Todos Santos Drunken Festival

A few weeks back Toby and I had a few days off work to celebrate the holidays of Día de Los Santos (All Saint's Day) on November 1st and Día de Los Muertos (All Soul's Day or Day of the Dead) on November 2nd. We decided to take the opportunity to travel and experience more of the local culture by attending a town festival. All cities in Guatemala have a patron saint connected with their community and the basis of their week-long festivals. However, in the town of Todos Santos, they fittingly celebrate all saints during the week of Día de Los Santos, and particularly on the first.


We set out at 6am on the 1st to travel to Huehuetenango, from where we planned to catch a van to Todos Santos, way up in the Cuchumatán mountains. Little did we know that no transportation was running to the town that day due to the festival! After a few hours of waiting and deliberation we walked to one last location where we might find transportation, and luckily a pick-up truck driven by a friendly Guatemalan doctor picked us up with a load of Guatemalans. We were on our way...but uncertain how we would make it back or if there was a place to stay...but we were going!


Once in Todos Santos, it was a drunken muddy madness all over. The streets were crowded with locals swaying with their Gallo beer bottles, and many tourists following suit. All the indigenous in this small community wear their traje (typical clothing), including the men, which isn't really the case in most of Guatemala. So it's also a very colorful site of purples, blues, and cute woven hats. It's unbelievable how Guatemalans drink and pass out in the oddest positions laying in mud, rocks, losing their clothing, you name it. This even occurs in our neighborhood in Quiché, but not nearly to the extent of this festival. And, the drunken activities were just beginning...


The true excitement of the day was a drunken horse race that takes place on a mud road with hundreds of people crowding along the route to cheer and watch. Horse owners loan their animals to beer-brave riders for Q10 a lap in which they race madly down and back at the sound of whistles. This can get somewhat chaotic since the riders aren't really in their right state of mind, so falls and crashes are quite common. One accident cracked open a rider's head and left the horse down in the mud to be carried off by many men...and probably later killed. Toby was even offered a free ride in the event by a guy that befriended us, but after the disastrous accident and without medical insurance, there was no way he was going in there!

At around 4pm we decided to try our luck heading back to Huehuetenango, because we didn't want to get stuck in the town with a bunch of raging drunks in the streets. Fortunately, there was one bus heading out of town but only about halfway to where we needed to go, but took it anyway and tried our luck. Almost immediately we were disappointed with our decision when a group of drunk and muddy men started fighting and falling all over me on the bus. They could barely stand as we drove up the narrow mountainside road, only to be propped up by me avoiding getting crushed. The bus driver couldn't take anymore of it though and stopped the bus to kick some of them off, and I I took the opportunity to move farther back into the bus for safety. From then on it was a smoother ride with only one person vomiting out a window in the back and 3 guys breaking open their beer bottles. We were also very thankful to meet a lovely Guatemalan woman who was in the same predicament as us and needed some way back to Huehue. Thanks to God we were able to find a van to drive us back there and we arrived in one piece after a very adventurous day.