One of the main reasons I joined the Peace Corps was for the excitement and adventure that it promised. My service has certainly offered me the opportunity to explore the highest and lowest emotions my psyche has to offer, and also put me in situations that I never thought I’d see or experience (Heads Should Usually Remained Attached, On Second Thought, Let’s Change that…), but one thing that has been lacking has been the sense that this is any sort of luxury vacation.
This past weekend I had the fortuitousness to experience luxury that would have qualified as “luxury” even if I were still in the First World. It was awesome.
About an hour outside of Xela exists a medium-size town called Zunil. If you grudgingly pay a very smug man 20 quetzales, he’ll take you up into the mountains, past the road’s switchbacks framed by pines and the patchwork of farm plots tucked against the slopes, until you arrive at what is almost certainly God’s bathtub.
When Kate, a recently-made non-PC friend, and I got to the parking lot of the Fuentes Georgina, it was deserted save for a few idling parking attendants, who instructed us to continue along a path leading even higher than the several thousand feet above Zunil we were currently standing. The heavy wooden bannisters and the bare rock face quickly gave way to a clearing and, proudly displayed in its center, three cascading pools, the roughly-hewn flagstones lining the bottom dyed green from mineral deposits. The steam shone golden as it curled off the water and became backlit by the sun.
There was just one other duo there, and we were easily able to pretend we had the place to ourselves. For the first glorious hour we joked about the unfamiliarity of true decadence. This was what traveling is all about, right? To find those hidden gems far away from the norm, soaking in (sometimes literally) their charms?
Changing into my bathing suit, intentionally bought when it was uncomfortably tight, I noticed that it seemed in danger of slipping off during the next particularly boisterous bought of cavorting. I appreciate a good cavort now and again, and this boded ill.
“Can you get a bathing suit tailored?” I asked myself as I examined my weak muscle tone and general level of abdominal pastiness. I’m going to have to start on that P-90X stuff that all the volunteers keep talking about. Running and weightlifting are practically impossible here. Of course, more exercise means more weight loss, and thus more tailoring.
Kate and I surveyed the pool before us. Irregularly shaped, with two walls butting against the rock face that fed it with its boiling waterfall, it could have been mistaken for a natural lagoon if the underwater tiling didn’t give it away. Had we come later in the day, the café and bar making the third wall would have been far more inviting. Instead, it was impossible to ignore that it was nine in the morning, almost, but not quite, entirely the wrong time for a beverage. It was too late for coffee to sound very appealing before a hot soak, and not quite late enough to sanction a brew.
The fourth wall of the pool created a walkway between the largest, hottest, and prettiest of the pools, and the second in all three categories. Underground pipes from the first, assisted solely by gravity, cascaded water that kept the second’s temperature more or less constant. The same occurred in the third.
I dipped my toes into the first pool. It was hot, but bearable. I immersed myself up to my knee, and right about then decided that I was too much of a weeny to go any further. The heat, to which I had hoped I would acclimate, did not seem to get any cooler. Instead, words like “searing,” and “ohmygodthisissohotican’tstandit” kept thumping themselves against my consciousness. Is this the way a lobster feels as it contemplates the final moments leading up to the great beyond?
“What do you think? 140 degrees? 150?” I asked Kate as she walked up beside me. She shot me a look that clearly suggested I needed to re-zero my internal thermometer. “Forget this, let’s go to the cooler pool.”
Kate’s example and snide allusions about my manliness eventually got me up to my chest in the main pool. When I tried to move however, my zen-like concentration on penguins and snow days was instantly broken, and we spent much of our remaining time alternating between pools number two and three. While they were certainly cooler than the first, they were plenty warm enough to work away at our muscle knots and induce that sleepy, sluggish feeling that hot water brings. I hoped the minerals would be good for my skin, but found myself wondering what the students at my 15 schools would say if the gringo walked up dyed as thoroughly green as the stones. I’m already huge here; would “you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” translate, or would it be taken as a polite, though obvious, statement of personality?
After several hours, our skin seemed irrevocably pruned, though still depressingly similar in color to when we had arrived. Throughout the morning, the cloud forest kept sweeping in dense fog, then lifting it just as suddenly. We didn’t even get bronzed; I’m still rocking the farmer tan.
Eventually other obligations reminded us that we couldn’t stay forever. Standing fully clothed a few minutes later, I surveyed my surroundings one last time. This wasn’t mental anguish, and I’m not even that lonely, I decided. Is Guatemala simply the Posh Corps, or have I found a hidden gem?
The photos for this week can be found at: https://picasaweb.google.com/sigrinj/Week23?authkey=Gv1sRgCPv7vNPVwpjJQw#
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