The Rio Dulce - Part I
Glover's Reef, Belize to Livingston, Guatemala. Approx. 80 miles, overnight along Belize's barrier reef. We had a few squalls with lots of rain, but no major wind: 20-25 knots maximum. During one squall, when visibility was low, we met a freighter on our course. We made radio contact to confirm that they saw us, which they did -- but only after we turned on our strobe light. We slowed down, and they soon passed in front of us. In the morning, the wind began to die, and as our course was now W/SW, straight into the little remaining wind, we took down all sail and motored the last 10 miles to Livingston.
On June 14, we crossed the sandbar at Livingston, dropped the anchor in front of the town dock, and radioed the Port Captain to request entry into Guatemala. A voice on the radio came back that it was time for lunch, so the officials would pay us a visit in a couple of hours. When they came out later that afternoon, it was in full force: seven men, and a boy for boat handler. Despite the crowd in our cockpit, the entry procedure was relaxed. There were no forms to fill out, and no one searched our boat or belongings. The doctor came too, and collected his fee, but his examination was extremely gentle: he neither looked at us or Sea Quill, but simply snoozed in the cockpit for the duration of our check-in. The friendly customs officer directed the show, and without much ado, he welcomed us to Guatemala with a map showing the location of the bank, and the offices where we should pay our fees and collect our stamps.
Livingston is a pretty, coastal town with one foot in Central America and the other in the Caribbean. The population is a true mix of ladino Guatemalans, Maya indians (more correctly, indígenas), and Afro-Caribs (Garifuna), plus enough young backpackers (hippies) to make up their own identifiable minority.
We were back in civilization, back where the food is; after three weeks without any access to fresh food, and a dwindling supply of even the canned stuff, it was heaven to walk among stalls of fresh fruit and vegetables. The town is accessed along the river by long docks, where the fishing fleet and the daily catch can be seen at close range, like these stingrays, which Ulf said were "cool" and Jen said were "sad."
There are no roads to Livingston. The only way to visit is by boat, small airplane, or helicopter. But the river itself is a little like an interstate, as open launches, with mega-horsepower outboards, speed through the canyon to and from town. Behind Ulf, is a glimpse of the boat traffic; now imagine it at highway speed. (Next time, we'll take video for the actual hair-raising effect.)
Amid the 400 horsepower speedboats, Maya people still paddle their tipsy dugout canoes, called cayucos, all over the river, loaded with wife, kids, grandma, dog, firewood, pineapples for sale, water jugs, fishing nets, and a thousand other things. It's wild to watch them calmly ply the water, and even grandma and the littlest kids are paddling expertly, unruffled by the speeding boats around them.
At the mouth of the Rio Dulce, large numbers of pelicans cohabit with the fishing fleet, first customers to the boats cleaning their catch at grey dawn. When they're not in the water, or gracefully coasting inches above it, they perch in tree branches high above the river. Throughout the Rio, fantastic birds and birdsong (and bird-screams) are everywhere.
The Guatemala guidebooks warn us not to drink the water, not to eat raw food, not to drink anything with ice, to wash and peel all fruit and veggies; and still, they warn, despite these precautions, we will probably need a de-worming treatment once every three months we spend here... eeww! We began to talk about how lucky we've been so far, drinking the water in Jamaica and Cuba, and never getting sick. Predictably enough, Jen woke up ill the very next morning: due payment, of course, for tempting fate with talk of our good luck. A couple of days later, the lighter-weight Jen had mostly recovered, and since we were anxious to see what was around the bend, we pulled up the anchor and began our trip upriver.
The first few miles of the Rio Dulce wind through high canyon walls, covered in thick vegetation. There's a wonderfully cool stillness in the shade beneath the rock ledges, and the high, green walls are dotted with the bright, fluttering colors of tropical birds.
Ulf had scouted the canyon in the dinghy a couple days before and found a spot where local boats filled their water jugs. When we came to it, we dropped the anchor and jumped into the dinghy with our empties. We tied up to a tire someone hung from the cliff. A long hose extended from high above, where it came out of a narrow cave. The water was cold and delicious. A local man, who came to fill some tanks, told us that the water filters naturally down through hundreds of feet of limestone. The rock was moist to touch, soft like clay.
