Hostel Cooking

Cooking in a hostel can look a lot like an episode of an evil Food Network competition:

“You have to make a nutritious meal using zero sharp knives but 7 spoons.
No cutting board or plates, but multiple bowls. And as many onions as you can carry,
but only one half mouldy tomato and some slightly slimy ham. Go!”

Over the last few months we’ve gotten very creative with our cooking. We’ve defined what a ‘backpacker healthy meal’ is (basically anything where at least one fruit or vegetable is present). And that they CAN be made with just a box of KD and some broccoli.

We’re pros at concocting a strainer out of multiple slotted spoons.We’ve become accustomed to making toast over a gas stove when the toaster is on the fritz or non-existant.

And we have no problem being the ones to reach into that nasty drain to pull out the remnants of 4 other backpacker’s dinners before we can wash our dishes.

When you’re backpacking you have a lot of variables to deal with when cooking for yourself: budget, availability of food, availability of tools in the kitchen, and, of course, it would be great if meals were well balanced too (eating pasta & tomato sauce 5 days in a row does not work for us).

Some of our favourite easy hostel meals have been the following:

• Breakfast
• Egg sandwich

Especially good for hangover mornings. Fried egg and cheese with fried tomato, red pepper and onion over brown toast. *try adding avocado!

Oatmeal

A quick and filling breakfast. Instant or boiled rolled oats with any combination of the following added: peanut butter, jam, diced apples, pears or banana, berries, peanuts, almonds, cinnamon, nutella, honey or maple syrup.

Lunch

Soup + Vegetables

One of the easiest ways to increase nutrition on a backpacker budget. Use an instant soup, then add your own veggies. Broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, carrots, peas, mushrooms, potatoes, canned corn or beans and tomatoes are all great additions to almost any soup out there.

Veggie Wraps

We were introduced to this recipe by Quetzeltrekkers, Nicaragua and it’s now one of our favourites. Make a filling mix with sliced carrots, cucumber and red peppers, diced tomatoes and onions and a can of uncooked corn. Add refried beans into a tortilla, crush some cheese Doritos on top (for crunch!), fill with the veggie mix, cover with some salsa and enjoy! *try adding avocado too!

Dinner

Creamy-Bacon Pasta

I made this for Bryan’s birthday dinner using what I could find. Make a cream sauce using butter, garlic, onion, sour cream and evaporated milk (using cream cheese, cream or milk would also work here). Add cooked bacon, broccoli, mushrooms and peas. Mix in cooked pasta. If you can find cheese or black pepper to add over top, please do!

Vegetarian Chilli

This meal often lasts for 2 dinners, which is helpful on the budget. Add sautéed onion, red peppers and garlic to a can of diced tomatoes, a can of onion/garlic or red pepper pasta sauce, a can of beans (red or black) and a can of corn. If you can find chilli powder and cumin add those in, or better yet, a chilli spice mix (they’re light enough to carry on with you too!). Serve over rice or with garlic bread.

Stir Fry

This is one of the easiest dinners to make. Take almost any vegetables you can find (peppers, broccoli, carrots, corn, mushrooms, beans etc.) and sauté with onion and garlic. Add in cooked ramen noodles or rice (even better if the rice is cooked the day before) and stir fry with oil and soy sauce. Add in 2 eggs and scramble.
Whether you’re hostel-cookin’ or looking for cheap, easy eats, try these out and send us your feedback/suggestions.

If you have any more recipe recommendations send them our way too!

We DO NOT want to eat spaghetti ever again (or at least for a long, long time).

Travel and Technology: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

Hey you, get off your f’ing phone!

The irony of bitching about technology by writing a post for a website on a laptop is not lost on me, but hear me out.

Times they are a’changin’ and nothing makes that more apparent than the mass amounts of technology us so called ‘budget backpackers’ are lugging around the world. Fair enough, we’re guilty of it too, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

My parents travelled the world back in the 70’s, when letters home travelled by land, sea and air, took weeks to arrive, and the expectation of regular updates was nil.

When I embarked on my first backpacking adventure in 2006 I had zero devices with me. Only a journal and the expectation that I’d be sending emails home VERY infrequently. This was a time before hourly status updates. Remember what that was like?

Fast forward to my second long term trip, where I had now acquired an iPod and the expectation that Facebook would be updated fairly regularly, when I could find an internet cafe.

Now we’re traveling with a plethora of devices that can be extremely useful and entirely detrimental in varying degrees. That’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly of travelling with technology.

