The language of the Mayan jungle

The horse seems all right, but a smear of blood runs from her cheek down her neck.
A soft-spoken, slight man of 43 with brown skin and a farmer's wiry musculature straps my backpack to the horse with the help of his 13-year-old son Ignacio. He explains that overnight, as we hung in our hammocks, the horse had been bitten by a vampire bat.

My guide doesn’t speak any English, only Spanish and Q'eqchi', one of the two dozen extant Maya languages in this region. And though this meant we trekked thirty kilometres on foot through the jungle to the archaeological site of El Zotz and I didn't get the detail I was hoping for (it turned out he was no expert anyway), it did give me the perfect opportunity to practise my Spanish. Despite my impressive ignorance of the language, we actually carried out a long conversation. He is a rancher with ten horses and eight children. We spoke about our families, about his horses, and about the life of las Mayas. About the food in Guatemala, the food in Australia. The plants in the jungle. The implications for the US-Russia relationship since the resumption of the presidency of Vladimir Putin.

I am constantly amazed by it. Conversing in another language is like having a superpower, as though I am able to penetrate another dimension of reality which other mortals can not.

In simple Spanish, he explained to me the use of the many plants in the Mayan biosphere. Often called "nature's larder", my guide refers to the jungle as "la tienda de Maya"—the Mayan shop. There was food everywhere. We picked up small orange fruits the size of grapes, fallen from high in the trees, called ramon. Most of it is a stone; you peel the surrounding rind like the skin of a citrus and eat that. It tasted like apricot. Another fruit called zapote, related to the mangosteen of southeast Asia, had a consistency similar to kiwifruit and tasted like pear. We plucked leaves of pimiento to make tea. There was also sassafrass, used to make root beer, but that's a bit more complicated. There was Mayan garlic (unrelated to garlic); a clutch of tentacles growing on a tree trunk called Mayan spaghetti that looked like a green octopus (unrelated to octopus); and Mayan chewing gum, chicle, which was sap harvested from the slashed bark of a tree.

When we reached the temples of El Zotz, we trekked up a long, steep rise and scrambled up the side of a narrow hill. This was the first temple—an unrestored mound, as they all are, of centuries of jungle debris with shaped stones peeking through the composted leaf litter. We sat and caught our breath at the peak, above the treetops, and as we surveyed the vast carpet of green canopy a spider monkey leapt across the chasm before us, arms aloft, and latched onto a liana vine.

These and howler monkeys are common. Less common are the diurnal pumas and the nocturnal jaguars, but those are famously hard to spot. From the corner of my eye I did spot a grey and red tarantula the size of a hand peering with a cluster of eyes out from the hollow root of a tree. As soon as I stopped he shot timidly inside his little grotto and wouldn't reappear despite all my guide's gentle coaxing: rattling a whip-like stick around inside the hole, followed by beating on the tree trunk with a machete. If only we'd had a shotgun.

By the time we reached camp, we had been walking for ten hours. It's usually 40 degrees Celsius in April, and though the weather was merciful and didn't break 30, the jungle was humid. I was drenched slick with sweat. I longed for a river to splash in, but there are no bodies of water in the Petén. Instead I had to settle for a Wet Wipe shower. And though I wasn't thirsty per se, all I had had to drink the entire trek was warm water. Tepid coffee would have been more refreshing. If a pub magically appeared out of nowhere with enough beer left for just one cold pint, and a man dying of dehydration crawled through the doors, I would have murdered him.

Hammocks are standard sleeping quarters in rural Guatemala. I think I've now got the hang of it, so to speak, and was comfortably asleep in minutes. Then again, my legs were so tired I could have slept on a bed of snakes.

The hammock and mosquito net (a cotton sheet) is also a preventative against vampires. Vampire bats live exclusively on the warm blood of mammals, typically horses and cattle, but they have been known to feed on people. Attracted by heat, the bat lands on the ground nearby and crawls towards its victim—you can picture it writhing like a de-shanked zombie with broken elbows—where it scales the leg, hauling itself up with wing-end claws, and bites the horse's neck. The fangs are sharp as obsidian. The bat actually cuts away the fur so it can make an incision in the flesh and laps up the blood as it pools in the wound.

