#like yeah sometimes she gets transported to a magical island where she plays with cute monkey boys. what about it

[semisolidmind]

(found a minute to finish a wip based on a couple posts by @thesexydancingcrepe from a while ago; something about reader meeting the monkey boys when they’re kids, and the adorable shenanigans they get into)

the bad end boys, because of their “birthless”nature (one came outta a rock, the other a shadow? idk), are raised by…all the mama monkey yaoguai in their troop. since they’re nobodies babies, they’re everybody’s babies. they don’t see humans very often (or ever, since they’re on an island). but they're not horrible yet, so cuteness will ensue :)

[elmerinolatino-blog]

Guatemalita, Mexixi

Guatemala, and leaving Mexico once again

Last time I wrote about my problems of leaving Mexico City. This time I will describe why I went back to Mexico City once again...

..gotcha. It was just for a connecting flight to Bogotá, Colombia ;). I did not really go back for a third time.

I spent most of the past 2 weeks in Guatemala, with a splash of seaside Jersey Shore realness... in Cancún's 'alternative sister city' (stop lying Lonely Planet, there is nothing alternative about Playa del Carmen...).

Last time I also wrote about Lago Atitlán, the place that makes westerners hardcore hippies and sucks them up in a tornado of yoga, retreats and ceremonies. Did I get trapped by the lake? No, this time I did not.

Guatemala, on the chicken bus

From San Cristobal, I got a bus to the border. From the border of Guatemala, I got on the... chicken bus. This is the way the Guatemalan buses are known, although I have never seen a chicken on them. I guess that wouldn't be a problem though. It´s the way Guatemalans transport their bulk goods.

Chicken buses are the drag queens of the buses, just see for yourself (scroll down). They are painted in pimp-my-ride-like patterns, and basically look like a riding disco at night. The plate with the direction, above the windshield, is lit up with blacklight, and there are lights of every colour around the windshield. To make the disco experience complete, they play loud reggaeton or latino songs which sound happy but have deeply melancholic texts. Or reli-rock, which Guatemala is big on.

Every chicken bus has a driver, a guy who charges the passengers, and a baggage guy, who puts larger baggage on top of the bus. This happens as the bus is driving off, and after a minute or so, the baggage guy climbs back into the bus via a ladder at the front or back. My first chicken bus ride felt like quite the experience. As we stopped somewhere, and I had no idea about the chicken bus logistics, the baggage guy threw down some sacks of clothes. I was a bit distracted, and then got woken up from my daydream by his arm handing down some money. Right after that, we started driving again. What the fuck, I thought, this dude is still on the bus!! Is this normal? Well yes, gringo Elmer, this was everyday business. The payment guy looked like a young Ricky Martin, by the way.

A drive I thought would have been an hour or two (150km) took six hours. Guatemalans like to live along the road, it seems, the whole zone from the border to my first destination was built-up... nevertheless, it was a beautiful ride. We drove through semi-jungle, high green hills with banana trees, palm trees, trees with bright flowers... the setting sun cast some weird glow over the smokey valley we drove through... I was getting excited and ready for adventure. And adventure I got.

Xela, and hiking to Lago Atitlán

As I arrived in Xela, it was 22:00. The streets were deserted. The streets were also full of trash. I asked how far it would be walking to the center, and the bus driver seemed surprised by my question. He said it was far and that it wasn't safe, I would get robbed. The hotels next to the bus station were expensive, taxis too... argh. Fallen into a tourist trap... I thought.

But I found another guy who went back to his hostel and we shared a taxi. All good. Later however, I went out for a midnight snack and the streets (in the center and we are talking a 200.000 people city here) were ab so lute ly empty with regard to people, although full of trash and street dogs. Because I wanted to avoid walking past a gang of street dogs I took another way than I arrived and ended up getting lost on the way back. Woopsie... After half an hour of searching I found my hostel, however. Again, all good.

In Xela, I did two hikes. One to a natural sauna (there is a lot of volcanic activity around the city...) and one time to a crater lake (amazingly beautiful). I got the taste of it and decided I would go on a 2.5 day hike from the city to Lago Atitlán. Awesome! I really discovered a new passion, when we arrived I wished it would have taken a day or three more. The next three days I spent at the lake, relaxing. The lake was described by Aldous Huxley (author of Brave New World) as the most beautiful lake in the world. Yeah, before the explosive growth of villages around it, I guess. I was not suuuper impressed. The village I stayed in (not the hippie village) was medium beautiful, the houses were just quickly built without many beautiful details or finishing touches. Mainly just a collection of concrete floors on concrete floors on concrete floors. I did get a penthouse with a spectacular view for a ridiculously low price, so I decided to stay a bit. Later, I heard that the hippie village, on the other lakeside, has a view on the volcano Fuego, and that sometimes at night lava streams are visible. Wah, guess I should have stayed there... but on the other hand, I found my hippie village hippie enough though. Example? I went to ask for a pen in my hotel one afternoon and ended up getting my Mayan astrology sign read... :). Also, I love in the underneath photo that you can do meditations to be useful on earth.

