Guatemala

My father's new Iranian passport arrived yesterday; it took the better part of 7 years for us to get it.  With it I will be able to apply for my own Iranian passport and, with luck, will make it to Iran to visit my family there before I go back to work in February.  I'll be in the city of Shiraz with my aunt Shalah and uncle Abbas - here's a picture of a Shiraz mosque, though it is most famous for it's gardens:

I got the news at an internet cafe in Guatemala city, where I am now visiting the family of my aunt Betty and cousin Ian, who are originally from Guatemala.  Rosa and her son Yankell have been incredibly kind and welcoming.  It has been so nice to be with family, for the first time in months.

In the email about my dad's passport arriving, my stepmother told me they needed some things from me in order to send in my passport application: 10 passport photos, in full suit and well groomed, a copy of my passport and an official copy of my birth certificate.  Incredibly, Yankell just happened to have a suit and tie hanging in his mother's closet and while Doña Rosa was at work I walked to a nearby barber and have a set of somber looking (this is the islamic republic, remember) passport photos taken.  And then I was able to mail it off with 6 day delivery.  The incredible things is that if I had gotten word in most of my other destinations, that simple process would have been way more compilcated- the suit, the photos and expideted mail.  Guatemala city looks more or less like this from the neighborhood I'm in:

What have I left out; I never wrote much about San Cristobal de las Casas, the old city in Chiapas where I spent a really nice week.  I ended up in a place with a working kitchen and spent every other day in the marcado buying fresh foods and experimenting with them at night.  Sucesses included roasted chiles with fresh fava beans and chicken marinated in this rub made of chiles and ground pumpkin seeds and then fried.  San Cristobal:

There I with a friend to a nearby religious center (on horseback!), rented a scooter to visit a park 10km away and climbed massive hills that lead to two citadels on opposite sides of the city, overlooking the opposing buildings and mountains.  From San Cristobal I took a passenger van across the Guatemalan border (about a 12 hour ride) through luch rolling hills and mountain-top towns - and through incredible rain, blinding fog and areas where rockslides forced both highway lanes to share one lane (often overlapping with the blinding fog; I practiced not looking and trusting the driver).  I arrived that night in the city of Antigua, at the foothill of a giant active volcano:



Today or tomorrow I will probably move on to Livingston, Guatemala which is on the coast near Belize.  From there I'll move on to Belize and then back to Mexico to the Yucatan coast.  Then back to Dallas to see my uncle Craig, who has been a gracious host to me in Texas...