But the horse appears to have suffered no ill effects from the bite, and under her burden she placidly weathers the return journey with my guide, his son and I leading on foot. We speak much less this time. Perhaps we are tired. Perhaps just my vocabulary is exhausted, and we have nothing left to talk about as we pass the same trees and the same plants.

Eventually we arrive at the little village kitchen where my driver back to Flores is waiting. I thank my guide and tip him a hundred quetzales and his son fifty. We shake hands and I spend the last of my Spanish to bid him adiós.

On the drive back I realise the one thing I forgot to ask my guide was his name.

The Guatemalan jungle: temples, drugs and vampires

My Guatemalan driver spoke English, but his accent was really thick.

"Uh, desculpeme," I answered. "I'm sorry... No entiendo. I didn't understand what you said."

"I jess say to you dees trock ees berry strong!"

He had picked me up at 6am and was driving me in a beaten-up Toyota an hour-and-a-half into what was once forest. The dense Petén jungle of northern Guatemala conceals an area in the Mayan world, which extends from Honduras to southern Mexico, where the ruins are most concentrated. Archaeologists are constantly uncovering new sites.

The smell of smoke followed us as we passed frequent smouldering plots of blackened land. The jungle is also being cleared, in an era of global warming, at one of the fastest rates in the world by illegal settlers who slash and burn the forest to clear it for cattle ranches and palm oil farms. Sometimes ranchers turn looters when, in doing so, they discover sites before the archaeologists.

We pass a military checkpoint, a common sight in these parts. The region has a reputation of being lawless and has become the main battleground of the drug cartels—Los Zetas, the Gulf cartel, the Sinaloa Federation and the Mendoza clan—in a turf war. For several years the fearsome and violent Zetas, special forces soldiers who deserted the Mexican army to act as enforcers of Northern Mexico's Gulf cartel before breaking away to form a cartel of their own, has been trafficking with impunity in these remote jungles, perfect for landing plane loads of cocaine on cleared airstrips. Establishing themselves in the sparsely populated Petén in 2007 barely a decade after the 36-year-long Guatemalan civil war ended, they presented a challenge to the fledgling democracy. In 2010, equipped with assault rifles, grenade launchers and armoured vehicles, Los Zetas encountered a Guatemalan army patrol and battled it to a stalemate. They provoked a state of martial law in 2011 when, near the town of La Libertad—on my route in the following days—they tied up and decapitated over two dozen farm workers who had no connection to the drug trade and scrawled a "you're next" message to the ranch owner on a wall in blood from a severed leg. He was reportedly helping the Gulf cartel. This is the real Breaking Bad down here.

Base camps for active archaeology sites have guards, and the drug gangs see that kind of permanent presence as a threat in detecting their activities. The temple site to which I was heading, El Zotz, is however inactive, though recent excavation of a hill of jungle detritus revealed elaborate stucco masks on the walls of a pyramid, dubbed the Temple of the Night Sun. Zotz means bat in the local language; the site is so called due to the clouds of bats that fill the sky at dusk from caves in the nearby limestone cliff. Vampire bats.

We entered a small village and my driver dropped me at a wooden shack, seemingly a family home with happy children, welcoming adults, and chickens and a dog roaming the dirt floor. It is the village comedor, or restaurant.

"You have brake-fast hair. I peek you up hair in two dace."

He said my guide to El Zotz would be along shortly, and then he was gone. A warm, smiling lady with a leathery face and a long skirt presented me with a plate of scrambled eggs and tomato, stewed black beans, salty cheese and tortillas, and poured me some sweet coffee, a typical breakfast here. As I tucked in I mused over my half relief, though the driver was a nice guy, that perhaps the new guide would speak clearer English. He arrived soon enough and addressed me with a  gentle, "Meester."

"Buenas dias," I said. I would be spending two days on a trek with him to learn about the jungle and this ancient Mayan site. "Me llamo Wayne. ¿Habla inglés?"

