Guatemala: A nation of easygoing people that’s easy to navigate

Always bring marshmallows when climbing a volcano.

And remember the chocolate bars and graham crackers if you want to get fancy.

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Nathaniel Mendelsohn / Cox Newspapers

Scenes of the market in Panajachel, Guatemala.

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Nathaniel Mendelsohn / Cox Newspapers

Nathaniel Mendelsohn (front) and Asher Price taking a break from kayaking on Lago Atitlan. Guatemala.

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Nathaniel Mendelsohn / Cox Newspapers

Asher Price roasts marshmallows on the volcano Picaya in Guatemala

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In a cool mist one early afternoon last summer, I made my way, along with my friend Nathaniel Mendelsohn, a guide and a dozen other hikers, up a lush mountain trail, scrambled across a saddleback and set out, gingerly, across the forbidding, utterly black volcano known as Picaya. It was like making your way from the land of Man into the land of Mordor.

The trek unfolded not in the far-off mountains of Hawaii or Indonesia, but in the Western Highlands of Guatemala. I had flown to Guatemala in June to spend a week with Nathaniel exploring the country before he began a Spanish course. He’s studying to be a doctor and, being the thoughtful guy he is, decided to brush up on his Spanish.

The object on this brisk afternoon hike was a stream of lava breathing out of Picaya. As we clambered over the black rock we spotted pockets of lava, as orange as fresh egg yolk, vibrating beneath crevices of the rock. Tap-tap went our walking stick on the rock to make sure our next footstep would not be our last.

At the lava, one of our fellow travelers pulled out the s’mores ingredients. We fixed marshmallows to long sticks we had picked up on the first mountain. Dangled 2 feet above the lava, they took about three seconds to burn into gooey goodness. I can honestly say volcano marshmallows are tastier than the campfire variety: Maybe it’s because they’re just harder-earned.

That was as difficult as things got in Guatemala, a nation easy to get around and with an easygoing people. They are quick to smile and listened patiently as I staggered through my pidgin Spanish. (We also were left remarkably alone, never hassled by tourist touts or panhandlers.) It helped that their Spanish was easy on a gringo’s ear: slow and clear. And Guatemala is nice any time of year — nicknamed the land of eternal spring, it’s often a comfortable 65 degrees, with the summer heat cut by a seemingly scheduled rain, sometimes misty, sometimes hard, that showers down each afternoon precisely from 3:15 to 4:45 p.m.

Guatemala is like a poor man’s Costa Rica. There are fewer resorts and fewer tourists. But organizing day trips like the Picaya hike, or bargaining for huipils, the embroidered, attractive ponchos sported by indigenous people, was no problem. To get from town to town, we popped into one of the many little tourist agencies to schedule transportation or we hopped on one of the many punctual little vans, Greyhound-like buses, or colorful, converted school buses known as chicken buses, for a ride along vertigo-inducing roads cut into mountainsides. (Unfortunately, with only six days, we didn’t have time to reach the supposedly magnificent Mayan ruins of Tikal, in the north of Guatemala.) Lodging in a clean room with cable television and hot water cost only about $25 a night.

Food, too, was inexpensive: It was never all that great — a lot of beans and rice — but the fruit was fresh and the licuados, fresh-fruit milkshakes, were divine.

We had set out for Picaya from Antigua, the lovely, touristy, cobble-stoned town that’s about an hour’s drive on a $10 shuttle from the Guatemala City airport.

(Guatemala City falls into that group of world capitals that are so much less inviting than the rest of their country that they are best skipped altogether. I’d throw Bangkok into this category, too, based on a long-ago trip I made to Thailand. But that’s another story.)

Antigua is a Colonial Spanish city whose colorfully painted churches and villas have been rebuilt several times after being shaken to bits by earthquakes. We had a nice time just walking around Antigua, hanging out in the beautifully manicured central square and popping into jade shops. We also happened upon the espacio ce!, a cultural center that’s a collaboration between Spain and Guatemala and which hosts fascinating exhibits, including one while we were there about disappeared peoples in Latin American countries.

Guatemala has had a recent history no less horrid than any other Latin American country that suffered through dictatorships or civil wars. But evidence of the massacres that ravaged Guatemala in the 1970s and 1980s is not obvious to a visitor today. Memorials to those killed or who vanished are largely hidden away. (I did meet a Fulbright scholar on a Highlands bus ride who was monitoring reparations payments to indigenous peoples.)

From Antigua we headed to Panajachel, a kind of hippie throwback that sits on the banks of Lake Atitlan, ringed by three volcanoes. (To some, the city is known as Gringotenango.) We spent a day taking a ferry that hopped from one town to another, the highlight being a visit to the village of Santiago Atitlan, where Nathaniel and I made our way through a warren of streets to visit Maximon, a cigarette-smoking, cowboy-hat-wearing wooden saint who epitomizes a hybrid of Mayan and Catholic religious traditions. Another morning we spent kayaking the lake, aimlessly paddling as we chatted about our favorite movies.

During my last couple of days in Guatemala, Nathaniel and I went to a market in the mountain hamlet of Solola. The markets are mad and wonderful, with a lot of very short, round-faced people jammed into close quarters, many of them bearing pounds of provisions on their heads. (At 6-foot-3-inches and fair as a white peach, I stood out.) The outdoor bazaar sold everything from headless chickens to DVDs to native textiles.

I left Nathaniel in the western city of Xela, a quiet, amazingly European town — it feels like a city from southern Spain, with its tapas joints, cafes, curvy streets and swaying palms. Nathaniel was to stay six more weeks to study Spanish, and I was sorry to have to come back to Austin for work.

In the dusk in our last night together we grabbed tasty tacos and fried dough balls from cheery street vendors by the central square. We ambled past a fancy quinceanera ceremony as it ended at a local church and sat down on a park bench to play some cards as a summer breeze rolled through.

Early the next morning, I grabbed a three-hour bus ride back to the capital for $10 and a taxi to the airport for another $10. That afternoon I was back in Austin, presenting some of my newly purchased textiles to my girlfriend.