Guatemala
During the night we left Belize and reached the Caribbean coast of Guatemala. This country is spread across a mountainous and extravagantly lush chunk of land, and is gifted with staggering natural, cultural and historical interest. Through just a small taste of this wonderful country, we managed to sample some of the best it has to offer, during a day packed with fascinating activities.
We awoke to the sound of a marimba band, serenading us as we breakfasted, docked in the busy port of Puerto Barrios. We were introduced to local guides, who were to take us through beautiful countryside and enormous banana plantations to one of the wonders of the Mayan world: the unparalleled Quirigua. It is situated in the Motagua Valley, where an extremely rich flood plain attracted both the Maya, and many years later the United Fruit Company. Quirigua’s position on the banks of the Motagua River made it an important trade route, mainly for the jade that is abundant in the area, and this important Mayan center was dominated by Copan, located just 50 km away, for many years. Although not endowed with the magnificent pyramids and other structures of Copan and Tikal, it went through a time of greatness when its most famous ruler, commonly known as Cauac Sky, captured and sacrificed the leader of Copan and took over from the famous city as ruler of the whole area. To make up for the lack of great man-made structures, Cauac Sky commissioned the greatest stelae and zoomorphs ever seen in pre-Columbian times, and thus ascertained his immortality and rank among Mayan leaders.
Once back onboard, we repositioned to the Caribbean town of Livingstone, home to a mix of Garifuna (originally from Saint Vincent and recently declared a UNESCO world heritage culture), mestizos and modern Quechi Maya. The town is situated at the mouth of the Rio Dulce, the end of the large waterways running through the Motagua Valley. This valley is created by a fault, where the North American tectonic plate meets the Caribbean plate. Added to the southern tip of North America, when it broke away from the mega-continent of Pangea, 140 million years ago, were two exotic terranes, named the Maya and Chortis Terranes. An exotic terrane is an extraneous land mass that has been added to a coastline when the tectonic plate it was riding on subducted below the less dense coastline in question. Both the Maya and Chortis terranes are made up of rocks dating back over 300 million years, and the suture between the two runs along the Motagua Valley! We took our fleet of Zodiacs up into the Rio Dulce, a national park of spectacular beauty and wildness, that runs through an impressive gorge, where contemporaneous rocks completely different in character and in original latitudes face each other on opposite sides of the valley. This was a unique experience, during which we felt positively dwarfed by the magnitude of geological time, almost beyond human comprehension.
During the night we left Belize and reached the Caribbean coast of Guatemala. This country is spread across a mountainous and extravagantly lush chunk of land, and is gifted with staggering natural, cultural and historical interest. Through just a small taste of this wonderful country, we managed to sample some of the best it has to offer, during a day packed with fascinating activities.
We awoke to the sound of a marimba band, serenading us as we breakfasted, docked in the busy port of Puerto Barrios. We were introduced to local guides, who were to take us through beautiful countryside and enormous banana plantations to one of the wonders of the Mayan world: the unparalleled Quirigua. It is situated in the Motagua Valley, where an extremely rich flood plain attracted both the Maya, and many years later the United Fruit Company. Quirigua’s position on the banks of the Motagua River made it an important trade route, mainly for the jade that is abundant in the area, and this important Mayan center was dominated by Copan, located just 50 km away, for many years. Although not endowed with the magnificent pyramids and other structures of Copan and Tikal, it went through a time of greatness when its most famous ruler, commonly known as Cauac Sky, captured and sacrificed the leader of Copan and took over from the famous city as ruler of the whole area. To make up for the lack of great man-made structures, Cauac Sky commissioned the greatest stelae and zoomorphs ever seen in pre-Columbian times, and thus ascertained his immortality and rank among Mayan leaders.
Once back onboard, we repositioned to the Caribbean town of Livingstone, home to a mix of Garifuna (originally from Saint Vincent and recently declared a UNESCO world heritage culture), mestizos and modern Quechi Maya. The town is situated at the mouth of the Rio Dulce, the end of the large waterways running through the Motagua Valley. This valley is created by a fault, where the North American tectonic plate meets the Caribbean plate. Added to the southern tip of North America, when it broke away from the mega-continent of Pangea, 140 million years ago, were two exotic terranes, named the Maya and Chortis Terranes. An exotic terrane is an extraneous land mass that has been added to a coastline when the tectonic plate it was riding on subducted below the less dense coastline in question. Both the Maya and Chortis terranes are made up of rocks dating back over 300 million years, and the suture between the two runs along the Motagua Valley! We took our fleet of Zodiacs up into the Rio Dulce, a national park of spectacular beauty and wildness, that runs through an impressive gorge, where contemporaneous rocks completely different in character and in original latitudes face each other on opposite sides of the valley. This was a unique experience, during which we felt positively dwarfed by the magnitude of geological time, almost beyond human comprehension.
