All posts by Aleksei

Pacaya

Guatemala

Guatemala boasts an impressive number of volcanos, however only three of them are active. The closest active volcano to Antigua is Pacaya. It takes about 1,5 hours on breathtaking mountain roads to reach it. I went with an organised tour as this is way easier than to book your own transport. Pacaya is 2552 metres high. An old American school bus left us off about midway to the top. Visitors can only go to about 2300 metres, as the volcano is actually giving out smoke and stones. At that altitude though everything is covered with lava.

The view of the neighbouring volcanos from Pacaya:

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La muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Santiago de los Caballeros de Goathemala

Guatemala

My next destination was Antigua. I took night bus from Flores and at 6 am we arrived in one of the many bus stations in Guatemala City. Estonian Foreign Ministry’s website comments that “no area in Guatemala City is safe”, so I felt a bit uneasy about looking for a shuttle to Antigua in a non-descript bus station. However I was not the only one in this situation, and demand gave rise to quick supply. At 7 am we were on our way, looking at the streets of Guatemala City, where men with serious guns guard one and two storey houses.

Antigua is the old colonial capital of Guatemala and one of the main tourist attractions. The grand old name of the capital was La muy noble y muy leal ciudad de Santiago de los Caballeros de Goathemala. In colonial times it was the capital of the Vice-Kingdom of Guatemala, which went all the way from South Mexico to Costa Rica, including 6 provinces which became independent states after the fall of the empire. The nobles of every province came here to elect the provincial government and to participate in social life. In 1773 a terrible earthquake struck, the city was destroyed, and the Spanish king decided to move the capital to another city, which became Guatemala City that we know today. The old capital came to be known Antigua, which literally means “old” in Spanish.

Antigua is located in the highland valley, surrounded by mountains and faced with three volcanos at its southern flank.

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Tikal

Guatemala

Tikal is a majestic place. Chichen Itza and Uxmal impress by their style, elegance, sophistication of late Maya Renaissance. But Tikal is the peak of the Classic Maya civilisation, the imperial capital, majestic in its simplicity.

I got up at 3 am to come to Tikal early, when it is almost empty. I walked at times for half an hour without meeting a single person. During these meditative walks I was reflecting about what we see in Tikal today. As in most ancient cities, today’s Tikal is ersatz, mirage, it has a look that it never had before. In Maya times this was a huge city cleared of all jungle. Pyramids and other buildings were painted with bright colours. Many buildings that look restored to us would appear damaged to a Maya observer, as they lack important elements, arcs, roofs, passages. On the other hand, the way Tikal was first seen by European explorers also has nothing to do with its today’s image. Then it was completely swallowed by the jungle, almost without a trace of any building. Untrained eye would not have even recognised an ancient city, as the temples turn into low mounds and other edifices are swamped by the trees and the soil. In fact, new ancient Maya ruins are still found from time to time, because even from the air one cannot identify them in the middle of the jungle.

Tikal’s top temples:

Temple I
That’s the one we see on most of Tikal’s photos, Temple One, or the Temple of the Grand Jaguar. To me it looks like a phantasmagoric tunnel into the sky.

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El Gran Cenote

Mexico

Cenotes are enormous sinkholes, resulting from the collapse of limestone due to the passing of water underneath. Yucatán is formed by limestone as far as 2 km deep. The water has created whole systems of caves inside the limestone. On the special maps one can see that many cenotes are interconnected by subterranean tunnels. The cenotes played an important role in the life of the Maya – as sources of water as well as ritual sites. Up until this days traces of ancient sacrifices come up in cenotes.

El Gran Cenote is found 3km to the West of Tulum. I biked there through an empty road through the jungle.

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The City of Dawn

Mexico

Following a last minute change of plans, which I hope will be the norm during this trip, in keeping in line with the idea of freedom, instead of Peru I went to Mexico.

There is a hidden door between Brussels and Latin America. This door is provided by Jetairfly – this company has a flight from Brussels to Cancún that at times is ridiculously discounted. I have already taken this door twice before, to go to Yucatán in 2009 and to Cuba in 2011, and I couldn’t resist taking it this time as well.

