GUATEMALA CITY – The city sparkled below me like a carpet of diamonds, flung carelessly over the valley and clinging to the surrounding mountains. This is probably as beautiful as Guatemala’s capital city gets, I thought, then scolded myself for the unwelcome thought. I only know the city from reading about it, and from a single pass through to the airport. Hardly enough to judge. I should know by now that you can’t judge a city by the media coverage – look at Mexico City, for example, which I’ve come to love.
And indeed my first night in the Guatemala City has put the lie to the widespread condemnation of Central America’s largest megalopolis. Thanks to Couchsurfing.com, I had friends waiting for me with dinner and directions, maps and guides and ideas for my project. I took a taxi to their beautiful home next to a park in a leafy neighborhood in Zona 2 and received a family welcome.
Couchsurfing, for the uninitiated, is an international web-based community of people who like to travel and learn about other cultures, but don’t necessarily want to spend a fortune on hotels. Members offer to share their couch or bed with travelers for a night or two or three. There is no charge, only an unspoken agreement that someday you’ll offer a space for another traveler. Besides saving money, the system gives immediate entry and insight into the local culture.
I’d heard rave reviews about couchsurfing and decided one day to give it a try. Just a day ago, I sat in a café in St. Louis, Mo., and entered my profile, then scanned a list of about 70 members from Guatemala City. Jose David Diaz, a Guatemalan restoration ecologist who works with the Ministry of the Environment, was my top choice, and I dropped him a line. A few minutes later, I received a warm welcome.
The next night, here I was, eating dinner with him and his parents – Cristina, his mother, had made chili con carne Texas-style especially for me, and a wonderful watercress fritter, Swiss chard with red sweet peppers, corn on the cob and fresh corn tortillas. She’d outdone herself.
Jose David, for his part, shared with me information about several groups he knows about who are working on interesting projects – a watershed protection project in the eastern province of Baja Verapaz, near the city of Coban, where I have been planning to go already; and a collaborative project of indigenous communities in the Central Highlands who are working together to protect the forests from timber poaching and other destructive incursions. He also showed me an excellent website with topographic maps of the entire country, and gave me his brief overview of the country’s environmental status.
He worries about the petroleum exploration going on in the Lago del Tigre wetlands preserve to the south.
“It’s a very fragile, very special habitat and I just can’t bear to think of what would happen if there were an accident,” he said, and we both shuddered, thinking of the environmental disaster currently unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. Just today, the news emerged that the mile-deep oil well leak is spewing not 1,000 barrels a day, but 5,000, and scientists fear it will wipe out fragile ecosystems along the Gulf Coast.
Jose David has given me his bedroom while he sleeps on a mattress in the living room. What amazing hospitality! It’s a beautiful room, spacious with a huge window looking out onto a tiny back garden. Pictures and mementos from his world travels are everywhere: Santiago Compostela and Madrid, Amsterdam and Africa, Honduras and El Salvador.
Yesterday’s trip was a good one – I sat next to a Guatemalan technology engineer with a renewable energy company who travels to China and Hong Kong regularly for his work.
He told me the Chinese are investing heavily in wind and solar, something I’ve been hearing in other quarters. He told me of driving through miles and miles of windmill farms on the outskirts of Shanghai – “This is not Don Quixote,” he exclaimed. “This is real!”
Meanwhile, we shared a moment of sadness about the massive oil slick approaches the Gulf Coast. Great Britain, he said, is pulling back from offshore drilling. So far, no word on this from the Obama administration.
At the same time, he was troubled by the harsh new Arizona law requiring immigrants to carry ID with them at all times – not surprising, as the law’s passage has dominated newspapers throughout Latin America and drawn criticism from regional leaders.
“Apparently Americans don’t realize that it’s the immigrants who keep the economy going,” he said. “After all, everybody in America comes from Europe. So they are immigrants too!”
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