Guatemala | #simplelife

Brad, let’s call him that, ordered hot chocolate. But not any boring Western hot chocolate. No, he asked for a “Mayan variety, you know, with heart-opening qualities”.

Brad was one of many attendees of a yoga and dance retreat at the villa on the shores of Lake Atitlan where we decided to spend a few days over Christmas. The lake promised to be quaint and peaceful and delivered on that in full - we spent our days exploring lakeside villages with public taxi boats, swimming in the lake at sunset (me), vowing to never swim in such cold water (Marta) and not much else. Soon, however, we took up a new hobby to keep ourselves entertained. We started eavesdropping on Brad and his friends and were soon able to parse their daily routine. What follows below is a mostly verbatim account of it.

Our friend Brad woke up before dawn with his head still swirling from ginger-hibiscus kombucha and all these wheatgrass shots he downed last night. He put on his up-cycled linen shirt, his Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist luck pendants, tied his hair in a ponytail and started doing Pranayamas. His mind wandered off and moved to his next #simplelife Instagram post on how much he benefited from digital detox of these few days. The communal yoga practice soon followed. He loved it, imagining his thighs as rainbows, spiralling outwards and allowing his body to fold over and letting the brain spill out of his head. Exhausted, he gorged on activated macadamia spread and sustainable chia seeds, drinking a mouthful of almond milk to cleanse his palate. Feeling elevated, he sat down on the terrace and confined in his new friends. How the people of Idaho are simply not ready for naked contact improvisation. How the only way to connect with Logos is through shrooms. Or LSD. How shamanic initiation workshops helped him discover himself, around a month after he discovered himself through Thetha classes. Another round of yoga followed. This time, he could not hide his disappointment at how his friends made it difficult for him to focus his chakras into a psychic energy blast with all their incessant breathing. He finally managed to relax only during an evening ecstatic dance workshop which kept other guests ecstatically awake well into the night.

In a way, we understood Brad. Guatemala turned out to be a country rich in Mayan beliefs, where talk of cosmic energy would not raise an eyebrow. After a ‘modern’ Costa Rica, Guatemala offered something else entirely - with over half of its population indigenous, over 23 widely-spoken Mayan languages and a syncretic belief system that managed to weave Mayan deities, Catholic saints, and conquistador legends into one.

While Logos continues to defy us and kombucha still loses to red wine, we loved Guatemala, minus Brad.

Sunset no 1.

Sunset no 2.

Sunset no 3.

It took us at least 10 attempts to get this one right.

Local womens' cooperative. Marta left with bags full of handicrafts

Daily commute.

Off to the next place.

We also visited famous Tikal ruins in the far north of the country - one of Mayan capitals, where cosmic energy seems a bit more real than that of Brad.

Postcard shot of the main plaza.

You may remember this view from Star Wars!