The Good

In today’s travel world, the ability to update Tripadvisor (or this blog) in the click of a few keys gives the upper hand to the customer. If multiple people have a bad experience with a business that business is basically f*cked. This allows us travellers to support the many fantastic hostels, restaurants and tour operators, and avoid the few that are out to screw you. This is good, but along with The Good comes The Bad.

The Bad

There seems to be a lot less exploring happening these days. Hostels, restaurants and attractions are researched in advance, booked online, and then simply arrived at. Almost everyone we talk to has already planned where they’re staying 2 towns over from where they are now. Of course this can be helpful, for example if you’re on a short timeline or have special needs, but overall the uncertainty that makes backpacking so exciting has been lost. On this trip we’ve made an effort to rarely book things in advance – to keep the unknown unknown. This tactic has resulted in varying degrees of success, but that’s the adventure of the unexpected and we prefer it this way.

The Ugly

It makes me sad. I can’t count how many times we’ve marvelled at fellow travellers, sitting in a stunning setting, in total silence, scrolling though other people’s vacation photos on their phones. Sigh. There’s a time and place for everything, so in this moment:

Put that damn phone down!
Have a conversation!
Take in your beautiful surroundings!
Enjoy our world, minus the pixels, and update your status later.

To Done List
Backpacking is full of surprises and adventures. Below is a list of the top things we’ve seen, experienced and accomplished in the month of July. They’re not on our ‘To Do List’ anymore, this is the ‘To Done List’.

1. First Canada Day in Guatemala.

How do you celebrate Canada Day when it seems like no one else is from Canada? After months of meeting travellers from all over the world we had met very few Canadians. We resigned ourselves to celebrating Canada Day just the two of us. Then, a decision to have afternoon beers at the hostel bar led to meeting a group from all over the world that wanted to celebrate with us because one of their own was a fellow Canadian. We then geared up for a night of toasting Canada with every sip. Ingenious shots of maple syrup were poured, and suddenly the whole bar was celebrating with us.

2. First time attending a sound healing session.musichealing1

The sound healing ceremony we attended in Flores, Guatemala was very unique and left us with a lasting impact. The dedicated group of nomads from the Caravana de Cura are travelling Central and South America, performing Sound Healing and massage sessions at a backpacker friendly price. We were happy to record our session, which makes for great meditation or yoga music. Listen here.

3. First time caving by candle light.

Semuc Champey is one of the most amazing sites in Guatemala. The natural pools of clear green water running over white limestone make the slippery climb to the El Mirador Lookout totally worth it. Swimming in the pools was really cool but the caving by candle light was one of the most exciting things we’ve ever done. Our tour included scaling makeshift ladders up slippery vertical rock one handed (don’t let that candle touch the water – you don’t have a replacement!), climbing up a waterfall with minimal help from a rope, and jumping into an underwater black hole in total darkness. We left thrilled, proud, excited and a little bloody while others were ecstatic to see daylight. The day was finished with tubing and a leap of faith from 35 feet into a moving river.

4. First cave tubing.

Leaving Semuc Champey we were excited to see more of Guatemala’s caves. We were happy to hear about the Candeleria Caves, a giant cave network over 23km long. However we had to backtrack a bit, back to Coban, to get to them. All the tour companies in Coban were charging a fortune to take us to the caves, so we decided to go it alone. An exciting journey there, via some of the craziest bus drivers we’ve ever experienced (4 people had to exit due to motion sickess!), resulted in a private tubing tour for just us and our friend Marvyn, who decided to join. The giant cave caverns reminded us all of the Batcave, so this photo had to be taken.

5. First weaving lesson.

In the small town of Nebaj, we were returning to our room when we met Tina selling textiles at the reception desk. We couldn’t buy anything (our bags are stuffed as it is) but we wanted to learn more about traditional Ixil weaving. We organized a lesson, where we learned weaving is much harder then you would first think. To read the whole story see here.

6. First mountain summit.

As we arrived into Todos Santos, our jaws hit the floor when we saw the beautifully scenic mountain landscape. We couldn’t wait to start hiking all the trails around town. After walking the main road into town and scoping our the scenery we chose our destination for the next day: radio towers at the top of one especially tall mountain. We made it to the summit by random luck, following one of the many paths out of town and were surprised to find a little village only minutes from the top. The view on the other side allowed us to see for miles and miles. See more photos of our Todos Santos hikes here.

