Monterrico, a small beach town on Guatemala´s southern coast, about a five-hour drive from Quetzaltenango, is defined by its beautiful black sand beaches, which will roast one´s feet if they are sans flip-flops or shoes. (All of the photos can be seen here http://picasaweb.google.com/zach.zaslow/Monterrico).
Arriving late Saturday morning, we checked into our hotel and took a brief dip in the pool. From the distance of the hotel, the ocean sounds were soothing, reassuring.By day, we played in the ocean--twirled, upended, and occasionally smashed into the soft sand by the powerful waves breaking close in to the beach. I and two other students swam briefly out past the breakers, careful not to get too far from shore because of the strong undertow.
At night, we lay in hammocks, swam in the pool, and walked south along the beach for miles, watching for sea turtles coming ashore to lay their eggs. The turtles were nowhere to be seen, but imaging their journey through the dark surf made real the vastness of the ocean, which in all my previous (and superficial) experience had seemed only another body of water to play in--something that was, at most, 20 feet deep, like a salty and tempestuous swimming pool, but nothing more.
In the blackness of this hot night, however, the sea stretched forever. Both in its horizontal reach and its evident depth, it was an infinitely encompassing thing, an inky monster from whom eminated the gnashing noises of a perpetually dangerous force, acting contantly, day and night, forever and all time. The turtles are quite large, I understand, and of course millions of years of evolution have finely honed them for precisely the task at hand. Still, my view of the ocean thus fundamentally altered, as we tramped back to the hotel, I felt for the turtles, somewhere out in the invisible deep, and wished them well in their quest to swim safely ashore and spawn another generation.The next morning, I and one other student arose at 5:30am for a rendezvous with a body of water of an opposite temperament. (The others insisted on sleeping in.) The same guide from the night before took us on a tranquil tour of dense, thickly woven mangroves, a labryinth of branches, grasses, and quiet, placid waters. If I understood him correctly (and, admittedly, it´s quite likely I didn´t), the inland river area we toured is composed of freshwater in the winter and saltwater in the summer, when one body of water or the other rises high enough to meet the other. The salt from the ocean floods the ecosystem, creating a cyclical killing off of much of the flora but generating a hospitable environment for many more types of fish.
In the current freshwater environment, though, we managed to see a few water-going animals, including long, eel-like fishes with four eyes (two that keep watch above the water, and two for reconaissance below the surface) that slithered away, bobbing in and out of the water like tiny dolphins, alerted by the first ripples of our flat-bottomed boat. Our guide maneuvered the boat like a Venician pilot in the shallow water, all the while narrating the changing views with a good natured attitude and helpful clarifying hand gestures.Emerging from the elaborate maze of early morning mangroves into an area of open water, we were met by a view of four of Guatemala´s volcanos looming above the tall grass. As our guide navigated back toward the dock via a different route, we encountered bird´s nests and water lillies, and I snapped some good photos of the sunrise.
I don´t know if it was the incredible relaxation of the environs or the diversity of experiences we compressed into the time available, but in the end, our two-day weekend constrained by a five-hour bus trek on each end felt more like a week than a day and a half at the beach.
