point a to point b
I’d like to play for you a recording I made of a howler monkey.
Some say they find the sound frightening. Others say it sounds like nothing more than a strong wind. I like to think about what it would sound like if you tickled one. That would be hilarious. I asked Ramona who would win in a fight – me or a howler. She said Howler hands down, which is probably true. According to the signs in Tikal, Howler Monkeys will attempt to defecate on the heads of intruders and shout loudly. Ramona and I wrote a song about it. I lost the lyrics, and unfortunately you can’t hear the tune, because it was pretty good, but the refrain went something like this:
“Hey hey we’re the monkeys, we’re always taking a shit. Hey hey we’re the monkeys – flinging our poo and laughing at you.”
I ask Ramona who would win in a fight, me or a Spider Monkey. She said that would be a tough one. She said Spider Monkeys have tails so strong they could slice a man in half. That’s true. She also said they have venomous teeth. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know they have really big balls, which are very exposed. If I did get in a fight with a spider monkey, I could probably just kick it in the nuts, but I’m not sure I’d be so comfortable with that. I would rather feed them food and watch them do cool monkey tricks, but the signs say you shouldn’t feed the animals. They say it makes the Coatis fat and angry. I wish they’d make a sign that told the animals not to feed on you. They have ants here whose bites draw blood. The mosquito bites look like cysts.
Speaking of skeeters, that’s what Ramona and I call the pushy vendors that try to sell stuff to you in the park. Skeeters. But the name actually comes from the rapper Lil Jon, not from mosquitos. We were trying to think of what to say to them to get them to leave you alone, since the word ‘no’ seems to have no effect. So we just figured it might be something they didn’t understand, but still sounded intimidating. If you haven’t heard it, here’s a sound bite.
Speaking of bites, the lake just below Tikal in Remate has crocodiles. They compete with the local townspeople for a place to swim. From the looks of things around Remate, the locals are losing. All around town you see people with missing fingers, gouged eyes. Either it was the Crocs, or they picked a fight with a Spider Monkey. We saw a beggar with no legs. Ramona asked if I thought he lost his legs from begging, or if he begged because he lost his legs. I thought long and hard about this, but I couldn’t come up with much of anything in the end. I guess any way you look it – he lost.
Seems like this is just wild country, and there doesn’t seem to be much you can do to tame it. You could probably chop a Guatemalan’s toe off and it’d grow right back. Just like a lizard’s tail. Just like all these trees managed to grow right back over all these giant temples. They say it only took a couple hundred years to completely swallow them. Just untameable, the jungle, the animals, the Guatemalans, everything. I guess that’s why they never bother with caution signs here. Nobody’d listen. They don’t even bother sobering up to drive. We took one taxi – the driver didn’t even wait until we were all the way in his Tuk Tuk before he started speeding off. Then he told Ramona she was out of control for moving so slowly. He skidded in to a bodega a minute later and hopped out. Said he need another drink. We decided we needed another driver. The next guy we flagged down, we told him about it. He couldn’t stop cackling. “The best part is, he wasn’t even headed toward Flores,” the driver said. “He was headed in the opposite direction” Laughing and laughing. I guess that’s about the best thing you can do in a situation like that though. Laugh about it, then head in the opposite direction.
