Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama and Nicaragua!
Panama
Panama’s Best Beaches
Aug 28th
Panama may not exactly be known as a top international beach destination, but it does have more than 1,500 miles of coastline on both the Pacific and the Caribbean. While much of the coastline is made up of dense mangroves rather than picturesque white sand beaches, I lived in Panama for over a year and can attest to the fact that there are plenty of lovely–if somewhat underrated–beach destinations.
Bocas del Toro: With a couple of ramshackle, English Caribbean-style towns that seem to suffer from a severe dichotomy between the relatively wealthy expat community and a struggling, impoverished Afro-Caribbean and indigenous population, your initial reaction when visiting Bocas might be to ask yourself why this is one of Panama’s most popular beach destinations. However, despite this rather sad economic reality, Bocas is actually home to some of Panama’s most breathtaking beaches, including the dazzling “Cayos Zapatillos” two white-sand islands with crystal clear waters and excellent snorkeling and opportunities. At Starfish Beach, hundreds of orange starfish dot the ocean floor. I recommend hiring a local boatman when visiting different beaches as a way to support the local community.
Kuna Yala: Also known as San Blas, these 365-plus (mostly uninhabited) islands offer crystal clear blue-green waters, tiny, palm tree-lined white sand islands and a traditional, strong willed people, the Kuna, who fiercely cling to their traditions and customs. In fact, foreigners are not even allowed to buy property anywhere on the Kuna Yala Island. The vast majority of lodging options here consist of thatched roof cabins with sand floors, no electricity or running water and few amenities. Because of the region’s isolation, most islands have no restaurants, bars or shops, so you’ll have to buy an all-inclusive package including mostly fish and rice meals. So while there may not be a thriving restaurant and bar scene, the Kuna Yala islands are the perfect spot to lay on a hammock, work on your tan and snorkel along the many coral reefs close to the shoreline.
Isla Coiba: Isla Coiba is often compared to the Galapagos Island because of its endemic species and unique ecosystem. In my opinion, Isla Coiba is Panama’s most pristine and gorgeous beach destination, but the Island receives relatively few visitors, not surprising considering there’s only a couple rustic cabins for lodging on the island and visiting can be expensive. But if money isn’t an issue, Isla Coiba is worth the hassle. Most likely, your tour company will arrange lodging at nearby Isla Coiba or right on the tour boat. Isla Coiba is considered one of the best diving and snorkeling spots in Central America.
Boca Chica: These aren’t the most beautiful beaches in the country – think beige sand, deep blue waters – but there’s something special about this rural region of Panama. On the Pacific side of the country, Boca Chica feels a bit like cowboy country. Men on horseback, verdant, rolling hills and miles upon miles of banana plantations dot the landscape and the climate here is hot and muggy — perfectly tropical, in other words! Boca Chica is home to some of the most beautiful eco lodges in the country and makes an ideal romantic getaway for couples because of its isolation.
The Pacific Beaches: These are definitely not Panama’s most impressive beaches, but the central Pacific coast is home to Panama’s most ambitious and upscale beach-side communities and all-inclusive resorts. The beaches here resemble those on the U.S mid Atlantic and have mostly brownish, medium grain sand and brown/green murky water with strong riptides that can make swimming dangerous for children and inexperienced swimmers. All that said, Pacific beaches such as Gorgona, Playa Blanca and Santa Clara make a perfectly pleasant day trip from Panama City, and if your idea of going to the beach includes staying at a full service (think multiple pools, restaurants, cocktails, nightly entertainment) all-inclusive resorts, you’ll be perfectly happy on Pacific beaches.
Low Impact Living and Travel in Bocas del Toro
Aug 27th
Husband and wife team Henry Escudero and Margaret Ann moved to Bocas del Toro in 2003 and were among the first foreigners to move to the islands, quite a bit before the whole concept of eco tourism really took hold. Margaret and Enrique own La Loma Jungle Lodge, a small ecolodge about a 15 minute boat ride from Bocas Town. As Henry and Margaret say, the Bocas del Toro Archipelago “ranges from jungle covered hills with calm mangrove bays to large beaches with rolling surf to the quintessential tropical islands rimmed with coral reef and coconut palms.” I visited Henry and Margaret’s eco lodge two years ago while I was writing the Frommer’s Panama guide and have admired their “low impact” travel and living philosophy ever since. I recently spoke to Henry and Margaret about living and working in Bocas del Toro, one of Panama’s most popular beach destinations.
