The Accidental Innkeeper: How an American Novelist Became a Hotelier in Guatemala

It’s almost midnight, two weeks in a precious writing residence in New Hampshire, where I’ve come to finish a novel. My phone rings.

From Lake Atitlán, Guatemala, a few thousand miles away, comes the voice of a woman I’ve never met: “I left the key to my casita on the bed. Can someone let me back in?”

I’ll get to work on it right away, I tell her. A few hours earlier, I had spent an hour on the phone with a plumber discussing the installation of a new Jacuzzi and ordering wood for the sauna. The day before I had arranged for a guide to take two guests on a hike to watch the sun rise over the volcanoes, and the day before an airport pick-up for a family of five from Indiana, and dinner on the patio for a couple from Germany celebrating their honeymoon.

With my property manager ill, the past few days have been busier than usual, but it’s a rare day when I’m not busy with at least one guest staying in the humble home I bought 23 years ago as a writing retreat . It now includes two houses, four casitas, two docks, a fleet of kayaks, a sauna, a yoga platform, a waterfall and a pizza oven.

I’ve been a writer all my life. But these days I’m almost as preoccupied with my role as an innkeeper as I am with fiction. It was never my intention, but I introduced travelers from all over the world – especially those from the United States, my native country, whose Website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has posted warnings about travel to Guatemala for years – has become a central concern in my life.

‘It was my private little oasis’

My history in Central America began more than 50 years ago, at the age of 11, when my mother took my sister and me on a six-week bus and train journey from the Texas border to San Cristóbal de las Casas in the Mexican state Mexico. chiapas. My experience of Indigenous culture that summer opened up my world.

Ten years later I was invited to join an orchid hunt in the highlands of Guatemala. Never mind that there was a civil war going on.

Our broken tires didn’t stop me from falling in love with the country – especially the 80-square-mile turquoise Lake Atitlán, and the people who lived there, who still dressed in traditional Guatemalan clothing made from homespun cloth, farmed corn on the slopes and followed the Mayan calendar.

I vowed then that I would return to the lake, though years passed before I did. By then I had raised three children and watched them go on their own adventures. For $250 a month, I rented a cottage on the shores of the lake, enrolled in salsa classes and Spanish school, wrote a novel, and experienced a greater sense of well-being than I had known in years.

I lived alone. I didn’t have a phone. There was no internet, so every few weeks I would take a boat across the lake to check my email. At the end of my writing day, I took my shopping basket to the market to buy vegetables for that night’s dinner. Every morning I swam half a mile in the lake.

At one of my swims I saw a sign on the bank: Se Vende. For sale. The land was wild and steep, covered with undergrowth, with a small mud house. A dozen bird species I had never seen in the trees. Across the water was one of the five volcanoes that surround the lake.

These were the days when a person with limited resources could still borrow money against her house, which is how I came across the $85,000 to buy about three acres of land on the shores of one of the most beautiful lakes in the world.

I called the place Casa Paloma. A few times a year I traveled there to write and swim. It was my little private oasis.

With the help of two young men from the village, Miguel and Mateo, I built a garden with retaining walls and stone paths winding up the steep slope. Over the years, the fruit trees we planted have matured and roses have bloomed—also orchids, Thunbergia vines, figs, pomegranates, bananas.

I finished half a dozen novels in that house. Every afternoon I brought a bowl of popcorn to my dock for the kids who came to swim there, and every morning I greeted the fisherman who showed up in the little cove in front of my house to harvest crabs just as the sun was rising behind the volcano.

Recognizing early on that this was a place of inspiration and tranquility, I started a writing workshop, hosting a small group of women for a week each winter. For $35 a night, they stayed in a simple hotel in the village, but they came to Casa Paloma every day to work on their manuscripts.

A lot has changed in those years. A hurricane hit and caused a landslide. Travelers came in greater numbers, along with storefronts advertising healers, yoga teachers, and shamans (cranial sacral massage, sound healing, a place known as the Fungi Academy). I expanded my house, planted more flowers, built a temazcal – a Mayan sauna – and a small guest house where I put my desk. Back in California, I fell in love with my second husband, Jim, and introduced him to the lake. The fact that we were now in our fifties didn’t stop us from climbing the volcano together.

The year after we got married, Jim was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. We traveled to the lake together for what turned out to be his last winter. After he died, I returned alone. Over the years I had often found solace in those waters. Now I did it again.

