16-17 November 2024: El Paredón – Paradise Trashed

I had one weekend left before returning home to Denver.  Should I stay in Antigua to see more of the city?  Well, I’d seen quite a bit of the city ten years ago when I was in Antigua for a conference and one-week Spanish immersion course.  I really wanted to get out of Antigua for the weekend, especially because of the two-day Festival de las Flores (Flower Festival).  I don’t have anything against flowers but Violeta and Fernando told me thousands of people would descending on the city meaning crowded streets, crowded restaurants, and many decibels of noise.  I also learned from Fernando that five young women who were attending a wedding would be staying in the room next to mine which was usually vacant or had one quiet guest at a time.  I could easily envision the five of them returning from the wedding at midnight – ¾ sloshed on free booze and ready to continue the party into the wee hours.  And I was also eager to get away from Michael, the obnoxious guest whose room was across from mine. 

I decided on a weekend at the Pacific Ocean beach community of El Paredón, 2½ hours south of Antigua.  Of course, the trip would no doubt take at least 3 hours or more given that it was a weekend.  And, yes, glutton for punishment that I am, I opted the trip there by tourist van.  The trip would be much shorter than those I had taken to El Salvador and Honduras so how bad could it be, right? 

On Saturday morning, I had to walk more than a mile to a central pick up point near the southwest edge of the city.  The van could not pick me up where I was staying because of the heavy festival traffic.  I arrived before 9:00, the departure time, but of course with loading bags on the roof, late arrivals, and general chaos, we were not underway until 9:30 – well, actually 9:40 because traffic was moving at an imperceptible crawl and it took the driver 10 minutes to get out of his parking place.  I sat right behind the front seat on the passenger’s side because the latter had no seat belt.  The seat was so cramped that I had to stretch my legs out right behind the driver after taking my boots off – lucky for him I was wearing a clean pair of socks.  The air quality was abysmal with all the idled traffic – ah, I love the smell of car exhausts and diesel fumes in the morning!

Because of the heavy traffic even AWAY from Antigua, it took us 1½ hours to cover the 22 miles to Escuintla.  After the driver picked up a couple guys in Escuintla, the van was near capacity with mostly 20-somethings and one bored, uncomfortable old guy.

As we exited the four-lane Escuintla by-pass and headed south on two-land CA-9A, I noticed something unusual about the driver.  Not only was he driving relatively slowly, he was almost too cautious, hesitating to pass when I thought he had plenty of room.  Well, better too slow and arrive alive, I suppose. 

South of Escuintla, traffic was light and we passed sugarcane fields, groves of banana trees, and occasionally cattle (mostly Brahmas).  After turning off the highway and continuing to the west parallel to the coast, our road became narrow but mostly paved. 

Finally, at 12:35PM, we reached El Paredón, an inauspicious beach town with mostly dirt streets, funky buildings, and no big multi-star resort hotels.  I had reserved a room through Booking.com for about $40 with all taxes and fees.  It was not really a room but a very comfortable and exotic thatch hut, a five-minute walk from the beach.  

After stashing my stuff in the hut, I found a local eatery where I chowed down on a tasty bean burrito.  From there I headed to the black sand beach which had attracted a number of young surfers with music blaring from loudspeakers in a wooden shack where guys were making announcements in indecipherable Spanish.  I think there was some kind of surfing competition going on.  The beach seemed relatively uncrowded for a Saturday afternoon but maybe the cloudy day had discouraged most tourists from coming to sunbath. 

While it was fun to watch the surfers occasionally catch a wave, I was more interested in taking a long walk on the beach and headed toward the Río Acome delta, about two miles to the west.  While the beach area where surfers were hanging out was very clean, as soon as I walked several hundred feet to the west, I started encountering many large plastic bottles and other debris.  The further I walked, the worse it got.  By the time I reached the delta, the beach was tragically disgusting with probably thousands of bottles strewn at the level of the highest high tides judging from the berm that paralleled the water’s edge.

The next morning (Sunday), I walked east along the beach for a couple miles.  There were still hundreds of plastic bottles above the high tide berm but the beach was not quite as badly trashed as it was to the west.  After looking at all these bottles, I noticed some commonalities:

1) Almost all had the caps on them.

2) The labels were missing or completely faded so the brand names were not readable.

3) Almost all were large soft drink bottles (the two-liter size).

I concluded that I couldn’t blame the beachgoers at Paredón for most of the bottles. Since the caps were on the bottles, they could float, and since the labels were missing or obscure, they must have come from some distance.  And since they were near or above the high tide berm, they must have been carried there by big storms, maybe in the Pacific’s easterly-flowing Equatorial Countercurrent.  It’s hard for me to lay the blame on any one country or source (ships, trash flowing from rivers into the Pacific, trash deliberately dumped into the Pacific, or the “Great North Pacific Garbage Patch Gyre”?).  Whatever the source, the responsibility lies with the petrochemical industry which provides the raw materials (Exxon-Mobil being the largest plastics producer), the plastic bottle manufacturers, and the large users of plastic bottles like Coca-Cola and Pepsi.  They should be held accountable and required to clean up these messes but in the current political climate, particularly in the USA, I’m not holding my breath.  

And consider this additional nasty reality.  How many people replace the cap on a bottle before they throw it away?  I would guess less than half.  So all the bottles without caps fill with water and sink.  Imagine the mess at the bottom of the ocean and the effects on marine life when the bottles gradually disintegrate.  Maybe you could care less what’s at the bottom of the ocean, but if you eat seafood maybe you should pay more attention to how marine ecosystems are being impacted by plastic waste.    

The van which would take me back to Antigua wasn’t scheduled to arrive until 3:00PM so after lunch I walked ¼ mile north from my “tropical hut” to a tributary of the Río Acome.  It was actually a scenic fresh-water mangrove swamp, connected to the Río Acome but without perceptible flow from what I could see.  Too bad I didn’t have more time so I could have hired someone with a boat to take me through the mysterious channels of this swamp. 

The van arrived at my lodging a little after 3:00 but it was 3:45 before the driver picked up all the passengers from different hotels and hostels and loaded their crap on the van’s roof.  It rained along the way and the numerous slow motorbikes we encountered on the roads slowed us down.  It was after 7:00 when we got back to Antigua.  The festival had just ended and the streets were once again snarled with cars most of which appeared headed in the direction of Guatemala City.  We were let off at the edge of town and I had to walk more than a mile back to Violeta and Fernando’s place.  Why didn’t I take a taxi or a tuck-tuck?  Go luck finding one, and I could get there faster by walking!