Antigua, the return of Fuego

After 4 days I was done at the lake. I was in a -supposedly- party town, but a party town in Guatemala is a town with bars that stay open until 01:00AM. After that, by law, all bars need to close. Clubs too. You might understand, as a new Berliner, this gave me a triple heart attack and I felt deeply insulted. I had to leave. I went to Antigua, which is.... surprise.... an old city. A beautiful one as well, because it made me feel like taking my book out at every square, and to fall in love. There was plenty of that happening though, it was Valentine´s day and every bench was occupied by some in-love couple eating eachothers faces.

My cheap-ass hostel turned out to be the hang-out spot for the youth from that city. At night I was having a beer in the bar and suddenly I found myself talking to a young girl who told me that she was actually 14. I was shocked until I remembered that I was also drinking in parks at 14, so I really had no right to be shocked. Anyway. The next two days I reserved for a hike up the neighbour of.... Fuego! The active volcano. There´s an old, inactive volcano next to Fuego which is 4000m high. The first day we (tour) descended up to 3500m, and I made friends with Dutch sorority girls (corpschicks; keep your friends close, enemies closer... nah kidding they were kind of cool. I mean, they were hiking up to 3500m to see a volcano erupt, which is obviously something only cool kids do)... ANYWAY (omg I´m really getting lost in the details this time), we got up to 3500m and the last bit was quite tough. Remember this was an old volcano, so its sides were full of porous stone and very fine volcanic sand. We got to the ´base camp´(how fucking cool does that sound) and BOOM! Fuego erupts. It did not actually make a sound, but we were able to see plumes of smoke coming out of the top. Magical. This went on, about every hour. The sun set, left red-pink-purple-blue skies, Guatemala city started lighting up, far away, the stars came out, and I was left speechless, and wondering whether I actually took LSD or if it was all just real... It was... surreal, unbelievable. No description does that feeling and view justice.

At 04:00 AM we woke up to go up the top (4000m) and see the sunrise. I swear I slept two hours maximum because my balls froze off during the night and on the way to the top, even more so. The top was almost like a sand dune of volcanic sand, it was extremely difficult to walk on and I also really noticed for the first time that there is a lot less oxygen on high altitudes. My god. When we got to the top, the wind was also insane... and it was minus 5 degrees Celsius. My water bottle was starting to freeze, but it was sooooo worth it! It was like being on the moon. Clouds hung far beneath us, the valley was still lit up with tiny lights, the sky went from red-pink-purple-blue to pink-purple-blue, to purple-blue, to the most beautiful blue I have probably ever seen. Whoah. Of course this Fuego bitch did not erupt while we were on the top, but as soon as we got to the basecamp again (running off the mountain, it was like a sand dune anyway)... another eruption. I can really only think of words like woah and magical while writing this. Oh yeah of course when I was down in Antigua again I saw an eruption that was 10 times bigger than the ones I saw. So mean, Fuego.

Flores, a day through Belize and the Jersey Shore

The rest of my trip before Colombia was a bit less magical, just so-so. I decided to make my way to Flores, a supposedly cute island-in-lake-town, with some Mayan ruins in the forest close by. However, upon arrival (after an overpriced nightbus) I found out it really was just a bit of a tourist trap. I was annoyed by seeing the prices to do a tour (let me just do that shit by myself) and even more annoyed that the only way to get there was... by tour. I decided, nah, I have seen pretty impressive temples already and what I really just want is to see some ruins in a jungle setting. So I went to another ruin complex nearby, that was reachable with a minivan (honouring its name, it was so mini that I needed to sit diagonally in it for my legs to fit). I paid for that visit with mosquito bites, but it was worth it. I really could notice from the kids staring at me on the way that I went “off the beaten path” and half the village did not even know where the ruins were when I asked. There is a weird sense of charm in having to ask 40 times how to get somewhere. I got there and the ruins were... very overgrown. I suddenly realised how a jungle can swallow a city, there wasn´t much to see... just hills that supposedly have been houses and two pyramids (quite clearly visible though!). However, I got what I wanted, I ticked my jungle ruins experience off. In the evening I made a tour around the island town (5 minutes), found tourist shop after middle-aged American tourist after tourist-shop after old American tourist on a group travel (indicator of being in a tourist trap). Luckily, I also found a place with mojitos for a euro, to drink the frustration away. 

