are where the Maya never left. In the villages around Lake Atitlán, each town speaks its own language — Tz'utujil in Santiago, Kaqchikel in San Pedro, K'iche' in the highlands above — and each has its own textiles, its own saints, its own way of making tortillas. You cross the lake by boat and the language changes before you dock. Antigua is the entry point: a colonial city frozen in time, its cobblestones worn smooth, its churches half-destroyed by earthquakes and left as ruins that are more beautiful than the originals. Three volcanoes watch over it — Agua, Fuego, Acatenango — and Fuego still erupts. Chichicastenango has the largest indigenous market in Central America: two days a week, the highlands converge here in a riot of textiles, ceramics, candles, and copal smoke. This isn't the Guatemala of volcano camping and Tikal sunrise (though those are there too). This is the other Guatemala — the one where you sit in a courtyard drinking coffee that was grown on the hill behind you, where a weaver shows you how her grandmother's patterns tell a story, and where the market vendor remembers your name from last time.