The Future of Petén

I finally got to see more of Guatemala by land yesterday. I left Flores, Petén, with Kara and Nadia at 6 a.m. Hector, our friend and driver, was behind the wheel and we headed south for hours on straight roads passing more treeless land than I had seen my entire time in Guatemala. The vast [...]

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 [...]

Yesterday we completed our two-day return hike from El Mirador to Carmelita. The bajos again felt muddy and endless, but with the help of an early start and a mule ride, we made it out. On our own, without the archaeologists for the first time in many days, our group of four felt [...]

My trip to Guatemala began with an uncomfortable bus ride from San Ignacio Cayo, Belize through Melchor to Santa Elena where I tried rather unsuccessfully to communicate with the people around me in terribly broken spanish. Nonetheless, as I waited for my brain to wake up enough to remember how to conjugate the imperative [...]

There are two very distinct ways of seeing the destruction of a tropical forest: peeking at the green-brown patchwork through the dense cloud cover sipping orange juice from 30,000 feet, and trudging through the mud to the edge of the artificial tree line and getting explanations from some of the people who helped make that [...]

SAN FRANCISCO — When I left Guatemala last December, I never thought I would return so soon. I had spent the better part of six months based in the western highlands, with a too-short foray into Petén.
As a tourist in El Remate, a languid town hugging the eastern shores of Lago Petén Itzá, I was [...]

BISHOP, Calif. — I remember my first contact with Mayan culture and history. In 2001, I explored the Mexican states of Quintana Roo and Yucatán watching as the Mayan Riviera exploded unlike anything this peninsula had seen in 30+ years. I walked around with my camera making pictures and thinking. So this is the future [...]

OAKLAND, Calif. — I am going back to Guatemala, but this time to the jungle. My family marvels at it — a return to a place crawling with desperate thieves and ex-paramilitary types? AK47s, snakes, overgrown Mayan ruins and a two-and-a-half-day hike into a place where even the Google Street Team dares not to go. [...]