My first port of call was Tulum, a small town about 120 km to the South of Cancún along the Riviera Maya. There was a good reason for me to go to Tulum. Four years ago on my last day before flying away I went to cenotes of Valladolid, then to the ancient site of Coba and planned to end the day by seeing the ruins in Tulum. However the door was closed right in front of me, about half an hour earlier than it was supposed to, leaving me fuming about the injustice. I promised myself to come back. And here I am!

Such moments happen from time to time as you travel. In 2005 we climbed for several hours the steep ridge of a mountain in Santorini, hoping to see the Ancient Thira, located on its top, which supposedly gave rise to the legend of Atlantis. Little did we know that the Greeks decided to give themselves a holiday, which we only discovered at the very door! A couple of days later we refused to give up, rented a scooter and climbed the other side of the mountain, on a winding mountain road, where the gravity seemed to barely hold us. The view of the Aegean from the top was ever so sweet.

Another time I pedalled for several hours from Stennes megaliths to Scara Brae on the Mainland of Orkney, all across the Western side of the island. Sweaty and excited, I entered the reception of the site, where it was cheerfully announced to me that the site is closed, 15 minutes before the official closing time. No argument could break the Northern respect to the rules. I did take a peek at the site anyway, from the side of the sea, where it is only guarded by a steep physical wall.

The Mayan guard tower oversees the turquoise Caribbean from the heights of Tulum:

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The Why

Thoughts

Exploring various materials about round-the-world (RTW) trips, I realised that probably the first question that needs to be answered, RTW 101 so to speak, is the question – why. Why am I really doing this trip?

I must say that over time as my feelings about the trip ebb and flow, or I’m lost in the minutia of preparations and research, I feel at times that I’ve lost track of exactly why am I doing this.

I guess the most important reason for me of what I want to achieve on this trip is to push my boundaries. Not necessarily in the psychoanalytical sense – I mean, overcoming myself to do the very thing I abhor. (For an introvert and HSP like myself, I don’t need to go very far to get to a wildly uncomfortable situation – an evening of working the crowd will do!)

Rather, pushing the boundaries for me signifies this rare pleasure which you experience when you crack some new code, use some new opportunity you weren’t quite aware of, and – yes – touch down with your feet in a new country. So it’s less getting a task done and more getting to a revelation. And by definition where the revelation will come from is unknown and unknowable until it does come.

I guess the dream of a RTW trip also means the dream of freedom, not being bound by a 9-to-5 rhythm, by any rhythm really, by any obligation. The dream of boundless discovery.

Freedom does not mean emptiness. And so the dream is also to use the time to write, to photograph, to conceptualise, to reflect, to self-define.

Main story

Thoughts

I am often surprised by the type of stories that fill our media. Petty scandals, local incidents, elections without choice – all this noise crowds out entirely the things that really matter. I think the main story of our time, the story for which we do not know the ending, or even the way it will develop until its climax, is the story of the climate change. That’s the main story.

Quite a few of my friends adhere to a rather surprising belief, one that says that humanity is bound to find some sort of a technological solution to the climate change. As if the humanity simply cannot lose. To me, this sounds a bit like magical thinking. We are so used to stories that are told in the movies, where we enter unimaginable difficulties only to miraculously come out on top at the end, that we cannot help but project the same narrative onto our common reality, where the major difficulty actually is coming up. I do believe that humanity’s creativity and inventiveness are amazing, and therefore that we will see various ways of combating climate change that we cannot imagine today. However I am also rather pessimistic about humanity’s ability to be altruistic and to abandon the narrow interests of particular groups in favour of the common good. I think that type of reaction only kicks in in view of an imminent danger. But the climate change may provide opportunities to deny this danger for a long while. And as we remember from the famous analogy, the frog will boil provided you increase the temperature only gradually.

That is not to say that this is the only challenge that the humanity is facing, only that it is the single one that characterises our times. There are major global issues that are not however unique to our time. One such challenge is clearly the food crisis, which refers to the fact that a major part of the world’s population is starving, all the while the richest countries consume endlessly. I also think that the major antagonism in the world is between the rich and the poor, and the difference has never been more acute – including within the richest countries.

Another challenge is of course that the natural resources of the planet are limited. In particular there is certainly a limit to fossil fuels, although in the light of climate change that perhaps is not such a bad thing. In any case, the research for alternative sources of energy will only really take off once there is a real need for them and the players opposing these new alternatives lose the enormous political influence they have today, controlling politically the United States, Russia and the Gulf.

