In his 1934 travel book Beyond the Mexique Bay, Aldous Huxley compared Guatemala's Lake Atitlan to Italy's Lake Como. The Italian body of water, he wrote, "touches the limit of the permissibly picturesque." Atitlan, however, "is Como with the additional embellishment of several immense volcanoes. It is really too much of a good thing." Guatemalans have interpreted this declaration by the author of Brave New World to mean that Lake Atitlan is the most beautiful lake in the world — which is the billing on most of the tourist brochures, despite Huxley's ambivalent phrasing.
Atitlan is indeed breathtaking, but nowadays it is leaving many visitors gasping for breath. A thick brown sludge is tarnishing its once blue waters. It is the result of decades of ecological imbalance, brought on by economic and demographic pressures. The unsightly and smelly layer, more than 100 feet deep in some areas, is chasing tourists away from Mayan towns in the area and posing huge cleanup expenses to a government already strapped for cash. Worse, the results of a University of California, Davis, analysis found that the bacteria is toxic. Scientists are urging residents to avoid cooking with, bathing in or drinking the water. Several towns get drinking water from the lake. (See TIME's photo-essay "The Politics of Water.")
The sludge has huge implications for the area and Guatemala. The towns around Atitlan have become reliant on tourism. Scores of restaurants and hotels have opened. Generations of boatmen made a living by shuttling visitors across the lake. And armies of three-wheeled taxis, known as tuk-tuks, were imported from Asia to help move tourists around. Business is down significantly this year. Hotels say they have about half as many guests as usual. Tuktuk drivers report they barely make enough to pay for gas. Restaurant owners are considering giving up. The global recession may be a major factor but the stench isn't helping. The problem is as much visual as it is olfactory. As the bacteria dies, a foul odor wafts from the water. "It's like trying to eat lunch in an outhouse," says English backpacker Brian Thompson, 22, pulling his t-shirt over his nose between bites of chicken at a little lakeside restaurant. "Tell you one thing, I wouldn't eat the fish." One restaurant owner says he's considering closing or renting the space to another operator, at a loss. "We used to have 15 or 20 tables a day. Now we get one," says Pedro Chavajag, 38, owner of Comedor Juanita, an eatery about 40 feet from a busy dock here. (See pictures of urban farming around the world.)
Scientists first detected the cyanobacteria that now infests Atitlan in the 1970s. But the genesis of the problem dates to the late 1950s when the Guatemalan government introduced non-native black bass into the lake's waters believing that hotels and restaurants could lure more tourists if they could offer freshly caught lake fish on their menus. Over the years, however, the bass ate through nearly the entire food chain, including the the young of the rare Pato Poc duck. Their consumption disrupted the ecosystem and destroyed the organisms that would have kept the bacteria at bay.
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http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1942501,00.html?xid=rss-topstories
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