Guatemalan treasure hunt

levity: conduct or attitude characterized by lack of seriousness; inappropriate gaiety; frivolity (Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary 1966)
Spanish: levidad


The other day I received a mass email from a friend of mine who is travelling in Central America. This was a surprise to me because I did not know he was down there. He described his travel plans, which, incidentally are very cool because he is studying plants, and named certain places he wants to go. On the list were a few destinations in eastern Guatemala. Reading his email transported me back to 2 years ago when I myself mysteriously found myself wandering down a beach on the Caribbean coast of Guatemala. I was with my friend, we'll call her Pine Cone because that's what her parents almost named her. Honest to God. So Pine Cone really wanted to score a bag of a certain special dried plant, but she didn't speak Spanish. Not to mention the sketchiness factor of approaching random people in a foreign town to inquire about such a quest. However, Pine Cone was very interested in obtaining a bag of this dried plant, and she kept talking about it. I had no interest whatsoever in her quest, but I was subject to hearing about it frequently. Well, back to the beach. We were walking along and I was entertaining my obsession with checking out interesting looking trash on the ground. (I feel this is one of the best ways to learn about an area as a tourist.) I saw a piece of paper that appeared to be a kid's math homework. Very interesting. Guatemalan math. I picked it up and opened it, eager to see the formulas written in Guatemalan. It indeed was a piece of math homework, but folded up inside was a bag of the special dried plant that Pine Cone had been craving. We laughed, of course, for a good long while, and then for the next few days, Pine Cone used the dried plant nightly. When it was time for us to leave that beach town and seek our next adventure, there was about half a bag of dried plant left. Pine Cone assigned me the task of hiding the bag so that she could return in a month or so to retrieve the rest of it. She was to wary of police to travel with the plant. I wondered why didn't she hide the damn stuff herself, but she must have been feelin incompitent or something, bless her heart. I decided that my room (Hotel California Room 8) was as good a place as any to hide the stuff, so I unscrewed a coat rack from the wall, duct taped the bag of plant to the back- all flattened out- and then re-screwed the coat rack. You'd never see it.

Pine Cone never ended up returning to that beach town, and I have wondered about the fate of the well hidden bag of dried plant that remains in Hotel Californina room 8.

Soooo, my friend writes from Central America and says that he is planning to maybe visit the east part of Guatelmala, and instantly I know that he is the perfect candidate to rescue the hidden treasure. I was writing him detailed instructions for a "treasure hunt" in Spanish, and I realized I didn't know the work for coat rack. Damn. It happens to be the key word in the whole instructions. I was over at my sister's, and she didn't have a Spanish dictionary. I was racking my brain for something I knew wasn't in it when the phone rang. It was MH calling from the Mountain Magnolia. I asked her what was coat rack in Spanish and she was busy saying things like " Maybe it's coato racko" when she was overheard by a guest. The guest said, " My friend is upstairs. She's visiting from Madrid, and speaks Spanish fluently. Lemme go get her..."
Perfect. I chatted for a moment with the gal, who told me "gancha para abrigos" would work for my purposes, and off went the treasure hunt instructions. I really hope someone makes it over to the ole Hotel California- Room 8.