I do think that at a certain moment the whole global economic model built upon ever increasing consumption and so-called GDP growth will come to a halt, as it is simply impossible to endlessly grow population while also growing the consumption per capita. Unfortunately this may come in a violent way, as the current paradigm simply does not foresee an exit strategy.

Cambodia part 5: two experiences

Cambodia

As a rule, at the gates of every Phnom Penh hotel an army of tuk tuk drivers is waiting. A tourist exiting the hotel is met with a chorus of voices: “Tuk tuk, sir? Tuk tuk?” On average a tuk tuk driver earns 4 dollars a day, therefore a single trip with a tourist – a price of which will be at least one dollar – can be quite interesting. Nevertheless it is quite tiring to argue endlessly with them about the just price. I befriended one driver who did not argue with the just price that I named and therefore got all the business from me, to the jealousy of others. On my last morning we were discussing the various tourist attractions. I had visited all the usual suspects with which he was trying to seduce me. Finally he reached a strange place called “Sooting Rage”. Sooting rage? Only after a couple of minutes of deciphering I understood that he meant a shooting range. I couldn’t miss that.

The range is found close to the international airport, and it takes 30-40 minutes by tuk tuk to reach it from the centre of Phnom Penh. The gates are guarded by two rather lonely looking armoured personal carriers. An instructor in military uniform greets you at the entrance and hands you a menu, quite like in a restaurant. Each page of the menu contains a description of some new type of weapon, which one can try, as well as the number of shots and the price. Judging by the appearances, the whole attraction is controlled directly by the army. The very first item is Kalashnikov, though I had the impression that it was of Chinese make. It costs $40 for 25 shots. The American semiautomatic weapons are more expensive: from $40 to 50 to 100. The revolver is priced at $25 for 6 shots. One can throw a hand grenade ($100 for 1), shoot from a grenade launcher (also $100). For $350 one can shoot from a hand held anti-tank grenade launcher (which is kind of shocking considering we are in the vicinity of the airport).

I have never held an assault rifle in my hands. Thus the first shot from AK47 gave some adrenalin to my blood. I had sound blocking ear sets, so could only hear a muffled sounds, and of course the rifle’s inertia gives a slight hit to the shoulder. At a certain moment the instructor switched the rifle from semi automatic to automatic regime. At this point you have to hold the rifle very strongly, as the inertia is so strong that the gun turns upwards very easily. The whole thing was quite indescribable.

Of course remembering the just seen scenes of mass murder, this attraction leaves a very strange impression. Cambodians, to a European eye, look like children. This instructor, who explained to me the details of functioning of this killing machine with a certain tiredness, looked like a child who grew up too early. The Khmer Rouge and their victim in the Genocide Museum had the same look.

The entrance to the shooting range. The instructor sits behind the computer, the ticket window is to the right.

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Cambodia part 4: Angkor Wat

Cambodia

Angkor Wat, this very name evokes the exotic temples lost in the jungle. For most tourists, it is the main reason for visiting Cambodia. Angkor Wat is a huge temple complex, which occupies many square kilometres in each direction, and is surrounded by several other groups of temples lost in the jungle a bit further away.

Angkor Wat strictly speaking is the name of the huge temple in the middle of the complex, however by all means there are many more temples to see. For example the temple city of Angkor Thom is to the North of Angkor Wat and includes a number of temples all united by a single wall. Taken together these temples are even more impressive than Angkor Wat itself.

Like many ancient Khmer temples, Angkor Wat represented Mount Meru, the centre of the world, where the gods lived, according to Hindu myths. Only gods had the privilege of living in stone edifices, therefore only the temples remain of the Khmers’ imperial capital – the kings’ palaces and other buildings were built of wood, and nothing remains.

From the practical point Angkor Wat really is lost in the jungle. The distance from Phnom Penh by bus is around 6-7 hours, and due to the constant flow of tourist a village Siem Reap close to Angkor Wat has by now grown to be second biggest city in Cambodia. The city has all the tourist infrastructure, even an international airport, thus in principle it is possible to fly here from Bangkok or Phnom Penh. From Siem Reap to Angkor Wat it is around 7 kilometres.

The traditional tour of Angkor Wat starts before dawn (i.e. around 5 in the morning). At that hour in looks like this (note the other tourist’s camera, of which there are endless numbers of all directions even at that hour in the hot season):

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