The pandemic strikes

I scheduled my memoir workshop for March 2020, the month the pandemic hit the United States. As always, I had booked a dozen or so rooms for my writing students in a small village hotel. While no coronavirus had been reported in Guatemala, I wasn’t sure if anyone would show up, but 16 women traveled there.

Two days later, the president of Guatemala announced that the airport would close and eight women flew home. Eight stayed on – they did their best with meals of rice and beans and guacamole, and plenty of wine.

Twelve days later, the State Department arranged for a plane to take American citizens home. But I decided to stay and invited two of the women from the workshop, Jenny and Xiren, to stay with me for a few weeks.

We ended up staying for six months – Casa Paloma, we realized, was probably the best place to be. The people of the village seemed blessed to be free of Covid. But another problem plagued them: with all the tourists gone, they couldn’t support their families.

Some expats in the city took a collection to help. I lived here long enough to know what the community needed more: jobs. So I started the project of building a guest house.

Each day a crew of about 20 men made their way down the hill with their picks and shovels, sacks of cement or stones on their backs. Every morning, just as the sun was coming up, they would greet Jenny, Xiren, and me as we sat at our laptops.

Sometimes a harpoon fisherman would come by with a fish he had caught 10 minutes earlier. That would be dinner, eaten by candlelight.

In the months that followed, I kept coming up with construction projects. Five more casitas, each different. One had stone walls with hand-carved stone heads built into it, made by a man in the village. In one, we built a tall wall using the old adobe building methods. I bought a chair made by a local craftsman, carved from a single huge avocado tree. He carried it on his back the mile or so from his house.

I am not a rich woman. In California, I could never have hired a crew for 18 months. As it was, paying the men a good local wage stretched me to the limit. But I knew this: If you gave someone a job in this village, a family of 10 would have dinner that night.

The men did a wonderful job. Sometimes, when I checked in with them at the end of the day, I would discover a detail – a spiral of tiny snail shells cemented into a shower wall, a broken ceramic monkey attached to a twisted piece of wood, with bougainvillea gushing from its head and silver paper from a chocolate bar wrapper for the eyes. Miguel and Mateo trained plants to grow in the shapes of a giraffe, a llama, a rabbit and a heart. A carpenter named Bartolo built me ​​a table out of conacaste wood in the style of a table I found on Pinterest that was designed by woodworker George Nakashima.

Our days and weeks took on a rhythm. Every morning, as I walked up the hill to my desk with my laptop and my coffee, I greeted the crew of men coming down. As I sat at my desk, I heard the steady sound of the men’s hammers, the sound of bricks coming out of buckets.

It dawned on me that in all my years of writing books—nearly half a century—I had never seen such a direct connection between the stories I made up in my head and the world of physical labour. When the men and I called out our greetings each morning, we knew each of us had a job to do. One supported the other.

By the following winter, a little over a year after the world shut down and vaccines were finally available, we welcomed 12 writing students. This time they were able to stay on my property in the five new houses the men had built, sharing meals on the expansive verandah, overlooking the lake, with meals prepared by our local chef, Rosa.

I am a writer, not a businesswoman. It occurred to me that if someone drains her bank account to build a property for 16 guests that requires a crew of more than 20 people to maintain, the place cannot be left empty. And so I became the host of a hotel and retreat center.

With the time and attention I’ve put into building Casa Paloma, I probably could have written a few more books. The casitas bear the names of some I’ve written: “To Die For,” “At Home in the World,” “Count the Ways.” One, Casa Una, is named after my newest granddaughter. In the past year, my team, now almost entirely made up of local men and women, has hosted more than 300 groups of guests: yoga practitioners, hikers wanting to climb the volcano, couples on their honeymoon, families bringing children they’ve adopted for years . ago to their homeland for the first time. This past high season, we were fully booked almost every night.

Looking back

In 2020 – those months when it felt like the world stopped – I experienced a state of such unprecedented concentration that I was able to finish a novel.

So – while the men were still at work – I started another novel about a woman from the United States who, after a personal tragedy, lands in a small village on the shores of a lake surrounded by volcanoes, in an unspecified named Central American country. . She unexpectedly finds herself running a magical hotel surrounded by orchids and birds.

At that time I believed that what I was writing was pure fiction, almost a fairytale. A year later the thought occurred to me: I had built a hotel myself. Now I better figure out how to run one. And I did.

Joyce Maynard’s most recent novel, ‘The Bird Hotel’, was released earlier this month. The sequel to her novel ‘Count the Ways’ will be released next spring.

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