T A B L E_T A L K Where are the hot spots in Berlin? Discuss the must sees of this city in Table Talk's Wanderlust area R E C E N T L Y The best little pizzerias in Naples By David Downie Where to savor Italy's best pizza (04/14/98) Silver linings in the Asian cloud By Don George Travel execs pump each other up at annual confab (04/13/98) Club Fed By Jeffrey Itell How Madeleine Albright spent more than $40,000 on a Caribbean weekend (04/10/98) Mondo Weirdo Readers' worst travel tales (04/09/98) Tiger, tiger, burning bright By Jeff Greenwald A blood-curdling encounter in Nepal (04/08/98) Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Feature archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -		On Guatemala's Gringo Circuit Volcanoes, videos and voluptuous expatriates entice wanderers to abandon all plans and just stay. BY DOUG FINE | SAN PEDRO LA LAGUNA, Guatemala -- Antonio was giving a lecture on Vigilante Day. He is the wide-eyed American-by-birth who runs the solar-heated thermal waters and decidedly North American indigenous sweat lodge next door to where I am living in electricity-free luxury in the new, peacetime Guatemala. His student was Stephan, a tall German who endlessly lists and re-lists the cities he has visited in the United States and in India. "So the whole village gets together, and if they agree Juan is a thief, they gouge his eyes out, then they string him up. Once a year." It occurred to me that there is a whole Hallmark niche in this (congratulations for the acquitted, condolences for the mothers of the blindly hung), but I kept this thought and my greeting card poems to myself. Stephan thought that he might have had an American Express travelers cheque and a few hundred Guatemalan quetzals (about $40) ripped off from a money belt inside the house where we had both been sleeping since its American gringa renter had invited us as we walked off the boat from Panajachel. A small-time volcano-climbing guide and ganja dealer named Chich was Stephan's chief suspect. Chich had come to hustle and hit on Claire, our 22-year-old hostess at a beautiful two-story green trim house (with two decks). She had moved in a week earlier when its septuagenarian Mayan owner took a liking to her because her name was the same as his departed wife's. Chich had had five minutes alone in the house while Claire went to collect some water through the 200 yards of coffee groves that abut the place. The groves, along with 10 acres of corn and black bean fields, lead down to spectacular Lake Atitlán and the surrounding lush velvet volcanoes, the whole a tourist haven in shaky Guatemala since the 1950s. The village of San Pedro is a prime spot on the Gringo Circuit -- the predictable nebula of young, guidebook-toting Western travelers settling into the nicer grooves of the developing world to study, screw, live, escape, learn and read John Irving, Tom Robbins and Carlos Castenada. They are here in numbers generally relative to the strength of their currencies: Germans, Dutch and an unexplainably disproportionate number of Danes, Israelis, Canadians, people who call themselves Canadians and the original gringos: norteamericanos. Western tourism around the lake started in formerly mellow Panajachel, the lakeside town that has been dubbed "Gringotenango" for decades. "Pana," as its hundreds of expat neo-hippies call it, bears about as much resemblance to its 1960s incarnation as the Haight-Ashbury does to its. Each year, satellite Mayan villages around the lake grow, specializing in various sectors of the tourist economy: Backpacker stoners gravitate to San Pedro; package tourists flock to see the semi-pagan maximón ritual at Santiago (wherein a mannequin is given cigarettes and prayed to out loud); slightly richer backpacker stoners and honeymooners make their way to Santa Cruz, particularly the nearly communal Iguana Perdida guest house. All are easy motorized-ferryboat rides from Pana. My chance at nostalgia A sort of scraping, ringing sound was reaching me at my thatched, queen-sized hammock on Claire's second-story deck. The scary, nationalistic, 6-foot-8 Stephan, an infected mosquito bite on his gigantic head like the mark of Cain, was sharpening a machete in preparation for a Vigilante Day of his own. I think he was misinterpreting Antonio's story. Antonio, 40-ish and rarely be-shirted, made a decision three years ago after a few decades of living on American communes (he calls them "ego factories") and working on Mexican ranches: He was going to pay $7,000 for a heap of rocks with a killer view of the powerful Guatemalan lake, live in a teepee made from morning glory and ivy and run the aforementioned hot springs and sweat lodge resort. He attends church weekly, and in his free time crafts cypress canoes. Antonio is widely regarded as a genius by the gringos who find him outside of the San Pedro village center. More will find him now. He is listed, albeit as "eccentric," in the latest version of the Lonely Planet guidebook. Among dreadlocked and multiple-pierced backpackers with a copy of Pirsig and a pocketful of parental cash, that is like a four-star Michelin rating. The one sentence devoted to him will be read by about 20 million eyes in 18 Indo-European languages over the next five years. As nostalgia is one of the great badges worn by those who consider themselves veterans of the circuit, I proudly and self-righteously look forward to lamenting how much "this place has changed from 10 years ago." I've always wanted to do that. N E X T++P A G E | Naked gringas and endless names