He shook his head. "Español," he said.

Buses: Guatemala

Looking like a giant jungle tree-house with its undulating stone garden courtyard, fully grown trees and steep, ladder-like steps leading to rooms, the Hostel Los Amigos in Flores, Guatemala, is one of the best hostels I've ever stayed in (joining other frontrunners Travellers House in Lisbon, Portugal, and the former HI hostel on Lake Alta in Whistler, Canada, where I stayed in 1994 and which sadly ceased 40 years of operation in 2003). Los Amigos has a restaurant with great food, a bar, a night lounge, and its own travel agency providing minibus connections to the Tikal temple complex, the big drawcard in this part of Guatemala.

A young Irish girl I befriended at the hostel, also travelling solo but right around Central America for nine months (making the Solonaut look like a lightweight), caught the minibus with me to Tikal for the sunset tour. She planned to stay the night, as did I to catch the pyramids at both sunset and sunrise (though I subsequently learned that there is no sunrise in a jungle that has 365 days of morning mist) and, both of us being backpackers, we chose the cheapest accommodation available: hammocks with mosquito nets in the campground for 85 quetzales (A$12).

I had never attempted more than an afternoon doze in a hammock. This one was made of denim and the mosquito net was actually an opaque cotton cloth forming a ceiling and four walls that draped to the concrete slab beneath my suspended arse, upon which I had visions of plummeting flat on my back mid-REM when the hammock rope sprang unwound at 3am. I was worried the full cotton enclosure might be stuffy in the steamy jungle, but on the contrary I was cold in the early hours and had to gather up the denim sides to wrap myself. All night I could hear mobile phone pings and beeps and twirrups until I realised these were the sounds of jungle nightlife. Nokia has been here with a microphone. Howler monkeys, on the other hand, sound decidedly unlike mobile phones and more like a hoarse lion, or a giant hound with whooping cough. Or rather, twenty giant hounds, as they howl in troops. If your mobile phone made a sound like that you'd set off a panicked stampede of fellow commuters. And I'm not sure exactly when howler monkeys sleep, as they make their calls to each other day and night. All in, I still actually managed six hours of sleep, though the knees were a bit sore from being stretched straight.

Los Amigos forgot they had sent us up there by the next day. The tour companies maximise profits, understandably, by sending minibuses up full, several per day. Unfortunately, they failed to send up two empty seats for our scheduled return on the final shuttle at half-noon. We found two others in the same boat, so it sounds like a common occurrence. The shuttle drivers told us we could catch the colectivo, the public service known to backpackers as a chicken bus, back into town.

The colectivo is also a minibus, seating twelve comfortably. A "conductor" rides with the passengers, manning the sliding door, collecting fares and securing any baggage on the roof via a side-mounted ladder. We left Tikal with ten people, and after a couple of roadside pick-ups soon fit twelve. We made another stop a bit further on and picked up one more. Then two more. The conductor made room by opening the side door and standing in the void, hanging on like it was a catamaran. We stopped again and let in another two. The conductor shifted to the ladder and rode outside. Then we let in a family of five. The conductor returned to the open slide door, this time to hold everyone in from falling out. After several more stops I counted thirty-three men, women and children wedged from rear window to windscreen, kids on laps and bodies pressed together standing and sitting. It was so ridiculous we all laughed about it. Guatemalans are pretty relaxed people. The conductor told us their record is forty, with people on the roof.

I complained to Los Amigos and made sure I was reimbursed for the cost of the colectivo—about $4. Hardly seems just.

Buses: Mexico & Belize

The long-distance buses in Mexico (we call them coaches in Australia) spoil me. First class buses have comfortable reclining seats and curtained windows to shade you from the Mexican sun. They play movies (though worth disregarding) and some include food (usually a simple sandwich and drink). But what I love is that they are cheap. I caught a 5-hour first class bus the other day for 120 pesos—about A$10.

