So...where to begin. Well its been over 6 weeks since April and I left Australia off on our wonderful adventure to Central America. I'm sorry i've been so lazy and not started writing this blog earlier, but in fact we have been extremely busy. The field school was amazing and I underestimated the amount of work that it entialed, but at the same time thoroughly enjoyed it all!
I don't really know where to being, but perhaps i'll give a brief rundown of the past 6 weeks. We arrived in Guatemala after a 37 hour flight through New Zealand, the US, and Mexico. Obviously by this stage we were both so tired and were glad when there was someone waiting for us at the airport. We went straight to this place called Antigua which was the old capital of Guatemala were we stayed with one of the employees of the field school that night. She had the most amazing house filled with artefacts and relics of the Maya: i'm pretty sure that her and her partner are quite well off! The next morning we checked in at a hotel in Antigua and spent the day checking out the town with Kim and Angela (two american students that were also on th field school). For the next few days we just explored Antigua and also met the other two students Paulo and Addison. We had to go to a Maya conference for three days in Antigua, which was entirely in Spanish, so not muich fun for April and I, but I guess it showed us how much we really needed to learn the language if this is where we want to work in the future. After the conference we returned to Guatemala City and visited Dr. Richard Hansen's house (he's very famous in the Maya world and I had to name drop!) then that night we caught the night bus to Flores/Santa Elena. We stayed the night at a hotel there and went to Tikal the next day. If anyone has ever seen pictures of Tikal you would understand just how amazing it is, as it really takes your breath away!!! I'll post some pictures so you can see, but basically Tikal is the most famous site in the Peten region (well its where all the tourists go, I way prefer El Mirador now) but anyways its big and its all been excavated so it looks pretty fancy. The next day we went to another site in the Peten called Yaxha. This ws equally amazing in my opinion, but not as big. We stayed one more night at Santa Elena then the next morning got in a van and went to Carmelita. Now im not sure that you would consider Carmelita a town, its more like a collection of houses in the middle of nowhere, but it is the last town before the jungle takes over. The hike to El Mirador takes two days and to be honest it was quite tough. The first hour was really hot and everyone was still getting used to the humidity. Well it got a lot worse from there. We stopped for lunch at a small site along the way that i forget the name, and arrived at El Tintal in the late afternoon. I was really excited about going to Tintal because it was one of the places i wrote about in my thesis, but i didnt get to explore the site at all because it was already dark. We stayed in tents that night and didnt get much sleep becuase it was so hot! The next day we started hiking at about 8am, stopped briefly for lunch and arrived at Mirador around 3pm. In all the hike was 64kms, so we were pretty proud of ourselves!
Mirador was pretty cool, not at all what i expected, but then again i didnt really have any expectations. We all stayed in our own tents and it looked like a little tent city in the middle of the jungle. Because i didnt have any expectations is was good because the camp was not what one would consider luxurious. The shower was a bucket of water, the toilet was a latrine (hole in the ground), there was absolutly no clean surface anywhere and the ground was super slippery with sticky mud. The kitchen was a long open table under a roof, with no walls, and the lab was the only building (apart from Richard's bungalo) that real walls, although it only had flywire as windows. All that being said, i fell in love with the place almost instantly. It was so tranquil, the climate was perfect and there was always some type of jungle noise in the distance, be it howler monkeys, parrots or frogs.
For the first few days we were stuck inside because there was the first tropical storm of the season Hurricain Andy and at this point we had no internet and no means of communication to the outside world at all, which scared a few people. But they had a technician helicopter in (yes helicopter in!!! thats the only way to reach Mirador without hiking) and the internet was fixed a few days later. Dr. Hansen took us on a tour of part of the site and explained to us that it was the basically the birthplace of the Maya. It was occupied as early as the middle preclassic about 600 BC, which is way before the big sites of Tikal and Calakmul. During our lessons with Dr. Hansen we learnt that what the field school actually entailed us to manage an excavation and write a field report at the end which would be published! We also had to write a paper on the origins of the Maya, which i still haven't done yet, oops! Anyways, we were all given our sites the folloiwing day, they are all looters trenches, which basically look like a vertical trench into the side of the mound (building). Our aim was to excavate the trench and see what the looters discovered and try to identify the function of the building in antiquity. April's site was almost in the camp and another student Josh was right next to her. There was one that was on top of the tallest Maya structure in the world, La Danta, would another that was on the causeway to La Danta, one that was to the South just outside of the city, and finally mine was at a place called Tzunun (hummingbird in Mayan) which was about a 30 minute walk from camp. Another student Angela was also there with me working on a different looters trench. We began work the day after we were assigned sites and we each had two workers. This proved to be quite a problem for April and I as they only spoke spanish and we only spoke english, but it was the beginning of a whole new adventure! Two days into working April had her toenail removed by the Cuban doctor as she has a blister under the nail and it had to go. Now you would think that when you hear that somebody had their toenail removed that it would have been done in a steralized environment, but that wasn't quite the case...you see the surgical table was a small wooden chair, the anesthitic was some iodine, and the scalpal was a pair of tweezers. The doctor didnt really speak english that well and kept saying "no pain, no pain", but there was pain and lots of it. April passed out and then had a small seizure, but she was ok. Anyways she recovered well and was back at work the very next day with a great story to tell!
As the weeks went by we were all very stressed writing out papers and trying to manage our sites, the time went way too fast! By the third week most people had finished their excavations, but fortunatly (and unfortunately) i discovered a burial at my site a few days before the end of the field school, so therefore had to stay an extra week to finish excvating it and write my report. The other students, besides Paulo, left in the helicopter at the end of the third week back to Guatemala City to attend the symposium. Meanwhile, Paulo and I spent another 6 days in the jungle finishing up our sites, and visiting other parts of Mirador that we didnt get a chance to see. I thoroughly enjoyed my last week there and it was nice to relax a bit and really enjoy the place. If im allowed, i will definately come back next year to continue excavations. Paulo and I got to fly out on the helicopter also and that was an amazing experience!! Flying over the jungle was cool and i could't believe that we walked all that way! We stayed one night in Flores at his grandparents house, and then flew back to Guatemala City (i didnt really feel like taking the overnight bus again) and caught up with everyone. Paulo was nice enough to let April and I stay with his family for the next 2 nights. We got a tour around the city on the first day and the second we went to the market and the anthropology museum. The following day Paulo's aunt drove us all the way to San Pedro at Lake Atitlan (which is 3 hours away!) and got us settled in at a hotel and enrolled in spanish school. So far we have had 2 days of spanish school and can already tell that we are going to learn a lot! On sunday we are going to stay with seperate host families here in San Pedro, so we will be forced to speak only spanish. We've been prety good at only speaking spanish to each other most of the time though. Lake Atitlan is absolutly amazing as you can see from the photos!! Its beautiful and im so glad that we get to spend the next couple of weeks here learning spanish!
I am positive that the next blog entry will not be so far off and not as long and once again im sorry for not writing sooner.
Love Catherine and April xoxo