The next day I went for... Playa del Carmen, next to Can(oh my god)cún. Yes, Cancún. Famous for stealing the dignity of American students during their spring break. To get there, we had to go through Belize, which is such a weird country. It used to be a British colony, the main language is English, and there just seems to be nothing there except for huge ranches. It looks like a huge swamp, with some Louisiana style colonial houses, and their currency is the Belize dollar. It is basically the wet dream of every Brexit voter. All the hours I spent looking out the window looking for a sign of identity of that country, and there was just.. none. It seemed like the most empty place on earth, or the perfect refuge of every person who has colonial dreams and an empty soul.

I can only think of the pure irony that I chose to spend my three last days before my flight in ´Cancun´s alternative (soul) sister´ Playa del Carmen. That´s like saying a glass full of rum with a single drop of coca cola zero is a healthy alternative to a glass full of rum with a single drop of regular cola. Or like saying George Bush is a healthy alternative to Donald Trump. Or like saying that pizza is a vegetable because of the amount of tomato on it. The point is, there is no ´little bit over the top´, this might have been a toned down version of a hyper Las Vegas on the beach, but it is still a Las Vegas on the beach. And so there I was, cool alternative traveller, complaining about tourist traps, spending my days in the definition of a tourist trap. My first night I was walking to find my hostel, when I suddenly found what looked like a gay club. I had to charge my phone anyway so I decided to go in. The body guards told me that there was some shows going on, and I thought of course that meant drag shows. My gay heart made a little jump and for a second I thought I found the one place in this godforsaken hellhole where I could see a bit of a cool rough-edge underground kinda scene. Aaaaaaand then no, it was just a gay strip club. In a matter of 2 minutes, three of the guys came towards me to introduce themselves and to ask whether I would buy them an overpriced beer. I said thanks but no, I´m trying to watch my expenses, after which they of course left looking super insulted. One was a little bit more aggressive though, he proposed we go to a private room and when I said naah thanks he (before I knew it) rubbed his dick a bit and put his fingers under my nose (umm wtf, I don´t know whose definition of sexy that would be... dude, gross). I decided to get another beer and watch the place as an anthropological experience, now that I paid anyway. It was... interesting. Next to me there was a mum (I think) with daughter, son+girlfriend. Son+girlfriend were making out aggressively all the time, mum bought daughter a lapdance. There was also a gay couple where the one guy decided he would just save money and give his boyfriend a lapdance the whole night. And then, finally, my favourite. A woman who (with a look full of horny drunk pleasure) would signal the guys to come over, lick her lips to seduce them, then make an instant grab for the guy´s dicks as they were within charging distance. It was an experience.

Luckily the next day, I was reunited for a day with my dear long lost friend Marina (plus her partner in crime Katrin), who know how to party, so we shook our booties to reggaeton that night in a trashy club where ´ladies get a free drink´ (sexist assholes). At some point the stripper with the finger under my nose move came in... and he seemed to be busy with the local rose-seller for a while. So I really thought this was the start of a very unusual romance... but then it turned out he wasn´t actually buying me anything (bitch), and I just focused on dancing, laughing about the bathroom lady offering everyone coke, and the hen party girls who came out of the bathroom bit by bit making signs with fingers and noses to eachother. The bride had a shirt with ´Feyoncé on it. 

The other two days I just decided to make most of the place, go to the beach and spend as little time as possible in my hostel, which was fucking nasty (reminding me of a particular flatshare in Berlin I used to live in) and full of Jersey Shore kind of people (omg I forgot these people existed). In this city, an instant inspiration-killer, I had to do something to not go crazy. Luckily my hostel rented shitty beach cruiser bikes so I drove around quite a bit and was able to really judge the place fully (as you notice, I like judging things). Turns out, it wasn´t thaaaat bad. Some resorts had hired good architects and actually looked really nice. There was a lot of street art everywhere... and in some parts you could still see remains of the jungle that used to be there before people decided that it would be a cool idea to bulldoze 300km of shoreline jungle and make it one big Disneyland on crack. So all the 3 days I was there, I was feeling some weird sense of disgust and being intrigued at the same time.

And what was also quite cool, because it was Mexico again, I was in the land of the ´platica´, ie the land where chatting is an art. I had little talks with a bunch of people. One lady (I still have her business card) told me about her husband, who was a lucha libre fighter (the best one, of course). She herself was a massage therapist, so they must have been the perfect couple. And I ran into the police officer who showed me the way the night of my strip club experience. I had an incredibly boring day that day (reading all the time gets boring) so I decided I would just start flirting with the police officer. That was fun, he enjoyed the attention and I enjoyed the hitting on him. Sadly, no stories of arrest and soaps dropped in a shower followed, he was just a cool police officer.

Sweet juiceheads and (lady)bunnies, that´s all for now. Next episode I will talk to you about Colombiaaaa, because (guess what) this time I did not miss my flight. To be continued... 

big kisses with sea salt flavour,

your el merino