The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [61]
“After two weeks I go back to the office feeling like I’ve really been somewhere, you know?”
“Right,” he said, staring straight across the water into the setting sun. It burned orange-red in color, like the circular bands on ancient Maya pots. Only when a boat approached did the Drafter drop his eyes to the lake.
The skipper tied the bow to a piling and jumped from deck to dock. He walked past us toward shore with a friendly Buenas tardes. Empty, the wooden craft left behind rocked slowly in the water, red hull with chipped paint, a faded look to its striped canopy that sheltered passengers during the day.
“I’ve walked to El Mirador, three days from the nearest settlement,” said the Drafter. He was the first I’d met who had been there, the largest ancient Maya city yet discovered, far to the north against the border with Mexico’s Yucatan.
“Wow, and three days back,” I said.
“Not if you are continuing on to Mexico,” he said.
Before I could respond another boat pulled close, but its skipper merely called out, “San Jose? Lake tour?”
“No,” said the Drafter, which suited me fine.
By the next day we were traveling companions. We discovered we both liked going to Tikal, about fifty miles north of the lake, even though we each had seen it before. He knew things, and I knew things. For instance, I knew how we could travel at one tenth the cost of the Tikal tourist shuttle. Just cross the causeway on foot from the island to the mainland, and grab the twice-daily local bus that runs to the village of Uaxactun, where the gum tree tappers and xate gatherers live. Before the bus heads into deeper rainforest on a dirt road, get off at Tikal, and, voilà.
Once at Tikal, the Drafter knew how to avoid the ticket kiosk, where a hefty entrance fee was levied on foreigners. The bus stopped on the old runway, unused for thirty years since archaeologists decided the rumble of propellers was destabilizing the thousand-year-old temples. We left behind the bustle of visitors arriving by vans and private cars. The Drafter led me around a pond with a sign warning Beware of the Crocodile, up a narrow path through giant matapalo trees, past a corrugated metal house where the resident shaman lived, and beyond, through a palmy grove once home to a family of indigenous Maya Lacandon. Emerging from the steamy forest, we saw the Temple of the Great Jaguar before us, rising into the sky. We were in.
By the end of the day I felt rather bad about not having paid an entrance fee, reckoning the money went to a good cause—keeping up the lawns, fixing stairs on lofty temples so ascending visitors depended less on grabbing tree roots for balance. When the Drafter wasn’t looking, I slipped the amount of the ticket into a donation box near the park’s exit. No use telling him, I thought; we were, after all, almost perfectly compatible for strangers who met on the road.
On the return bus, we watched another foreigner—French, I think—plunging one tortilla after another into his mouth, smearing each first with a dark substance from a small jar.
“I hate it when travelers make an exhibition,” I whispered. “I take it personally.”
“It’s the sauce,” said the Drafter.
The young man wore a shirt made from a huipil, embroidered in a dozen colors and typically Guatemalan-looking, but, please! Huipiles are women’s clothing. His jeans were fashionably ragged with holes at the knees. Even the poorest peasant farmer dons his single decent pair of pants to travel.
“He can’t help it,” said the Drafter. “Nutella.”
That’s