Back to Antigua

FIlm Day Three,

Safety

Locking cars, police escorts, soldiers? How safe is this place? I’m a little freaked about a place with so many machine guns. Every since we crossed into Mexico the level of machine gun sightings went from, well, none, to every day. At the gas station last night there was a uniformed guard with a shot gun. (also dancing girls, but that was some promotion thing, I think. Maybe there are dancing girls at that station every day.) At the borders , of course there more machine guns and the police have them too. The soldiers I talked with at the Guatemala border were friendly enough. How safe once again? That’s hard to figure. We’ve driven around with a car that wasn’t lock and had no problems. Then again we met a van load of kayakers that got ripped off. At times the worry of getting our stuff getting stolen has gotten out of hand. After all most people in the world, work, raise their families and so on. I’ve been to enough places where you get the, “We’re great, but watch out for the people over there.” And then where you get to “over there” they say “ We’re great but...

On the other hand to a thief, the amount of wealth we are traveling with wold make a retirement level score for a thief. In the end, being smart and not projecting a paranoid, thief attracting, image is all we can do anyway.

Antigua Take Two

To tell the story of our trip we often can’t keep to the real time line. When you actually see the show, the order of the scenes won’t always be the actual order in which they happen. Our late arrival to Antigua on Good Friday meant we missed shooting things we needed to tell the story. Today we went back to Antigua to show what we had missed.

As we got into town, we pulled over to shoot the volcano from a distance. Just as Don started rolling tape there was an eruption. It’s started with a tiny plume of smoke, a tuft on a huge mountain. But it continued to grow. Blown over by high winds, it soon spread roiling across the sky. The dumb luck!

Back in town a few processions were scheduled for Easter Sunday. Keith helped make one of the carpets. This one was made with a background of colored saw dust that was shook through a screen onto the cobble stones of the street. Broad bands of bright colors were laid down then onions were placed upon the border. With in the design were potted plants, squash and red peppers. Now, we had more of the story. I was pulled away to drive the cars away as the police were threatening to tow them. When I got back Keith and Don there filming the procession emerging from the Church. Rows of people in wheel chair lined either side of the churches plaza as it passed. I caught up with them to point out that this procession would walk right through the carpet that Keith had just helped build. We rushed across a short cut to film the carpets final purpose, it’s destruction. As the procession passed the crowd moved in to pick up the vegetables. Now we had the complete story. We could add the new footage to what we got friday night. Now we would relent to our guide Walter’s request to get our butts in the cars and get over to the coffee plantation.

The coffee plantation was what was on our schedule for the day. We could the tour, once again out of order. First the washing process, then the drying court yards, then the plants and picking them. Then it was into the plantation to see the coffee plants. This is shade coffee. There are two sets of trees, the shade trees, which are heavily pruned to keep them wide and then the coffee below. Afterwards we had some coffee. I must say as a coffee hater, this was good coffee.