From the top of the ridge more than a thousand feet above
Nebaj we had a great view to the west and the day’s trek ahead of us with the
village of Acul down below in the valley and the wall of the east side of the
Altiplano that we’d be climbing the next morning about ten miles ahead of us .
The drop down into Acul was a fairly gentle one.

Acul, the main town in the valley is primarily Quiche
speaking, a different Mayan language from the Ixil spoken in Nebaj. It’s
interesting that while there are aspects of common culture throughout the Mayan
world from the Yucatan and Chiapas in Mexico to the borders of Honduras and El
Salvador, the Mayans speak over twenty fully different languages.

I found Acul to be a quite nice little village, somewhat
less messy than many others in Guatemala, and in a fairly idyllic setting in a
very green valley with mountains in all directions. As we walked through town,
Andrew (our guide) suggested we take note of the village’s church and the big
tree standing in front of it since they’re significant to the story he would
tell us when we stopped in early afternoon for a picnic lunch. Anyway, Acul’s
story is that it was the site of one of the Guatemalan Civil War’s worst atrocities
against civilians in 1981 when the army accused the townspeople of supporting
the guerillas, herded them all into the church, selected a significant number
of them to be shot, and burned down all the buildings in town leaving only the
church and the big tree standing .

While I recall the conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua to
be almost constantly in the news through much of the 1980s as the U.S.
supported the Contras trying to overthrow the Cuban-supported Sandinista
government in Nicaragua as well as the government of El Salvador fighting its
own civil war against a leftist insurgency, I don’t remember the civil war in
Guatemala being much in the news, perhaps because U.S. policy at the time wasn’t
as controversial. The stats, though, are substantial with estimates as high as
200,000 Guatemalans killed in the conflict and up to a million fleeing to
Mexico, the large majority of the victims being Mayans in the Highlands killed
or tortured by the Guatemalan army for allegedly supporting or giving aid to
the leftist guerrillas. Conditions were bad enough that the U.S. eventually
suspended support for the Guatemalan government in 1986, and it was not until
1996 that a peace agreement was finally signed to end what it considered to
have been 36 years of war in the country . It is amazing to me that so much of
Latin America (Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, Nicaragua, Peru) was deep in
armed conflict when I was of college age and so much more of it under
dictatorships of various sorts, while now there are no ongoing wars that I can
think of in the hemisphere and all but a but a few countries are now at least
mostly democratic.

A short distance beyond Acul we made a stop at a beautiful
dairy farm owned by an Italian immigrant family to purchase some cheese that
would be part of our lunches for the next three days. The cheese is one of
Guatemala’s best known and is much more European in style than the standard
cheese you generally encounter in Latin America. We continued for about an hour
further past another village named Xexucap to a beautiful picnic spot for a lunch
of bread, black bean paste, vegetables, cheese, and tortilla chips.

From there it was another hour and a half or so of walking
mostly uphill on a dusty dirt road to Xexocom, a village of about 40 families
that was our stop for the night . Our accommodations were on the floor in the
village’s schoolhouse, although I saw little indication that the building was
actually used as a school. The village has no connection to an electrical grid
and apparently only one generator that can be moved around and turned on at times
to provide some light. We bought a few (warm) beers at the village’s little
tienda and set off for dinner and a temescal at a family home a short distance
up the hill.

“What’s a temescal?” you might be wondering. A temescal is
essentially a Mayan version of a sauna, something I’ve also heard described as
being like a human pizza oven. It’s a small domed enclosure with a door which
can accommodate about two people at a time (maybe more if the people are little
Mayans) and is heated with a wood fire. Water is heated to create steam as well
as to pour over yourself as a bath while you are inside. While not exactly a
substitute for a shower, I did leave the temescal feeling warmed and refreshed .


Dinner consisted of a generous portion of rice, beans, egg,
and unlimited tamales. We all went to bed in our sleeping bags on our sleeping
mats on the floor of the school almost immediately after dinner. Hey, there’s
not much to do after dark in a town without electricity, especially when you
have to get up at 3:45 A.M. to start hiking again. Hiking at 4:00 A.M.? Yes,
that will begin my next blog entry.