About ten miles up the Rio, the canyon opens into a low, wide valley with green farmland close to the water and high blue mountains in the distance. Here, we set the hook near the mouth of a creek called Rio Tatin. Before long, a Q'eqchi Maya boy came paddling out to Sea Quill in a cayuco. He came up to our boat with a big smile, greeted us in Spanish, and boldly asked if he could come aboard. We invited him up. His name was Hugo, he was ten years old, and lived in Rio Tatin. While we talked, a few cayucos passed, and each time, Hugo hid behind our cockpit curtains, so that his neighbors would not see him.
Jen was having fun, but Ulf (who was better informed) was getting nervous. Coincidentally, the day that we arrived in Livingston, the front page story in Aftonbladet, a Swedish online newspaper, was about a tourist who was nearly stoned to death in a Mayan village in Guatemala. The Mayans accused her of kidnapping a child. Later on our way up the Rio, we heard about other stonings and lynchings in Guatemala over the last few decades, each time by mobs who accused tourists (particularly, women who took pictures of children) of kidnapping Mayan children -- and this is where the story gets really bizarre -- to harvest their organs. Over the decades, the story has revived every few years in isolated Mayan villages, and a handful of tourists, and even a few of their Guatemalan guides and drivers, have been killed by mobs. In Livingston, we quickly noted that most of the Mayans were extremely shy; although a few returned our smiles and hellos, most would not. In fact, most seemed determined not to make eye contact with us at all. At the extreme, in the market one day, Jen waved at two little kids hiding behind a sack of potatoes; she quickly acknowledged their Mayan mother, but her "Buenos dias," was met with a look of unmistakable, absolute horror.
So, here we were, a strange boat at the mouth of the Rio Tatin, and here was Hugo, this Mayan child, visiting us without permission, as his hiding proved. Before long, Hugo's tiny little brother came paddling out to meet us too. He scrambled aboard. Fearing the worst, Ulf began to shuffle the boys off Sea Quill, but they were in no hurry to go. They were curious, and having fun... and Jen had just given them Tang! Eventually, Ulf did get them into their cayucos, although he nearly had to pick them up and drop them overboard to do it.
As it turns out, the hysteria about child kidnapping and organ harvesting has recently cropped up again in Guatemala, including the Rio Dulce. It even made the T.V. news here. The U.S. State Department has issued a warning to travelers not to engage too closely with Maya children, and certainly not to take pictures of them without explicit permission from their parents. A few long-term ex pats, including a doctor who serves remote Mayan villages from his boat, report that the situation is an "urban legend" that crops up from time to time in remote villages, creating a witch hunt. Although Guatemalan authorities have investigated numbers of times, they have never found corroborating evidence. On the cruisers' morning radio net, the jungle medic confirmed that the mutilated body of a child had been found earlier in the week, but that the mutilation was clearly the result of an animal (incidentally, jaguars are one species still present in the Rio Dulce). The jungle doctor warned the sailing community not to over-react, but by the same token, neither to be too familiar with Maya children when visiting remote villages. The whole situation adds a strange dimension to our stay in the Rio. For the first time, we cannot be casually friendly with children, which is a shame. On the other hand, the current situation reminds us of the "impenetrability" of other cultures, which perhaps we too often ignore, or oversimplify. At the very least, you now understand why there will be very few pictures of Mayans or Maya children on this web site.
In any event, we spent a pleasant night, without incident, anchored outside Rio Tatin, and the next morning we took Sea Quill into a little side river called Rio Lampara; but first we had to get ourselves over the bar. According to the local, who later showed us the way through, our pilot guide was plain wrong. Following the directions in our book, we grounded Sea Quill on sand between ominously large rocks. We were good and stuck, and couldn't motor ourselves off. Just as we were loading the anchor into the dinghy to try to kedge ourselves off, a launch with a 25 hp engine came through. The young German couple inside, with their infant, offered to help, and with half a dozen strong tugs they were able to pull us free. While Ulf held Sea Quill off, Jen went out in the dinghy to sound the channel, and found that it was impossible: a bar crossed the whole width. (Later, we learned that the Rio was exceptionally low that week, so perhaps our pilot guide isn't criminally bad.) A Guatemalan, waving from the banks, offered to show us the proper way: a narrow, deep channel on the opposite side of the island. The effort and adventure were well worth it. As soon as we entered Rio Lampara, we were enveloped in perfect silence. We motored slowly up the narrow river for three or four miles in constant depths of 18-22 feet.
The houses on Rio Lampara are simple palapas, like the one above. We saw women and children in front of their houses, washing their clothes, dishes, and selves in the river. They smiled and waved. We also passed the little place below... with a sailboat, almost our size, tied up to a dock in front of a shady bungalow -- and all in a clean, quiet river, safe from hurricanes, but still less than 20 miles from the Caribbean Sea. This picture really got us thinking....