Security leaving Mexico City from Autobus Terminal Norte is like catching a flight. My backpack was scanned, my hand luggage searched, I passed through a metal detector and I had two physical pat-downs. I finally took my seat and saw through the windscreen a security officer with a digital camera taking a video of the front of the bus. She then climbed aboard and walked down the aisle, recording each passenger's face! It was strange having a camera thrust at you. Do I smile? Wouldn't that look idiotic, as if I thought I was on this woman's vacation? Thankfully, my disorientation imparted a mere dazed look, like a two-year-old on Santa's knee. Christ, I thought. I hope a bomb doesn't go off and I get my stupid mug splashed on television screens around the world. "D'you know an Australian died in that blast in Mexico?" "Of course. He was the one with that cock-eyed stare." Maybe I should ask her to take it again. How do I explain that in Spanish? To everyone else this all seemed rather routine, which I guess it was.

There are no such precautions catching a second class bus through Belize. No such comforts, either. After two luxuriantly comfy Mexican coaches from Guanajuato to Mexico City and a short flight to Chetumal in the south, I took (following a five-hour sleep in a hostel) an eight-hour trip from the Mexico-Belize border to the Belize-Guatemala border in a half-clapped-out minibus with no air-conditioning and seats designed for people with disproportionately short femurs.

Belize is actually an inviting little country—indeed, I was literally invited to stay by the friendly immigration officer when I told her I was only passing through—and I was disappointed not to have time to stop. It has a Caribbean feel (being on the Caribbean and all) with dread-locked and corn-braided people of African descent, and is a member of the British Commonwealth. It is the only Central American country to have English as its national language. It is also a small-scale oil producer. Though I wouldn't describe the country as wealthy, there is infrastructure and real estate, municipal parks and schools, and towns with thriving businesses of internet cafes and DVD shops and bespoke furniture. People drive Toyotas and Mazdas and Kias, and two-storey painted mansions are not unusual among the wooden shanties.

The only thing I didn't like about Belize was the money changers at the Guatemalan border. Belize charges an exit tax of 30 Belize dollars, and having spent barely fifteen minutes physically on the soil of the country I naturally hadn't a single Belize cent. "We don't accept Mexican pesos," I was told by the clerk. "You'll have to see the money changers outside." The roaming men with belts full of various currencies are licensed money changers and present their laminated plastic in a kind of assurance that you won't get ripped off, and then proceed to rip you off. In an exchange of Mexican pesos and Guatemalan quetzales worth A$70, the guy took me for A$20. I wasn't expecting to have to buy Belize dollars so didn't know the exchange rate until I later checked.

Latin America trek: Cuba, Mexico, Guatemala

On the first day of the first journey of 2014, I am operating on minimal sleep. It's a terrible and regular habit: the night before the flight I obsess over final details and still pending plans, and I never get a solid rest before the voyage on the plane. I managed a mere three hours of kip followed by a couple of catnaps on the 13-hour Sydney to Los Angeles leg. Arriving in the Californian morning, I then powered through the rest of the daylight hours to beat the jetlag—ignore the body's pleas for sleep and push through till dark. Then crash. That will reset the body clock. All of this means about four hours of sleep in 52.

This trip will see a week in Cuba, four in Mexico, and one more in Guatemala. I want to catch Fidel's Cuba before it is lost to the gradual changes the more moderate Castro brother, Raúl, is introducing since being handed the leadership. Mexico is at any time a wealth of treasures, and I have wanted to return since my memories—or rather, one memory—of straddling my father's shoulders at two years old in a Mexican souvenir shop, looking down into the bin at a punched out set of bongos. Somehow Mexico imprinted on me, with latent echoes of mariachis, piñatas and the skeletal iconography of Santa Muerta—Saint Death. And where Mexico's Yucatán peninsula bleeds into Guatemala is the world of the Maya, still here after the end of 2012 and home to colossal, ancient pyramids. I have a mission there: to reach the 2000-year-old Mayan murals of San Bartolo, hidden in the Guatemalan jungle until their chance discovery in 2001.

These things have waited a long time. But they can wait one more night. I'm going to bed.