7. First Marimba recording.

Throughout Guatemala we’ve been interested in recording a Marimba band as Marimba is the countries historical instrument. It’s heard everywhere and very important to the Guatemalan culture. In Xela we were introduced to Marimba Princesita, one of Guatemala’s premier Marimba bands and had the opportunity to record the 9-man band as they practiced for a big performance.

8. First night on top of a volcano.

Since touching down in Mexico at the beginning of this trip, our goal was to climb one of the regions volcanos. It was in Guatemala that we got our chance. We climbed Volcan Tajumulco with a group from Xelha over 2 days. Our ascent to base camp was cold and damp, with none of the spectacular views we were told about. Cloud cover stayed until the middle of the night as we shivered in our tents under 4 layers of clothes. We were rewarded early on day two. As we climbed to the peak using headlamps in the 3am darkness, we could see the sky was clear. Sunrise provided a fantastic view of the entire mountain range surrounding us, and the hike back down in bright sunshine was spectacular.

9. First home away from home.

The first place we stayed that felt like a second home was found on AirBnB. A small eco-cottage on Lake Atitlan that not only lived up to the stunning posted pictures, but surpassed them. Our wonderful host was a pleasant surprise too – she welcomed us to her home and showered us with gifts from her garden. This was her first AirBnB experience too! With a little kitchen, living room, office, yoga area and giant loft bedroom, all surrounded by stunning views of the Lake Atitlan’s 3 volcanos, we were in heaven. We decided to stay an extra week.

The view from our bedroom in Lake Atitlan

10. First birthday outside of Canada (for Bryan).

We celebrated by climbing to the top to Volcan Tajumulco on the weekend before, it was always a dream of Bryan’s to stand on top of the world and see as far as the eye can see. We then planned an awesome dinner and drinks on Bryan’s actual birthday at our new place on Lake Atitlan.

Backpacking is full of surprises and adventures. Below is a list of the top things we’ve seen, experienced and accomplished in the month of August. They’re not on our ‘To Do List’ anymore, this is the ‘To Done List’.

1. First music town.

We’ve met a lot of musicians over the past 5 months, in all sorts of spots – street performers, local teachers giving lessons to travellers, hostel common areas, open mic nights and scheduled performances at many, many bars. However, it wasn’t until Antigua, Guatemala that we felt we had found a true music town. Where bars promote their in-house talent days in advance and your night out location is determined by where your favourite band is playing. We LOVED Antigua (our livers and our wallets, however, did not have such a great time there). Listen to some of the music we recorded in Antigua here.

2. First castle.

To be truthful, when we arrived in Rio Dulce, Guatemala we didn’t even know a castle was there. Thankfully, we were directed to it by a local man. We fit 3 of us on a small, tippy, 2 man kayak and paddled across the river for some castle sight-seeing. The Castillo de San Felipe has been so many different things, from army barracks to a jail, and now a tourist attraction. Perched on a bend in the river, it looks like something right out of Game Of Thrones.

3. First hot water waterfall.

A phenomenon neither of us has experienced before, the Finca El Paradiso are hot waterfalls that plunge into a cold natural pool. You can even swim to a little nook behind the falls for a full on steam facial. Topping off this very spa-like day was a full body covering of white mud from the nearby river – this mud is supposed to be great for your skin (or so they say). We just had fun covering ourselves in it, then jumping in the hot water springs to clean off.

4. First (unintentional) white water rafting river. Without a raft.

Near Gutamala’s Rio Dulce is Boqoron, a huge canyon of white limestone walls, giant hanging stalactites and a quick moving riving. As we rode the boat into the canyon we were in awe with the giant scale of the place. Arriving to a blockade of boulders, the boat couldn’t go any further, but the best sights were still farther up ahead. Time to swim. Against the current. Through multiple rapids and large rocks. Though the swim was tough at points, the views were definitely worth it. The swim back, with the current, was a lot quicker. We body boarded, although without the aid of an actual board, over the rapids and back to our boat in no time, only swallowing a fraction of water and kicking just a few rocks along the way. Great day!

5. Country #4 (of this trip): Honduras!

We were able to pass over the border from Guatemala to Honduras quite simply, with only one bribe request that was dropped as soon as we asked for a receipt. The border patrol agent then said to me, in perfect English, “Sorry I don’t know what you’re saying when you ask for a receipt. I don’t speak any English.” Ha! Well ’tis the way of borders I suppose. We took a jam packed mini van to the tiny town of Copan and dug into a dinner of the Honduran signature dish: Baleadas.

