As some of you already know, I spent a week in Guatemala last month on a birding trip. Here are some images from that trip. We spent a few days at Reserva Los Tarrales in the Pacific foothills in south-central Guatemala; the closest real city is Escuintla. There are about 300 people who live and work at the reserve. Their main source of income is coffee, ornamental plants (imagine vast greenhouses filled with golden pothos plants) and cut flowers (mainly Heliconia sp.). Interestingly, all of the contracts for the ornamentals and flowers are with companies in Italy; they’re shipped in refrigerated containers.

The settlement looks a lot like most other small Latin American villages; there is always a soccer field:

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The houses look primitive, and they are, but at least here they all have electricity and running spring water, something that’s the exception rather than the rule in small-town Latin America. Many of the houses have TVs, and nearly everyone has a cell phone.

The reserve sits on the southern slope of Volcán Atitlán:

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On two of the mornings, we rode in the back of a pickup truck up a very rough road, about a third of the way up the slope, and then hiked around from there.

There is a one-room carpentry shop at Los Tarrales; the building is maybe 40 ft long and 15 ft wide. The two short sides are cinder block walls; the two long sides are open and covered with chain-link fencing:

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As you can see in the photo, they have a small benchtop jointer, a benchtop thickness planer, and a fairly heavy-duty looking shaper. The guy in the photo was working on some sort of shaft with bearings and pulleys; I don’t think it was directly related to any woodworking (my Spanish isn’t good enough to engage in much of a technical conversation). Most of the stuff they work on is fairly simple furniture and carpentry: doors, tables, shelving, etc.

There are two large workbenches in the shop; you can see the leg vise on this one:

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You can see a couple of tablesaw blades hanging in the photo, but there didn’t appear to be a tablesaw in the shop. There are lots and lots of small lumberyards in all of the towns in Guatemala, and most of them had tablesaws (no guards, of course), jointers and thickness planers. I visited one in Panajachel, but all he had was some rather boring looking pine.

Here is the wood supply in the shop:

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(I think the main lumber storage is elsewhere on the property, but I don’t know exactly where.) You can also see part of a very large pile of planer shavings in the foreground.

Of course, a workshop isn’t complete without some pinups:

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Another volcano that is visible from the reserve is Volcán del Fuego, which is just south of the former capital (and present-day major tourist attraction) at Antigua Guatemala. You can see some steam rising from the caldera:

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At the end of the road up the slope, there is a small settlement, where the families who work in the coffee plantations up there live (so that they don’t have to make the long drive–or walk–every day). Each day, as we came back from our morning hike, the kids would gather around to see if we had anything for them:

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I had just given these kids some Reese’s chocolate and peanut butter Easter eggs. You can see that the Mayan girls (and women, too) still wear the traditional woven and embroidered skirts, although the boys (and men) have mostly gone over to more European/American-style clothing.

It’s hard to get photographs of the adult Mayans. They generally do not want their pictures taken, and the older and more traditional they are (and therefore the more interesting their wardrobe), the more likely they are to refuse a photo. One day, near Totonicapán, I pulled out my camera without thinking, trying to get a photo of some old women driving their mules down the road. As soon as they saw the camera they ducked down behind the mules.

Here’s an interesting hinge I found on the doors of our hotel in Antigua Guatemala:

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You can see that the visible half is like a cotter pin. The other half is presumably the same, but the far end is buried inside the jamb, so it’s impossible to tell for sure. It worked remarkably smoothly.

Most of the doors were simple two-panel affairs, with rails mortised into the stiles (sometimes through and wedged, sometimes blind). In the highlands, the wood is mostly pine, but at lower elevations, it’s mostly a mahogany-like hardwood that I don’t recognize. I smuggled a small piece out; here are tangential:

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and radial:

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views near the sapwood/heartwood transition. The wood is fairly lightweight, with no noticeable fragrance. Like mahogany, it has lots of pores, but the concentration of pores along the rings is more distinct. I think the longitudinal grooves that you can see in the tangential section are from insects. You can see some fine ray fleck on the radial surface.

Here are some ripe coffee berries at Finca el Pilar, near Antigua Guatemala:

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While we were visiting Reserva Natural Atitlán (near Panajachel, along the north shore of Lago Atitlán), a group of nuns arrived in a small bus. Some of them decided to try the obstacle course:

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Here are fresh cashews at the huge, huge market in Antigua Guatemala:

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The part that we know about in the US is inside the grayish husk at the end; the other part is sometimes called a cashew apple; it has a tart, apple-like flavor, but doesn’t ship well, so you don’t see it outside of cashew-growing areas. The husk of the nut contains a high concentration of urushiol, the same compound that’s in poison ivy and poison oak, so it’s actually a rather hazardous job to shell the nuts (which is why you never see the nuts in the shell here). The toxic husk is a key component of the plant’s seed dispersal strategy: A monkey will grab the fruit, carry it off, and eat just the apple part, leaving the seed behind to germinate.

Finally, a spectacular cloud formation at sunset in Panajachel:

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-Steve