"Adventure Travel" in Guatemala

Mark J. Curran

Description

The continuing adventures of Professor Mike Gaherty and "Adventure Travel" Leader Amy Carrier investi gating the Maya Heritage and major cultural sites of Guatemala and Copan, Honduras for a proposed "Adventure Travel" Trip.
“Adventure Travel” in Guatemala - The Maya Heritage is the fourth in the series of fiction - travel - culture - adventure books on Brazil, Mexico, Portugal-Spain, and now Guatemala. Professor Mike Gaherty and AT Leader Amy Carrier are in Guatemala researching that country as a destination for a future AT Travel Trip for its “Adventurers.” They investigate Antigua, Puerto San José, el Lago de Atitlán, Chichicastenango, Tikal in Guatemala and Copán in Honduras, checking out the history and culture of both the Spanish and Maya Heritages. Emphasis however is on the Maya people, their lives and efforts to survive under adverse circumstances in post 1976 earthquake and political turmoil in Guatemala. There are surprises and dangerous moments for Mike and Amy, and difficult decisions to come for AT Travel.

Sujets

• Copan
• Fiction
• Guatemala

Informations

• Publié par: Trafford Publishing
• Date de parution: 20 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781698712307
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

“Adventure Travel” in Guatemala
The Maya Heritage
Mark J. Curran

 
© Copyright 2022 Mark J. Curran. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.
 
ISBN: 978-1-6987-1231-4 (sc) ISBN: 978-1-6987-1230-7 (e)
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only. Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
This book is a work of fiction. Any reference to historical events, real people or real places is used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Trafford rev. 07/19/2022
www.trafford.com North America & international toll-free: 844-688-6899 (USA & Canada) fax: [phone]
CONTENTS
Author’s Disclaimer
Prologue
 
Chapter 1In The Air to Guatemala City
Chapter 2On The Way To And In Antigua
Chapter 3A Little Bit of History But Not Too Much
Chapter 4Next Day Antigua
Chapter 5Antigua – The Churches
Chapter 6On the Road to the Pacific and “Puerto San José”
Chapter 7Back to the Highlands – The Magic of Atitlán
Chapter 8The Maya World of Chichicastenango
Chapter 10Respite and Planning in Guatemala City
Chapter 11Adventure Research Travel to Tikal
Chapter 12Exploring Copán
Chapter 13An Unlucky Number Back to Guatemala
 
