No Itinerary

Day 83

After leaving Lago de Atitlan we travelled on to Quetzaltenango, or ´Xela´as it is known locally, from where we would make our connection to Mexico. Our most memorable day in this city involved a visit to the local museum. The guidebook had noted that it contained some ´curiosities´and that it was an eclectic mismash of local history, but we were not quite prepared for what we saw.

The first few rooms were certainly eclectic, but certainly not alarming. The sports room for example included a range of football trophies from 1989 to 1991 and not much else, apart from a large section devoted to a local guy who held the world record for the longest run using a skipping rope - he completed the LA marathon. Then followed a bizarre collection of not quite antique typewriters, computers, computer servers and photocopiers all of which had been lovingly donated to the museum.

The natural history section was where things started to get strange. Along with the usual collection of samples of leaves, trees and natural products derived from the earth they had started to document some of the worlds more recent artifical offerings. Hence a large section with different brands of cigarettes pinned to the wall in cellophane bags, a multitude of examples of what can be made from plastic (mainly different coloured hairgrips and small useless plastic toys), and many other things which we can no longer remember.

Then came the killer room. Literally. A full room of stuffed animals of all varieties. Many were fairly typical of the things you see, like stuffed birds, small rodents, larger mammals, and some reptiles. However these were the things which really made our stomachs turn (or just scared the hell out of us):

1. El diablill0 del mar - This was a freakish sea living creature which looked pretty much like the devil, and had fully constructed feet, hands, a tail, eyes and horns. We have since tried to look this up on the internet but can find really nothing about it, apart from a small reference in Harry Potter. It truly was terrifying, so please if anyone knows anything…..

2. Carnero de ocho extremides - This translates as the animal with 8 extremities. Which is what it was. A stuffed thing which looked something like a cross between a rat and a dog, clearly a siamese twin of the animal world. According to the blurb it lived for only 5 minutes, and when it died it exhaled from its nose a yellow liquid in the form of a cloud of smoke. Nice - glad they decided to preserve this

3. The Fetus section - a series of jars containing large fetuses including parrots, mice, dogs, cows and last of all, human.

As we left a large group of school children were queuing up to enter. Poor things, I really hope they didnt have nightmares.