6. Macaw madness.

After visiting the larger-than-expected Copan Mayan ruins, we headed into the hills of Macaw Mountain, a bird sanctuary for all the colourful birds of Honduras. Due to poaching and habitat destruction, the Macaws, Toucans and Parrots of Central America are becoming extinct, and quickly. This rehabilitation centre takes in injured birds or those donated by owners who realize they aren’t meant for domesticity. Birds are then bred and any well flying babies are released to the wild. These birds really need much more room to fly than can be provided in a home, and poaching results in many more dead birds than lives ones arriving to the black market. Please don’t buy large birds as pets.

“Never make fun of people who speak broken English. It means they know another language”.

I carried the above quote, ripped out of a Reader’s Digest from 1996, all across South East Asia and would show it to anyone who was shy about speaking English. It made a lot of people feel more comfortable talking to me knowing that I understood that speaking broken English didn’t make them sound dumb. In fact, it made them way smarter than me, someone who ONLY spoke English.

As I now try and remedy that by learning Spanish, I’ve found it’s amazing how confusing languages get in your head. I barely know 25 words in French and none in Italian, yet I keep speaking both those languages randomly when my brain is searching for Spanish.

So far, the most successful long conversation I’ve had in Spanish was with a 7-year-old in Semuc Champay, Guatemala and most of that was just us pointing at different things, saying the Spanish word for them, then giggling.

As we work towards (hopeful) Spanish-fluency, here are a few of the ‘Lost In Translation’ moments we’ve had along the way:

1. A family in Puebla, Mexico offered us a ride through their adult son, who spoke some English for his job at a call centre. We tried to speak to the entire family in our limited Spanish but often needed his help.It was about 20 minutes into our car ride that he corrected our use of the word papa – which is Spanish has two meanings, depending on where the stress is placed. As he kindly asked: “Can you change how you say Papa? My father is not a potato.

2. Before hopping on a bus leaving Oaxaca, Mexico I gave Bryan a kiss. Nothing too racy, but definitely not a kiss you’d give a family member. Upon seeing the slightly disgusted expression on our drivers face, I realized that I had incorrectly used the word ‘hermano’ (brother) when referring to Bryan, rather than ‘esposo’ (spouse). So this poor guy thinks Canadian brothers and sisters are a bit too handsy with each other.

3. In Todos Santos, Guatemala, we got into a rather confusing conversation. At this point, Bryan and I felt we had a basic grasp of the language and so were perplexed when our hostel receptionist asked if we wanted ‘jabón’ – a word when spoken sounds like the Spanish word for ham (jamon).

“No thanks” we replied in Spanish, “we’ve already eaten dinner”. She gave us a look and asked again.
“No, no thanks – we just ate and we’re stuffed” we said in rough Spanish.

This back and forth went on for some time – with her asking repeatedly and with increasing confusion and us always saying something along the lines of “Yes, we already ate down the street. Don’t need anything more now, thanks!”.

Turns out we had been telling her we didn’t want to eat the soap she was offering us. So she thinks Canadians are weird too.

4. While taking Spanish classes in Antigua, Guatemala, my teacher asked me in Spanish “Do you have any brothers and sisters? How old are they?” I replied I had one of both, and that they were in their mid-20’s. Her head snapped up and she intently examined by face. Turns out she had actually asked if I had a son or daughter and how old my children were. For a moment or two there, I was either the youngest person in the world to have given birth or the youngest looking 50 year old she had ever met.

After the past few months of speaking Spanish with varying degrees of success, I now have a renewed admiration for people who speak more than one language. This shit is HARD. People speak at break-neck speed, they use slang constantly, they fire questions at you so quickly all you can do is say “Si!” and hope you haven’t agreed to something horrible.

So please, the next time you’re speaking to someone who doesn’t share the same mother tongue as you, slow down, use simple words, gently correct them, then tell them how much you admire their determination to learn a second (or third, or fourth) language.

Along this trip we’ve stayed in some nice places, and some not so nice ones – as is the way of backpacking. When we found a beautiful lake-side cottage on AirBnB, we only hoped the reality of it would be comparable to the pictures. It was going to be Bryan’s birthday and we wanted to celebrate in style.

Getting to Lake Atitlan was a superbly crappy day for us all around. It started out well, with a birthday breakfast for Bryan and a plan to get to the cabin ASAP to start the celebrating. Road blockades left us stranded at the bus station, waiting for a bus that would take us from Xela to our waiting cottage. In desperation we agreed to pay a cab driver an exorbitant amount of money to get us around the detour. We then found ourselves in bumper to bumper traffic for hours when he couldn’t. Lesson learned there.