Why did you decide to move to Bocas? The lodge was a dream that had been gestating since we met in college in 1991. We both wanted to pursue a largely self-sufficient lifestyle and escape the trappings of the work and consumer driven ‘global north’. After reading a newspaper piece entitled “Panama, The Oddest Country in Central America,” we decided we needed to visit. We fell in love with Bocas’ incredible natural environment and its diverse population.
2.) What were some of the challenges you faced when you first moved to Bocas, both personally and professionally? Having worked as an archaeologist (Henry) and a museum specialist (Margaret), there wasn’t a great deal of roll-over into this project. We both had to learn hands-on how to build structures, plan for water and solar systems and navigate the bureaucracies for building permits, licenses etc. It was particularly hard for Margaret as a women to have any authority in such a male- dominated culture. We were also appalled by the attitude of many ex-pats to the local communities; one of disregard at best and blatant racism at worst.
3.) How do you reconcile guest comfort and environmental friendliness? Many people seem to think they can’t simultaneously exist. What are some of the drawbacks or challenges you face running a “green” hotel? We’re very clear up front what the lodge can offer guests. We make it apparent in all of our publicity that our emphasis is on bringing guests closer to the natural environment and local communities and not on amenities such as air conditioning and swimming pools. As a result, our guests share the same ethos about responsible travel. They seek us out specifically because we’re the antithesis of generic chain hotels. This said, we do everything we can to provide comfort as long as it is compatible with maintaining our small ecological footprint. We have comfortable beds, enormous mosquito nets, flushing toilets and hot water. I can think of no challenges we’ve faced in running a ‘green’ operation verses a high impact hotel.
4.) What makes your lodge green, and why did you choose to build annenvironmentally friendly hotel? We wouldn’t dream of building it any other way! Although large portions of the land we purchased had been farmed in the past, the jungle was well on its way to reclaiming its territory and this is the way it should be. The flora and fauna are remarkable. From the outset, we did everything we could to limit our negative impact on the environment and local communities. Our power is solar, our water comes from a spring on the land, all black water is safely treated and gray water reused, we farm much of the food we consume and source the rest locally. We strictly minimize non-compostable waste. We employee only local people, offer training and career development opportunities and run a community development program (Hooda Chi). We’ve also planted hundreds of trees and worked to reduce invasive plant species.
Our interest and intentions were always in the area of sustainable and responsible lifestyles, although we have no formal training. Margaret specialized in social inclusion in the cultural sector, so although it may not have been immediately obvious, many of her skills were useful in running the community development program.
Is it a challenge to be green in Bocas and Panama? Yes and no. Awareness of environmental issues is leagues behind the UK and US. A little example? The looks of confusion we would receive when we asked not to have groceries put into a plastic bag! However, levels of consumption are less (largely due to limited income). In the past couple of years, there’s been a recycling scheme in Bocas which is great.
How do your guests respond to the lodge? The vast majority appreciate what we are doing at La Loma and relish the new experiences on offer to them. They’re often surprise at just how comfortable it can be living simply in the jungle. We made many wonderful friends and have many repeat customers.
Guachimontones: unearthing a lost world near Teuchitlan, Jalisco
Aug 17th
Just outside the unassuming little town of Teuchitlán, Jalisco, 40 kilometers due West of Guadalajara, lies one of the most impressive archeological sites in all of western Mexico. However, the first time I saw it — in 1985 — I was anything but impressed.
“Where’s the pyramid?” my friends and I asked a local farmer, who then pointed toward a hill completely overgrown with thorns, brush and skin-irritating dominguilla. A half-hour later, sweating and muttering, we reached the top of what obviously was not a natural hill. “It may be an unusually tall heap of rocks,” we muttered, but that’s all it is, just a heap of rocks.”
Without realizing it, we had drawn a conclusion similar to what many archeologists of the time thought about the nature of ancient west Mexico and — like them — we couldn’t have been more mistaken.
Unknown to us, two local researchers had looked beneath the surface at Teuchitlán and had discovered that the textbooks were wrong. An amazing civilization — with a style of architecture unique in all the world — had once flourished in those weed-covered hills.
In 1970, a Mexican professor of Art History and an American archeologist, Acelia and Phil Weigand, happened to be visiting Balneario El Rincón, the natural spring from which the Teuchitlán River is born. In the swimming pool, Acelia Weigand found an obsidian blade, which intrigued the couple. “Where has this come from?” they asked themselves. They began hiking in the hills just above the balneario and ended up wandering among the ruins of the pyramids now known as Los Guachimontones. Phil Weigand says, “I stood on the largest pyramid, looked around and thought, ‘This is unexpected.’”
