Wednesday, February 10. Hanging With The Maya In Guatemala. In The Rain. In some cruise ports, there's absolutely nothing to do unless you take a tour or rent a car for the day. In the corner of Guatemala that faces the Caribbean Sea, the second option is not an especially good idea. The dock is at Santo Tomas de Castilla, a busy industrial port for a long time. It's only in the last few years that cruise ships have come here. Last year, the only attraction in Santo Tomas was entertainment of note I found was a large warehouse filled with crafts tables. It did have a highlight: a truly fantastic nine-man marimba band that played a mix of American and Latin American easy-listening standards. But even thy could only hold one for a half-hour or so.
So I booked a tour. I felt I was betraying Mary Ann by doing so. She hates tours, and always tries to talk our travelers out of them. But she's not here. And last year a few of our people said that the scenery and little towns were worth the trip.
A modern, comfortable bus took us to a Mayan site called Quirigua. It was small as Mayan settlements went, but when it was discovered about a hundred years ago the archaeologists found enough carved stone monuments to make it worthy of study and preservation.
Quirigua has about a dozen steles--the Greek word for tall vertical stones. To say that these are rich in detail is an understatement. Except in places where the rock has been eroded away, these things were covered with drawings, each of which conveyed a message. Not all the meanings have been deciphered yet, but among the ones that have are the incomparable Mayan numerical and calendrical notations. These tell with amazing accuracy--down to the day--exactly when these steles were dedicated. Notations about star positions on the steles--agree with the dates given.
And we're not talking about the Greeks here, but a rather primitive people in the years between 300 and 700 AD. But in many ways they were ahead of the rest of the world. They were using the mathematical concept of zero before any other culture was.
Our guide Rita was clearly a scholar of the Maya, and told the whole story of Quirigua. Apparently this small town defeated the much larger Copan in a battle, the report of which is amply explained on one of the steles. There were political intrigues, some kings who were better than others, and all the same stuff we read about in newspapers now.
Even though it drizzled off and on while we walked from one stele to another, and the ground was squishy wet (it's like that all the time, said the guide), I'm very glad I spent the $85 for all this.
Quirigua is preserved in the middle of an immense Del Monte banana plantation. The wet weather, Rita said, is perfect for bananas, and they get three crops a year from the place. "The biggest bananas go to the States, the medium bananas go to Europe, and we eat the small ones," she said.
The only disappointment on the tour was that we didn't stop somewhere for a Guatemalan lunch. On the other hand, the same marimba band that was here last year--Familia Portueria--was playing up a storm once again. I sat there through two sets and one performance by a young dance troupe.
Back on the ship, the Martini Club attracted about half of the group. I decided it was time for an actual martini. I should have stopped with one. The first martini is always the best. But the Galaxy of the Stars bar was serving doubles. And two of those was too much, particularly after having skipped lunch. I was pretty well sloshed by the time we made it to Le Bistro, our dinner venue tonight.
Le Bistro is easily the best of the specialty restaurants on Norwegian Cruise Lines's ships. It has been on all of the four I've taken, and although the surcharge is not the highest on the ship, its food surpasses everything else.
Remembering how good the escargots were last time, I started with those again. Then a creamy mushroom soup, served in a bread bowl. I was looking at the foie gras-stuffed chicken for the entree, but the lady next to me--the same one who had the tough sirloin last night--said she wouldn't mind splitting the double-cut ribeye. My guilt about recommending the sirloin last night made me go along, but I'm glad I did. The beef was perfectly cooked and slathered with bearnaise. It was better than any ribeye I've had in a long time. Good enough to make it into the top three dishes on the cruise, in fact.
They served a three-way dessert that hit all of the major dessert groups (chocolate, custard, and fruit). We'd gone through at least two bottles of wine. Somehow, I got the check for the whole table: a shade over $200. I am decidedly overspending on this trip. Fortunately or un-, Mary Ann is not here to look at me disapprovingly.
I went to karaoke, hosted by a different guy with a different selection of music from the one I saw two evenings ago. This one had almost nothing from my era. By which I mean not only almost no Sinatra, but also almost no Beatles. And I told him so.
I took some great pictures of Quirigua and our dinner at Le Bistro. Tomorrow's entry explains why they're not here.