Arriving hours later than we had been expected, we again paid a ridiculous amount of money for a late-night boat ride to where we hoped our cabin was waiting. But it was too late, too dark and although we were standing on the correct dock (out of the 200 or so on the lake) we couldn’t find our cabin. We resigned ourselves to celebrating Bryan’s birthday at a hostel in the small nearby town of San Marcos instead. The groceries we had trekked from Xela to Lake Atitlan sat in the hostel fridge. We would make Bryan’s birthday dinner the following night instead, when hopefully we’d be able to find our home for the next week.

Apart from shuttle boat trips (hailed from our small dock) every few days across the lake to get groceries, we stayed put, and extended our stay by another week. We planned meals around our no-fridge kitchen, and made some damn good ones. We stocked up on books in town and read them all day, every day. We played Euchre, Boggle, Chess and all the songs on our iTunes. We chilled out with relaxing yoga sessions and made our own kombucha. We received garden-fresh veggies and eggs from Andreas, one of Luzmi’s workers, who liked to visit us daily for some Spanish-to-English conversations. We watched the lake – from the living room, from the kitchen, from the bedroom. We enjoyed the nightly lightning storms that lit up all the mountains around us. We cuddled with Rosie, Luzmi’s cat who joined us every night. In the evenings we watched episodes of The Wire, which Bryan had thought to download before we arrived. We enjoyed the no-wifi quiet.We unpacked in awe of the space and light we had in this place. Big windows on every wall gave us fantastic views of the lake, the garden and the surrounding volcanos. We had room to move around! 2 floors! After living in rooms with beds as the only furniture, we were ecstatic to relax in a living area that was not a bedroom. The kitchen was larger than the one we had back in Toronto, and brighter too. We never wanted to leave, and we barely did.Well, thankfully, the place was well worth the wait and hassle. The next morning we were greeted on the dock by Luzmi, the tiny woman who owns the property, and the 3.5 cabins on it (one is under construction). She showed us up the weaving stone path from the water through the garden, which grows much of her food, past the chicken + 1 duck coop, and to the beautiful cabin we’d be calling home for the next little while. Turns out, we had seen it from the water the night before, but in the dark we just couldn’t find the path up to it. Luzmi invited us to a welcoming ceremony, where we burned sage, copal and candles and told each other what we were appreciative of. Mostly, we were appreciative we found her and made it in one piece.

 

As we prepared to leave, we knew that moving on to Antigua was going to give us a bit of a shock – people! cars! restaurants! Luzmi and her other guest Sharon joined us for a lovely send off lunch where we enjoyed a bean-avocado-quinoa dip, tahini almonds, a salad from the garden and homemade kombucha.

Our Lake Atitlan cabin has convinced us of a few things:

1. Western toilets are the stupidest invention, possibly ever. Why do we, literally, shit on our clean water supply? The toilet here is waterless, smell-free and earth-friendly. If all I have to do to conserve water is pour a bit of dirt on my business, I’m in.
2. Secondary to the water conservation concept, I’ve found how little water I really need to get clean. There is a lovely stone shower at the cabin, but I enjoyed heating water on the stove for a wash instead. No kidding, 2 litres of water is all I needed. I think 3 times as much runs right past me down the drain when I shower. The comparison makes me shake my head a little.
3. Much of what we refrigerate at home doesn’t need it. Our milk, yogurt, juice, eggs and vegetables were just fine stored in drawers and on shelves. We ate leftovers that had been on the counter all night and survived to tell about it.
4. When we do settle into a house, wherever that may be, it will absolutely need to have more windows than walls.

We can only hope to find another home-away-from-home along our travels, although to beat this one is going to be a tough challenge.

Before arriving in the remote town of Nebaj, Guatemala, Bryan and I weren’t sure what to expect. Searches online turned up almost zero info on the area. In fact, we found very little about the civil war that terrorized the community only a generation prior. In the 1980’s genocide and ‘disappearances’ happened regularly in Nebaj, as the Guatemalen government gave free reign to the military to control the Ixil indigenous population by any means necessary. For more information on the long and devastating Guatemalan Civil War, read here.

As we rolled into town (standing in the back of a pick up truck no less) we were surprised at how large Nebaj was. Sitting in a bowl of mountains, Nebaj is home to the indigenous Ixil community, a group of people who wear very traditional clothes (for women, red woven skirts and multi-coloured woven shirts, for men, red coats and large white hats) and speak Ixil-Maya.

