Sunday, January 21, 2007: Livingston, I presume?

Said goodbye to Alice in Flores and Airek and I caught a night bus to Rio Dulce (“sweet river”), which is a town on, you guessed it, the Rio Dulce. We stayed in what was quite possibly the worst hostel ever: for Q20 (USD$3) we got a cold reception and a colder mattress—no pillows, sheets or blankets—in a dorm with paper-thin (wafer-thin?) walls next to the salsa band. Whatever, by then it was after midnight and we we’d already had to backtrack on the bus after falling asleep and missing our stop; no salsa band was gonna stop us from getting some rest. Next morning we hurried off to Livingston and the Caribbean so we could finally get some R&R on our so-called holiday, with Rusty (ex-Iguana) at his new hostel.

We paid an exorbitant amount of money for a cruise down the Rio Dulce to get to Livingston, which sits where the river meets the sea. It was a nice trip…



…but not worth Q100, no matter how many water lilies or hot springs you throw in.

Finally we made it to Rusty, who was waiting to take us out to a beautiful white sand beach on the Caribbean. This is where Airek’s holiday officially began, I think—when he finally found himself on the sea, splashing around in the salt water, lazing in the hot sun with a cold beer in hand, and playing a bit of beach soccer. (Mine had started a couple days before when I found myself sitting in a café in Flores, sipping a cappuccino and writing some postcards—my penultimate holiday activity.)


Livingston itself is a neat little town. It straddles two worlds: like everywhere else in Guatemala, the Maya simply get on with the tiresome business of living, while the Garifuna, like nowhere else in Guatemala but what I imagine to be everywhere else in the Caribbean, skip the tiresomeness and simply live. Thus the Maya run a lot of the businesses like laundries, hotels and tiendas while the Garifuna, when they must work, work in tourism or run bars and restaurants, but mainly they play soccer (futbòl) in the streets and music in the bars and wink at pretty girls wherever they happen to be. I know that’s a simplistic view of things, and it’s equally simplistic to say that everyone seems to be happy with this particular division of labour, but in a place like Livingston, simplicity is rarely a bad thing.



After a day off to recover from our big day out at the beach, I made the trek out to Siete Altares (the seven altars), a beautiful series of cascades within a protected area an hour and a half walk from town.

The walk follows the coast line:


It’s no longer the wet season so the waterfalls were just trickling, but the grey stones that make the cascades what they are were magnificent, smooth as pewter and nearly glowing in the soft light that filtered down through the thick canopy of leaves. And there was still plenty of water for a swim in the biggest pool—the seventh altar—at the top of the cascades; the water was deep and fresh and cool under the shady trees. I’ve been looking out over a postcard-perfect, volcano-rimmed lake so long I hardly notice it anymore: by being so strikingly different, Siete Altares was for me one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen in Guatemala.


And that was it, time to go home. We left Rusty’s at 6 a.m. in the morning to begin a marathon day of boat-chicken bus-taxi-chicken bus-boat travel. Without even a 20-minute break between any of our various forms of transport, we got back to the Iguana 13 hours later, just in time for dinner. Our parting shot from Livingston was this, the bizarre Chickenman randomly painted on a garage near Rusty’s. Why?