Epilogue
About The Author
AUTHOR’S DISCLAIMER
I’m writing this book in 2021 and 2022, but the story I’m telling is fiction, combining history, art, architecture, and tourism, and takes place in 1980. My own travels to Guatemala were first in 1962, then again in 1969 and 1970 for very short visits, and extensively with my wife Keah in 1976 and 1977. I must tell the reader that I was uninformed of the real situation, especially in those latter years. To the tourist, the country was still beautiful. There are no excuses for me. The color remained, Guatemala’s famous indigenous Maya villages, small farming, and wea ving.
In 1962 I was on the buses, first in Mexico after classes at the UNAM, then to the Guatemala border and then on down to Quetzaltenango, all in a very folkloric trip. In that visit I experienced what amounts to a very sheltered view of Guatemala through an upper-class college friend from school days in Kansas City, Missouri from 1959 to 1962. The country seemed wonderful, a paradise of nature and with the vestiges of the Spanish Colonial Heritage and the modern views of the descendants of the Maya in their syncretic religious ceremonies, the “cofradia” or religious brotherhood in the church in Chichicastenango, the villages around Lake Atitlán and of course in Antigua. I fell in love with the country. I was even offered a job to stay, but graduate school was the goal.
The visit in 1969 and again in 1970 were the same, a whirlwind of tourism after Br azil.
I directed the Arizona State University Summer Program at the Universidad Francisco Marroquín (they called it “The Harvard of Central America”) in 1976 and 1977, accompanied by my wife Keah both times, in 1977 she well along in her pregnancy. Each year we had about twenty – five students housed in “pensiones,” and we all did the standard tourist forays on the weekends. (I think today it was a miracle that no disasters befell us.) The big change in Guatemala was the aftermath of the horrendous earthquake of early 1976. We at A.S.U. were seriously considering cancelling the summer program prior to June of that year but were assured that “things were better”. We saw the devastation of the “better.” But we also witnessed that “off to the side” business mentioned earlier: poverty was evident everywhere including the shanty towns down the hill from Guatemala City’s downtown and National Palace and evident in the countryside when we passed through villages and hiked at Ati tlán.
We of course noted the guards at the National Palace with submachine guns (standard practice in such places as Peru or Brazil where I had spent time) and occasional military trucks or small convoys armed to the teeth at various places, but the color was still there, the Maya ladies with their weavings, the battered remains of churches in Antigua, Guatemala City, and the highlands. Someone did point out to us the bullet holes in the walls of buildings in Sololá on the way to Lake Atitlán, but no one, and I mean no one, including that spiffy faculty at the University talked of the “Guatemala Solution” to the supposed threat of Ché, Fidel and the Left in the Country. I did have an inkling of the bandied about phrase – “Land Reform,” - but only in bits and pieces. It turns out to all be very complicated, and so much was not revealed in the international press until the 1990s from firsthand witnesses like Rigoberta Menchu. And I hesitate to say, the role of United States’ politics, military “aid” and intervention to in effect make Guatemala an armed, military s tate.
I do not pretend to delve into Guatemala’s “Dirty War” which lasted thirty some years. Suffice to say it is yet another of the great human tragedies of our times. I today have enough experience to know that most on both sides sincerely believed in their version of the reality. I have been chagrinned and saddened by what I have learned, and today’s mass migration north is therefore no surprise. I am not here to write a condemnation nor even a description of those days and y ears.
Much of this book will be the re - creation of my memories of pleasant times (not all, most) and what this small country idealistically could offer when at its best. I have had to do the same with writings in fiction of Brazil. I do not intend to ignore the ugly reality but strive to create a read that basically expresses my mindset before I found out the “other side.” I’m just starting, so let’s see how it goes, how it evolves. My only defense: I loved what I saw of the country and its pe ople.
PROLOGUE
The reader (hopefully a few more than that) may recall the book combining culture and fiction, “Portugal and Spain on the ‘International Adventurer’” of 1977. It recounted the trip and adventures of Mike Gaherty and uh, … colleague, friend, sometime lover, ex – fiancée, Amy Carrier in Portugal and Spain of that year. All was successful, albeit with some surprises, and we made it home, but now we are “just friends.” Amy was the one who is responsible for that decision. Okay.
It all ended in the “post – trip” meeting with Adventure Travel’s CEO James Morrison in the office in Los Angeles. He had great praise for our work in Portugal and Spain and an amazing commendation from no less than veteran Harry Downing (he of more than one hundred AT trips) for both Amy and me. James at that “decompression” meeting expressed a desire for us to continue with projects and trips, the one “on the table” would be an AT trip to Guatemala, with a side trip to Copán in Honduras. A significant part of that choice was my extensive research, travel, and teaching respective of that area highlighting both the colonial charm of Guatemala but especially the Indigenous heritage today and the outstanding Pre – Columbian sites like Tikal and Copán. In fact, I had done a preliminary outline adding Guatemala to our original Mexico trip, but it turned out, wisely, that it was just too much for one trip. Hence the “tabled” notion. James had kept the original itinerary plan in his files, so there was nothing new, I mean, nothing to sell him on.
Time has passed; it is now 1980 and I’m still a happy Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, teaching those languages plus respective cultures both of the Peninsula and the Americas. It goes well with significant research completed on Brazil, and publications, hence the boost to the rank of Associate Professor (with a freeze on the promotion dollars but that small raise came a year later).
Amy has continued with her full-time dedication to AT and trip planning the past three years. We are in touch but there are no romantic developments to report. Me, I’m lonely, not finding anyone serious in Lincoln although there has been a lot of dating of one or two of the Department of Languages and Literatures colleagues. So, it remains to be seen what may be in store for Amy and me. She did get enthusiastic about a reunion on the research trip to Guatemala, reiterating we had enjoyed some wonderful times together but re – reiterating she liked just being good friends. I’ll take that for now. We met in Los Angeles in April and set up the plan for our investigating the layout for a possible AT trip for the summer of 1981.
The reader may also have seen my book on our joint research for AT in Mexico in 1974, “Pre – Columbian Mexico. Plans, Pitfalls and Perils.” I won’t spoil it for a new reader or two due to mentioning it now; just buy the rare book (in terms of sales) if you want to know the whole story (the same message my “literatura de cordel” poets in Brazil tell the public when they recite only part of their story – poems in the marketplace or fairs). What you do need to know is that good ole’ Mexico provided incredible travel adventures but also Amy and I almost lost our lives trying to complete