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Outside Magazine's 2002 Travel Guide

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La Ruta Maya
Cigar-smoking santos, icy Belikin, crumbling pyramids, freshly spun tortillas, slithering vipers, and everlasting love
By Stephanie Pearson

"I SEE TRIUMPHS IN WORK AND everlasting love...," the fortune-teller predicts in Spanish, winking at the circling band of compadres eavesdropping on my optimistic future, which gets better and better with every Guatemalan bill I drop into his outstretched palm. Taking me for a gringa with endless coin, he demands another quetzal before dispensing more good juju, but I'm satisfied with the "everlasting love" part and move on.

It's a Sunday during Lent and I'm in San Andrés, a dirt-crusted village west of Antigua, Guatemala, in the shrine of Maximón, a fallen pagan saint who, in Maya-Catholic tradition, is said to be a badass combination of Judas Iscariot, the explorer Pedro de Alvarado, and various Maya deities. A line 50 worshippers long snakes its way through rivers of candle wax and smoke, offering gifts of alcohol and flowers to the wooden santo holding court in what appears to be a stationary Popemobile strung with Christmas lights.

I watch Maya women dressed in embroidered huipiles spark up boiled-egg and cigar altars—eggs to ward off evil, cigars to satiate Maximón's tobacco habit—while shamans fill their cheeks with aguardiente, then douse waiting pilgrims with the alcoholic spray. Outside, firecrackers explode with staccato bursts. This orgy of carnivalistic religiosity is wreaking havoc on my Lutheran sensibilities, but I have to admit it's the liveliest church service I've ever encountered. The firecrackers were an offering from John Fox, a 36-year-old archaeologist and one of my seven American traveling companions. He's hoping Maximón will return the favor by blessing the eight blue candles we've left burning on the altar—local insurance for safe travels.

Living La Ruta Maya

The 411 on Rentals and Hotels along La Ruta Maya: Click Here

But as we soon discover, Maximón's good graces don't come easy. What began as a benign month of wandering through Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala would suddenly take a turn toward the disastrous. In the week to follow, we'd encounter an armed mob, lose a $4,000 Leica, shear off a trailer tire while inching up a gnarly pass in the Cuchumatanes mountains, and watch Nate Strandberg, a 25-year-old graphic designer from Minneapolis, heave his tamales out the car window while the rest of us decided how best to jury-rig the broken tire.

Such mishaps are to be expected along La Ruta Maya, a loosely defined route through Central America's Maya heartland, a place that stirred poet Wallace Stevens to enthuse about the "wild country of the soul," and where grace and beauty duke it out with evil and misfortune at every turn. In the jungly lowlands, deadly fer-de-lance vipers slither atop centuries-old ruins. In the highlands, 21st-century Maya, many of them refugees of the 36-year civil war that left 200,000 Guatemalans dead or disappeared, eke out sustenance from agricultural plots that grow less corn with each passing year. Throughout this history-scarred country are mountain-bikeable dirt roads, paths packed down by generations of barefoot villagers, mysterious unexplored cave systems, swaths of palm-lined beaches, and jungles thick enough to swallow you.

Our 4,331-mile, six-week circle tour started in the parking lot of a sanitized Austin, Texas, Super 8 motel, where we hopped into a Suburban, inserted Blood on the Tracks, and let the world unroll beneath the steel-belted radials. Herewith, a few vignettes, should you decide to devise a Ruta Maya of your own.

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