The Future of Petén

It’s the last leg of our journey back from Guatemala and I marvel at the difference in the landscape from above — houses neatly dotted against the foothill ridges and valleys of California’s sloping red terrain inching all the way from Los Angeles in random sproutings of civilization. It’s the same feeling I had while [...]

As the sun emerges from the gray-brown smog that hangs over Guatemala City’s wet streets, we board our plane and are inundated by the sounds of English words, and babies crying — for the most part a universal language of frustration.
Our time here is ended (for now) and I point [...]

Our Future of Petén multimedia team has been searching the Flores, Guatemala area for lumber workers to tell us their story. Today we found a few and broke that Flores lassitude fade into the distance.

The jungle of Mirador spit us out on Sunday. One hundred miles swelling up our feet, we stumbled into Carmelita and drank ourselves a Famosa and inhaled some PBJ sandwiches while watching las mulas swat away flies from their behinds. Small curious childen watched us as we sprawled on plastic lawn chairs y Doña Pati [...]

The more than 40-mile trek from Mirador to Tintal, Guatemala, did at times involve hopping on the mule during rain torrents.

July 13, 2008
FLORES, Guatemala — From our plush hotel balcony in Flores, Don Oscar’s house sits by my pinky when I stretch my arm out. A week ago we landed there straight from the bus ride from Guatemala City and scrambled to keep things organized and to have a sense of where we were [...]

July 12, 2008
TINTAL, Guatemala — Tintal is quiet and empty without the anthropologists. In the distance the howling monkeys scrape their calls through the night. We sit under a xate rooftop and listen to it rain again and again while we drink hot sweetened milk - our eyes glazed over from fatigue. We’ve untied our [...]

The laboratory in the jungle is a small oasis of electricity and Wi-Fi in Peten’s sea of rainforest darkness broken only by the drone of cicadas that is present all day. Every night, David Barreda and I move in with a bag of battery chargers, power strips, two laptops and a multitude of gadgets that [...]

Our first day of trekking 25 kilometers into Mirador was a hellacious experience involving mud, a nine-hour walk with mud up to our knees, a few lost trekkers and a lovely night hike with sloshing mud. Death march anyone?

Rio Paso Caballos
After three hours of sleep and a massive repacking job we head out from Flores bound for Carmelita where the road ends and our journey begins. We are embedded journalists now living out the intimate journey of Guatemalan archaeologists working at one of the rawest experiences in exploring Mesoamerican history. The past is [...]