New Year's Livingston style

it has been pointed out to me by a number of people that i have been a delinquent blogger. many apologies! let's see if i can make up for missing the past month with some pictures and accompanying explanations of some of what i've been up to...

Maya, Janine (a fellow PCV) and i traveled to Livingston, Guatemala to ring in 2008. Livingston is the only Garifuna village in Guatemala, and is unique in that it can only be reached by boat - from Honduras and Belize by way of the Caribbean, or down the Rio Dulce from points farther north in Guatemala. it's home to a mix of Garifuna, Maya and ladino (the Guatemalan version of Mestizo) residents, who seem to coexist peacefully, though live in segregated parts of town. though isolated, it seems to be a popular tourist spot, and we spent a few evenings sitting on the elevated patio of a hotel, sipping mojitos and wine and watching the mixture of tourist and local traffic drift by. we befriended a rasta couple who sold beautiful jewelry from a table at the foot of the hotel. thanks to Maya's bionic eavesdropping skills, we met a group of Peace Corps Guatemala volunteers on a vacation of their own. rang in the new year with them at a party that skipped between several beach bars. Maya and Janine were fascinated to hear Garifuna being spoken with a Spanish inflection.




Maya and Janine walking down the beach back towards Livingston, after our visit to Siete Altares (Seven Altars), a series of small waterfalls. the walk was beautiful, though we were a bit disappointed by the fact that the lack of rain had rendered the waterfalls slightly less than spectacular.




we took a trip up the Rio Dulce, a wide, beautiful river flowing out to the Caribbean just on the edge of town. we pulled up our boat next to a young man in a dugout canoe to buy fish he'd caught a few minutes before with just a line - no fishing rod. our guide took them to a woman who cooked them for us Maya style, wrapped in leaves and roasted over a fire. these young boys rode past in their own dugout as we were relaxing on shore while our fish cooked.




our river guide chopped down some fresh coconuts as an appetizer. coconut water is drunk straight from the green coconut. just tip it back and try to keep it from pouring down your chin.




i have no idea what this statue represents, but it sits in the water just off the Livingston coast.