It turned out to be an understatement. The Weigands set aside a summer to explore the pyramids they had found and ended up spending the next 29 years documenting a complex, highly organized society which had begun in western Mexico in 1000 BC and had reached its apogee in 200 AD. They discovered that Teuchitlán had been, in fact, a metropolis of sorts, housing around 25,000 people fed by produce from hundreds of chinampas, small agricultural islands irrigated by an ingenious system of canals, dams and floodgates. In those days the economy was booming, for these people traded in salt from the flats of Sayula and, more importantly, they were situated right next to the third largest obsidian deposits in the world. In fact, they controlled more than 1,000 obsidian mines, from which some 14,000 tons of the precious volcanic glass were extracted. In Teuchitlán’s workshops, skilled craftsmen fashioned the obsidian into knives, spear heads, mirrors of extraordinary quality, unique, ultra-thin earrings and flat-bladed swords called macahuitls, capable of chopping off an enemy’s leg or a horse’s head with one blow. In a society without hard metals, obsidian was the very gift of the gods.
Only in 1999, after intensive mapping and investigation, did the Weigands’ team, which now numbered eight archeologists, begin to excavate and eventually to restore the ruins at Teuchitlán. Today, most of the mounds have been cleared of their jungle-like overgrowth and now you can stroll along the smooth, circular walkways surrounding what were once shining, terraced pyramids built of stones cemented together with a special Mesoamerican mortar which has proven surprisingly resilient and weatherproof.
Today, more than 150,000 people a year visit the Guachimontones, a local word meaning “mounds where you find plenty of bottle gourds.” A well paved road takes them up the hill from Teuchitlán to a parking area which became too small almost as soon as it was created. Two of the three largest pyramids have been beautifully restored, each with its circular walkway or “patio” and surrounding platforms, which were previously bases for public buildings.
Between the second and the third largest pyramids lies what was, in its day, the largest ball court in Mesoamerica, 111 meters long. The game they played was quite different from the Aztecs’ and, in fact, a form of it, called ulama is still played today in Sinaloa. The ball was a heavy round stone covered in natural rubber which players could hit with their hips. According to archeologists, all the skeletons of males found at Teuchitlán have broken hips. This was not a game for the faint-hearted!
The ball games were often played from sunrise to sunset. Points were gained by getting the ball into a corner in one of the L-shaped legs at each end of the playing field and immobilizing it. Interestingly, points were lost for errors and a team could end up with a negative score if they didn’t play impeccably, a concept that even today might be useful for improving certain modern sports. At the end of the day, the captain of the winning team would receive the great honor of losing his life as a sacrificial victim.
Wandering about the Guachimontones, we naturally asked ourselves just what was going on in this place 1800 years ago when those same walkways were crowded with the native people of this area, who — for want of a better name — we’ll call the Teuchitlán Nation. What sort of ceremonies took place here and how would it have felt to be a participant?
Some answers to these questions can be found in 25 maquetas or clay models found buried in various sites under the influence of the Teuchitlán Tradition. These extraordinary works of art are around 2,000 years old and reveal what the curious circular architecture was typically used for. Unlike codices, which show stylized figures only understood by experts, the little clay figures give us a three-dimensional look at people chatting with their neighbors, carrying on business or playing everyday games.
Unlike the Aztecs, whose ceremonies resulted in rivers of blood coursing down the sides of their pyramids, the people of Teuchitlán worshiped Ehécatl, a gentle god, who didn’t need human sacrifice to satisfy his ego. On ceremonial days, the ring-shaped “patio” was crowded with people chatting and jostling one another or perhaps linked arm in arm, performing the cadena, or chain dance while listening to groups of musicians. Around this walkway, on evenly spaced terraced platforms, the local VIPs gazed out the doorways of buildings that to western eyes might look typically Chinese. They had tall, pointy, gabled roofs which, along with their wattle-and-daub walls, were carefully plastered and beautifully painted in bright colors. The VIPs chatted with the people in the milling crowd, perhaps discussing the latest score of the ball game taking place in the court located alongside the largest pyramid. Directly to the north, a huge crowd of onlookers watched the events from a steep, terraced hillside, a vantage point from which music from the pyramids could easily be heard.