For Bryan and I, this was the first place we’ve been where no one in town speaks English. To boot, very few speak Spanish either. Ixil-Maya is a fun language to hear – it’s throaty and jumpy, made up of low B and H sounds. As a person with a fairly high voice, I’m horrible at attempting it. Bryan is much better. We were also an oddity in Nebaj. Few backpackers make it to this remote region and that garnered us a lot of giggles and stares, and even one brave boy who ran up, touched my jacket, shrieked and ran back to his friends.

Kaili_weaving
Gettin’ my weave on.

One thing we did know we wanted to do while in Nebaj was learn about the weaving that dominates the Ixil traditional dress. We were lucky enough to meet Tina, an Ixil weaver who was selling her wears outside our hotel. In broken Spanish (for both of us, as Tina’s first language is Ixil-Maya) we arranged for a lesson on traditional weaving and looked forward to learning the colourful art.

Our lesson started with a visit to Nebaj’s bustling market, where Tina led us down a dark ally to a hidden area full of sewing and weaving supplies. Here we chose the cotton colours we wanted to weave with. Traditional scarves, belts, shirts and skirts are often woven using 9 or more colours, but we decided to go with a more basic 4-colour palate. This got a laugh from Tina and the yarn salesman, especially when we chose our colours: green, orange, purple and black. I think they were surprised we didn’t choose red – everyone here wears red, almost exclusively.

We were humbled to follow Tina to her house where our lesson would commence. She explained that it had been in her family for 3 generations, and she lived there with her 3 children (a grown daughter, and 2 sons, 12 and 15) and her parents. Tina was shocked to hear that in Canada we don’t often live with our parents as adults. The house was made of dirt-packed bricks and Bryan had to duck just to get in the door. We are much taller than anyone else in this town. Our hotel room looked jammed with ‘things’ in comparison to Tina’s sparse house, and we’re living out of backpacks, which begs the questions: why do we need all this stuff?? Tina and her family seemed to be getting along just fine without it.

Bryan weaving
Bryan weaving some yarn.

Tina and her daughter had many laughs as Bryan and I struggled with the most basic of tasks: unrolling and re-rolling the yarn in prep for weaving. To be honest, we were pretty shit at it. And super slow. We appreciate that they didn’t just roll their eyes, grab the yarn and roll it in a fraction of the time themselves – they were very patient with us.

Next up came the looping of the yarn around a large wooden device to make sections where the yarn crossed over each other. After watching this happen, and participating it in myself, I still have NO CLUE how this process works to result in a woven scarf, but it does. Magically.

Tina took over for the intricate parts of tying off sections of the looped yarn and applying it to her basic apparatus of spare plastic tubes and tree branches. Together these items make up a simple hand-held loom. Both of us took turns following Tina’s instruction to weave, while sitting on a sling to provide the tension needed to pass the dowel back and forth between the crossed yarn.

Once we (sort of) had the hang of this, Tina added in a twist – we’d also be knotting in an image to our scarf. This part really threw me for a loop. No matter how often I watched Tina and Bryan knot the proper sections of yarn, I barely got the hang of this. Our final scarf has a very distinct ‘Kaili section’ where everything is just a little askew. Tina was so fast at this process. Her hands passed across the yarn, tying 10 knots in the blink of an eye – and always in the exact right place. In comparison, I think the same process took me, for real, over five minutes per line.

Tina weaving
Our skilled teacher, Tina.

When it was time for us to leave 4 hours later, we had only finished 1/6th of the actual scarf. My back was aching and I was a little cross-eyed. Tina let us know she’d have the whole thing done by the next morning. She is one fast weaver! Over a lunch of tomato and leafy green soup and we sat and talked (as much as three people who only speak a limited about of a common language can).

woven scarf
Our final piece.

We learned that Tina’s husband left her many years ago, and since then she’s struggled to provide for her family. She told us that for 7 years she was very sad, but was feeling better now. She sings in her church choir multiple times a week and a few friends stopped by for a visit while we were there. She has never attended school and looked at us with wide-eyed amazement when Bryan told her he spent over 20 years in classrooms. The only job Tina ever had is weaving and selling her pieces in the market or hotel lobbies.

There are mixed feelings when doing something like this because we wish we could do more to help Tina and her family. This experience was more than we hoped for when we arrived. We parted ways with a hug and a smile, and our perfect souvenir from Nebaj.