The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston
Here's Honduras:
Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Doug Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization.
Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes. But it wasn't until they returned that tragedy struck: Preston and others found they had contracted in the ruins a horrifying, sometimes lethal-and incurable-disease.
Suspenseful and shocking, filled with colorful history, hair-raising adventure, and dramatic twists of fortune, THE LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD is the absolutely true, eyewitness account of one of the great discoveries of the twenty-first century.
You know that I've been trying to stick with native authors for this challenge, but every once in a while I find one that seems so intriguing I have to read it. That happened here, and it was totally worth it. My biggest criticism is that the book wasn't longer. Seriously. When I got to the end I just went "Wh-what?"
I find history and archaeology so fascinating. I'm sure I wrote about it in my Paris posts, but one of my favorite things to do while visiting was look up the places we had gone to that day to see what happened there historically. And it was so huge to me, the things that happened in a space I had just gone to. There's a feeling that you just don't get in the US. Of course the Native Americans were here, but it's a totally different atmosphere. To go on an expedition and visit a place that nobody stepped foot in for hundreds of years...unfathomable. Well, let's get into it.
Preston delves into a lot of detail and history around the country and expedition, which is really interesting. He talks about the country's instability and, of course..."But even more debilitating was the country's unhealthy relationship with the United States, whose shortsighted policies and business interests had kept the country politically unstable for more than a century." I mean...can we stop ruining everything for everyone please? It's getting to be a real downer.
As the expedition flies over the sites to use the Lidar, and ultimately flying in and out of the chosen site, Preston describes the pockets of demolished rainforest. "The Honduran rainforests are disappearing at a rate of at least 300,000 acres a year. Again, bummer. Apparently the areas they saw were cut down for cattle grazing. Admittedly, I know absolutely nothing about raising cattle, but it seems like maybe you could not cut down the forest for that? I dunno. Not an expert.
"It was a long, dusty drive over mountain roads, through a succession of impoverished villages with dilapidated houses, heaps of trash, open sewers, and sad-faced, droopy-eared dogs slinking about. We did pass through one strikingly different and pretty village... Those streets were clean and well swept. But as we entered the town, the soldiers warned by radio that under no circumstances were we to stop, as this was a town run by a powerful drug cartel." I found this really interesting, and not all that surprising. I remember seeing some documentaries about...maybe Pablo Escobar?...and the people in the town loved him because he could employ them. I guess when your country doesn't present a lot of opportunities you'll take what you can get. But this is going a bit far... "While there, I learned from a local businessman that the cost of a contract murder in Catacamas was twenty-five dollars."
"I'd been in sketchy aircraft before, but a helicopter is another level of concern." Yup. When I was working tourism in Alaska they would have to cancel a lot of the helicopter tours because they couldn't tell the difference between the clouds and the glaciers. That's no bueno. In fact, Soldier likes to call helicopters Spinny Spinny Death Machines.
In AD 426, a ruler named K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' (Sun-Eyed Resplendent Quetzal Macaw)... Ummm can we all agree that this is the most baller name in the history of names?! I want one like this. But he gets better. "His bones showed that he had taken quite a beating over the course o his life: His skeleton was peppered with healed fractures, including two broken arms, a shattered shoulder, blunt trauma to the chest, broken ribs, a cracked skull, and a broken neck. The physical anthropologist who analyzed his remains wrote that, "In today's world, it would appear that the deceased had survived an auto accident in which he had been thrown from the vehicle." But in the ancient world, the injuries were probably caused by playing the famed Mesoamerican ball came called pitz in classical Mayan." WHAT. WHY. "One sixteenth-century friar, a rare eyewitness, spoke of players being killed instantly when the five pound ball, made of solid latex sap, hit them on a hard rebound.." WHY WERE THEY PLAYING THIS GAME. It sounds like death dodgeball. No thank you.
"Having no metal tools to chisel with, these ancient sculptors shaped them using a laborious grinding process, using handheld rocks and sand to abrade a block of stone into the desired form." See, this is why history is so interesting. The things they made were stunning, and they didn't have anything like we do today. I guess you had to fill your time somehow, but man. Sounds like a process.
Then we get into a little bit of post-Columbus "discovery," and the difference between Old World and New World diseases. And just in case you forgot Columbus was a horrible person, let me remind you: "But overall, the Spanish (and Columbus personally) were deeply dismayed by the vast die-offs [from smallpox]; the deaths of so many Indians interfered with their slaving businesses, killed their servants, and emptied their plantations and mines of forced labor." Even better, "One biologist told me that what probably saved may indigenous Indian cultures from complete extinction were the mass rapes of native women by European men; many of the babies from those rapes inherited European genetic resistance to disease." COOL. I'M SURE THEY'RE VERY GRATEFUL.
Lastly, let's make some disease comparisons. "Think what it would be like for you...to watch all these people die--your children, parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, your friends, your community leaders and spiritual authorities. What would it do to you to see them perish in the most agonizing, humiliating, terrifying ways possible?" Hmm...something's coming to mind...can't quite put my finger on it...OH YEAH. "The world's last great pandemic was the Spanish flu outbreak in 1918 that killed a hundred million people--about 5 percent of the world's population. If a pandemic like that were to happen again, it would spread faster and might be impossible to contain." Foreshadowing?! I just looked up the worldwide death toll from covid, and it's 4.55 million. So that's fun.
Here are my takeaways:
- stop invading other countries
- the US needs to leave people the fuck alone
- i want to go on an archaeological dig
- GET VACCINATED. WEAR A MASK. SOCIAL DISTANCE.