Everyone, of course, was anxiously waiting for the main event of the day to begin. A sturdy pole had been set in the exact center of each steep pyramid. No one today knows exactly what its function was. The clay models show a “flier” balanced on top of the pole, perhaps tied to it so he wouldn’t fall off. He probably represented Ehécatl, the bird man, and, as the clay models show us, a crowd of people pushing on the pole caused him to “fly.” It is also possible that ropes were wound around the pole, as is still done today in Veracruz, and that fliers tied to the ropes and bedecked with feathers, swooped through the air in ever-widening circles, soaring up and down like the graceful birds, finally to land on the circular walkway around the pyramid. The width of this ring was always the same as a second, exterior ring where the buildings were placed, following a complicated geometrical formula; and the diameter of the pyramid was always 2.5 times the width of the walkway.
These proportions form the basis for Teuchitlán’s formal circular architecture which is unique not only in Mesoamerica, but in the entire world. Nearly two hundred complexes employing this architectural style have been found in western Mexico, making it easy for archeologists to trace the limits of Teuchitlán’s influence.
Another characteristic of these people was the construction of shaft tombs. A very deep hole, just over a meter wide, would be dug, with burial chambers at the bottom. The long, narrow shaft might be up to 20 meters deep, a kind of insurance policy meant to protect the tombs from looting. Unfortunately, this strategy has not dissuaded modern tomb raiders, who have beaten the archeologists to the bottom of just about every shaft tomb in Jalisco. On one of the few occasions when an untouched tomb was found, over 60,000 artifacts were discovered.
Apart from its unusual architecture, the Teuchitlán tradition was distinguished by a particular way of decorating their ceramic pieces, a process now referred to as pseudo-cloisonné. After firing a pot, they would roughen its surface and apply chaute, a mixture of charcoal, oil of sage seed and a glue-like substance from the camote tuber. When this black coating was nearly dry, they carved out certain areas and filled them with bright colors made from inorganic materials such as azurite and red ochre, leaving the raised chaute as a black border. In the past, the colorful panels they created were thought to be merely decorative, but studies have shown that many of these ceramic pieces display glyphs similar to those found in Mexico’s famous codices, meaning that the countless ceramics spirited out of western Mexico over the years probably contain a wealth of valuable information.
The Codex of Ehécatl, for example, found near Teuchitlán by the Norwegian explorer Carl Lumholtz, is now in the American museum of Natural history in New York, along with forty other pieces taken from the same place. This panel depicts the god Ehécatl (the Night Wind) dressed in feathers, his nose pointed like a bird’s beak and with claws for feet. Sad to say, tomb robbers are not interested in the codex-like information on the outside of these pots, only in the monitos (figurines) frequently found among them. When they smash one of these vessels, says Weigand, “It’s like walking into an historical archive, taking out the year 1776, and burning it because your fingers are cold.”
The bright light of the Teuchitlán Tradition began to dim around the year 500 AD for reasons that may never be known, but archeologists tell us that a day came when every building around the circular pyramids was burned to the ground. For a while it was thought that this indicated an abrupt end to that enigmatic civilization, but recent excavations prove that Teuchitlán was inhabited continuously for 2,000 years, from the pre-classical period right through to the post-classical.
Faithful replicas of the clay models showing life around the Guachimontones at their moment of glory are on display at the Museum of La Casa de Cultura Teuchitlán, at number 10, Calle16 de Septiembre, one half block west of the plaza. There’s nothing quite like them anywhere else in Mesoamerica. An excellent 30-minute documentary on Teuchitlán is also shown there daily. The hours are 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Tuesday to Sunday. Tel: (01 384) 733-0833 and 733-0129. Note that a new, state-of-the-art “interactive museum” is now under construction at the Guachimontones. The building – round like the circular pyramids – was designed by architect Francisco Pérez-Arellano and will cost 28 million pesos. The Teuchitlán archeologists will finally have room to display thousands of artifacts, skeletons and bones found at the site and visitors will plunge into a long, curving tunnel filled with multi-media gadgets for a “journey into Teuchitlán’s past.” The new museum (which comes with a new parking lot as well) is expected to open its doors in early 2010.
The Guachimontones are located 1.2 kilometers northeast of the town. You can get to Teuchitlán from Guadalajara by taking Mexican highway 15 west (toward Nogales) for 25 kilometers and turning left onto highway 70 heading southwest towards Ameca. After 17 kilometers you’ll pass the large sugar refinery at Tala. One and a half kilometers later, turn right onto a road signposted Ahualulco. After 12.7 kilometers you’ll come to the Teuchitlán gas station, where you turn right and drive into town. Three blocks past the plaza, turn right and after 100 meters, make a left onto the road heading north to the Guachimontones. The driving time from Guadalajara is about one hour.
