Whenever I hear about 9/11, I will hear, from the background of my memory, the sound of monkeys. Ericka and I had arrived a day earlier on a little, twin-prop airplane that had carried a dozen of us north from Guatemala City over the verdant canopy of Central American jungle to Tikal in Guatemala's northern province, and back in time five centuries to a Mezoamerica the jungle swallowed whole. We entered the ruins at daybreak under the silhouettes of monkeys in the treetops above us, climbed temples to look out over the jungle canopy, wondered quietly about the lifestyle of a people whose world ended before ours began and whether that world made any more sense or was in any way more satisfying than this one...

A strongly Mayan region, Atitlán is populated with quiet towns of farmers and artisans which, except for the new tourist trade, live much the way they did five hundred years ago.