That night we anchored back in the Rio Dulce, across from a sulfur hot spring. In the morning, after coffee, we crossed the river for a soak. Scalding hot water trickles from limestone caves high above, down to the bank of the Rio, where it sits in a layer on top of the cool water. We had to churn the water with our arms and legs to mix the hot and cool together to a bearable temperature. The result... was heaven.
To explore the limestone caves, we climbed up the steep mountain, and then carefully climbed down a hole into the steeper cave entrance (a Mayan guide led us the whole way; no, we're not brave like that...). The wooden stairway leading up to the caves is decorated with long, dried, undulating vines.
Lots of small rivers lead off the Rio Dulce, but not all are navigable with Sea Quill, even with our 4' 8" draft. In a shallow river that snakes through ranch land, we took the dinghy for miles until the river was impassable with fallen trees. Along the way, cows peered at us from their shade trees, while the free-wandering horses ignored us.
Later that day, we took Sea Quill into El Golfete, the first of two big lakes in the Rio. We rounded the north end of Isla Grande, and anchored in 25 feet of water in a gorgeous bay surrounded by thick jungle, yet oddly enough, no mosquitoes!
It was so peaceful in this bay, that we relaxed and stayed put for a few days. We gave Sea Quill a much needed spring cleaning, inside and out. We swam, and read, and ate simply, because, you guessed it, our fresh food was running low again. That's life without refrigeration.
We went walking one day at the Biotopo Chocon, a jungle preserve for manatees and other wildlife, including some really wild insect-life (massive moths and butterflies and beetles, and who knows what); the awesome, leaf-carrying ants were kind of mesmerizing...
We were intrigued by a Mayan camp near the anchorage, where we heard speeches and clapping by day, and music and laughter by night. There was a lot of cayuco traffic coming and going; every day, large groups paddled or motored over to listen to a certain man give speeches (always the same voice). We watched them erect some simple bungalows, in two clearings, where they nailed up hand-painted posters with the words "Historia, Justicia, Generacion...." It's an election year in Guatemala, so we wondered if they represented one of the parties? Maybe it was a local movement? Were they claiming the land? The group seemed well organized and popular. A number of the young men wore their hair long, though we had not seen any other long-haired Maya men. One day, we distinctly heard machine gunfire above the camp. It lasted for a couple minutes, and was followed by applause. We were now pretty curious; so after we'd been anchored there for a few days, we approached their dock in the dinghy, but no one smiled or waved, or looked even remotely welcoming, so we turned and kept on going.
Then an extraordinary thing happened. One morning, Ulf woke up and decided to install our Kiss wind-generator! The momentousness of this event cannot be overstated. For more than three months, ever since Jamaica, the heavy, awkward machine had taken up residence in our V-berth. We couldn't sleep in our bed without moving the hulking thing, and of course, every time we needed something from the locker under the bed, it had to be moved again. Eventually, the machine just beat us down, and we retreated into the galley/salon, forfeiting a full third of our small cabin. The final insult was that we had been living without refrigeration because we needed the wind-generator for power. In Jamaica, we could not get the 6" stainless steel bolts we needed to mount the generator on the mast. In Cuba, we bought stainless rod from Australia 31, but rolly anchorages (and the gods of inertia) continued to cross us, and the wind-generator lingered in our cabin. In desperation, Jen threatened to install the thing herself, but Ulf insisted that if anyone was going to screw up the mast, it would be him. Finally, on this wonderful morning of mornings, Ulf re-read the manual, assembled the parts, and balanced the blades; then we hoisted him up the mizzen with a bucket of tools. It was his first time in the bosun's chair.
The installation went smoothly, as we pulleyed the engine, blades, and various tools up and down the mizzen. High above the calm waters of El Golfete, Ulf comported and contorted himself like a trapeze artist. Finally, the wind-generator was mounted on high and we recovered our bed. Triumph!
However, the saga of the wind-generator continues. While he was up the mast, Ulf discovered that the electrical cable was pierced in two places close to the engine. The cable would need to be replaced in total, which could not happen until we made our way upriver to Fronteras, where we would, hopefully, find cable (among other things). Nonetheless, we were still ecstatic about our newly uncluttered cabin, and the spinning blades were music to our ears, as we imagined the day we would plug it in and rev up the fridge!