Alta Verapaz

This post has been a hard one to write.  Generally photographs don´t capture real feeling of a place and for me, this is likely never been more true than for my time in the Lanquin area of Guatemala.  Partially this is because I couldn´t have my camera with me, but for lots many other reasons too.  Hopefully I will get some pictures from other people that had water proof cameras.  But even with the inadequecies of photos I think this post is worth it. 

Lanquin is a small little village about 6 hours from Guatemala City and Semuc Champey another 25 minutes in the back of a pickup truck. There are not a lot of travellers there at all, but the ones who make the trip all come to see the Grutas de Maria and Semuc Champey.  This area is all about water - perfect for me.

The hostel I stayed in was in a gorgeous area, with green sloping grass and tropical plants down to a blue river for swimming.  The each little cabin was on a platform and was constructed with wood and palm leaf roofs.

This part of Guatemala is limestone and has a lot of karst features. The Grutas de Maria is a cave system that you tour with a guide. It is partially full of water, so there is lots of swimming, climbing up waterfalls, and jumping down 10 feet off rocks - all inside of a cave with either a headlamp if you were smart enough to bring one, or a candle supplied by the guides. I don't have any pictures from inside the cave, as my camera is not waterproof.  I am hoping that I will get some by email from some other travellers.

After the caves, I visited Semuc Champey.  This is an area where the Lanquin river flows underground for about 300 m, exiting in over a waterfall.  We climbed up inside the waterfall and jumped in to the pools beneath.  Above the area where the river flows underground is a relatively flat section of limestone, filled with small, turquiose and green pools of water, each cascading down to the next in a small waterfall.  The view from the Mirador, complete with howling howler monkeys is fanciful and swimming in the pool feels otherworldly.  If you closed your eyes and pictured the perfect jungle paradise of rivers, waterfalls, trees, animals, this is it.  And there were only 15 people in the whole area all day.

Hiking at Semuc Champey

View of Semuc Champey from the Mirador

The area where the river goes underground and the start of the pools on the left.

Close up of the pools

Working in Nicaragua - Chureca

In my second week in Nicaragua we spent 5 days installing piezometers and sampling at Chureca, Managua's city garbage dump. Apparently the dump was started in its current location after the earthquake that decimated Managua in 1972; they needed a large area, close by for all the building debris, and the large vacant area adjacent to the lake was selected. But, I think it has continued as the dump for all the city waste since then and now is very large and slumping into the lake.  The garbage is about 20 m high.

This is not a landfill, it is a dump: there is no lining, no leachate collection, no control on what comes in, and no planning on where different materials are placed. In the image below, the large grey area along the top is Lake Managua, the dump is visible just south, with a long road running through it.

The green areas between the dump and Lake Managua are areas where vegetation is growing on older portions of the dump; the garbage extends right to the edge of the lake. When the lake level is high, it is above the bottom of the garbage.

Life in the dump

There is a village in the dump.

People work in the garbage and live immediately adjacent, or on top, of the garbage. Each truck that comes in to the dump has a handful on adults and children inside it, digging through for the best stuff, before it even gets dumped.

 

One thing that struck me about the houses was that even in a village in a dump, there are those that are better off, and those that aren't.  Some house have fences, more permanent walls made of scrap sheet metal, some are even painted.  Others have plastic sheeting roofs and cardboard walls.

(film crew was with us, documenting the Chureca and the work being done there for Spanish TV)

And animals - everything you could imagine lives and grazes here - cows, horses, goats, cats, dogs, I'm sure rats, and vultures.

Even still, there were some beautiful areas, if you could ignore the smell and forget what was behind you.

Field Work
 
For the people who read this that have an environmental background, I wanted to capture some of the differences in field work here compared to what we are used to. One of the big differences from consulting is that here people time is pretty much the cheapest item, I think.  We had 10 people in the field (6 labours to dig holes) and only one waterra valve: there was a lot of standing around and I had to turn off my project management thoughts.
 
Drilling methods - for shallow wells anyway - and drill cutting (note the shoe)

 

Piezometer construction and filter socks - or filter panyhose

 

Vegetation clearing - and protection

 

Driven piezometers in the lake bed

   

Crazy labours (note the hat, he forgot his that day) and film crews. I have a starring role as sample carrier, preserver and field measurement tech.