The Future of Petén

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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 [...]

Lost in the jungle at night with no water, but lots of mud and mosquitos.
Paco went missing. On the first of two days of walking, on Monday, I was enjoying a series of mini botany and archaeology lectures from Paulino, the archaeologist we’d nicknamed “The Philosopher.” He was pointing out the differences between the ceiba [...]