Maya

They are everywhere. When you walk down the steets of Tulum. When you buy icecream in Guatemala. When you wait for the bus. Their smiling faces greet you from cars, houses, supermarkets. It seemed so strange to me at the begining that these bold faces that used to belong to one of the mightiest civilizations that ever dwelled this planet now use cell phones, wear high heels and have commercial businesses. What the hell did I expect to see, right?- naked indigenous peoples that have 18 months a year with 20 days each. Well, no Kam, if you ask a Maya what day is today they will look at their Gregorian Calendar and say "It's Tuesday my friend,February 2009". :). However, there is something about their faces. The lost glory. The heirs of time. They look at us -stupid tourists with digital cameras - and smile carelessly, mockingly, patiently. This is their land and they know it. While being among them for 2 weeks I remembered an excerpt from one of my favourite books "On the road" by J. Kerouac. Sal Paradise's thoughts as he is passing throught the streets of Mexico- somehow very similar to my own :

"The boys were sleeping, and I was alone in my eternity at the wheel, and the road ran straight as an arrow. Not like driving across Carolina, or Texas, or Arizona, or Illinois; but like driving across the world and into the places where we would finally learn ourselves among the Fellaheen Indians of the world, the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world from Malaya…to Morocco to the selfsame deserts and jungles of Mexico. These people were unmistakably Indians and were not at all like the Pedros and Panchos of silly civilized American lore – they had high cheekbones, and slanted eyes, and soft ways; they were not fools, they were not clowns; they were great, grave Indians and they were the source of mankind and the fathers of it. The waves are Chinese, but the earth is an Indian thing. As essential as rocks in the desert are they in the desert of ‘history.' And they knew this when we passed, ostensibly self-important moneybag Americans on a lark in their land; they knew who was the father and who was the son of antique life on earth, and made no comment."