NEW CASTLE — (First of two parts.)



Imposing stone ruins scattered about Guatemala can give travelers a glimpse into the lives of the Mayans.

Or you could just go make tortillas with them.

Markus Naugle can help with that.

The 1986 New Castle High valedictorian and his fiancée, Laura Wheelock, founded and operate Magic Carpet Rides, a program that offers home stays with Mayan familiies for travelers looking to get more out of their trip than just an SD card full of photos and suitcase crammed with souvenirs.

“We try not only to integrate you into the family,” Naugle said by phone from the Central American nation, “but also into the rhythm of the community and how they’re trying to support themselves and improve their living conditions.

“So in that way, you come down and you really become a member of a 4,000-person Mayan village (there are about a dozen surrounding Lake Atitlan near Antigua), living in a house with a family, eating their food the way they eat and doing some of the work that they do. So you really get into the culture — rubbing up against the skin of the human mosaic, as opposed to passing through as a tour group.”

Originally conceived and operated as a “gap year program” — an extended stay offered primarily to students before or after college or graduate school — Magic Carpet rides has morphed into more of aplacement service in which families who had hosted gap-year participants now welcome other travelers for shorter periods.

One reason for the change, Naugle explained, is that he and Wheelock are expecting their first child in December, and “traveling around with 17 to 21-year-old kids takes a load of energy. So we’re getting grounded a little bit in that way.”

“We also want to be able to offer this experience to individuals of any age — to families, to retired travelers — to anybody,” Naugle continued. “We’re especially trying to encourage individuals with experience in a particular work discipline or just life experience to come down and be exposed to the Mayan culture, but at the same time help us solve kind of the challenges that exist down here as well.”



FIRST STEPS

Mayan tortillas may seem far removed from Augustine’s Pizza, but Naugle believes growing up in New Castle provided a solid foundation for settling down in Guatemala.

“In cultures like this,” the one-time Red Hurricane football captain said, “it’s all about community. I consider my upbringing in New Castle — which was all about family and going to church and having Sunday dinners with the whole family after church — a big plus.

“In addition to that, in my class and on my football team, I had people named Epitropolous, Micaletti — there were Polish people and Greek people and lots of Italians. There was just such a real ethnic diversity, and that really gave me an appreciation for the fact that we all come in different soul costumes and shapes and colors, but that we’re all human, and that we all want to be loved and seen and heard.”

After graduating from Ne-Ca-Hi, the son of Bob and Judy Naugle of 807 Young St. earned a degree in molecular biology from MIT and devoted eight years to health care, as a management consultant in New York and London, and later as a product manager for a California biotechnology company.

Bob Naugle believed his son eventually would go in another direction.

“He earned his degree in microbiology, but he was just one course shy of minor in writing,” he recalled, “I thought with his love of travel that that he’d end up being a travel writer, and I believe it was his intention to do a series of children’s books on travel that would have been called Magic Carpet Rides.”

Markus Naugle may not have become an author, but his dad was right about one thing: his son’s love for travel eventually would refocus his life.



THINKING GLOBALLY

A yearning to experience the world beyond New Castle started early for Naugle.

“I grew up in the ’70s in western Pennsylvania, certainly with heroes as the Pittsburgh Steelers,” he said, “but Jacques Cousteau also was one of my heroes. I really liked him and Marlin Perkins on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on Sunday nights — the animal, nature, naturist side of it.”

Naugle recalled that as he became more successful in his early efforts, he also began to ask for more time off to take progressively longer trips. At age 28, he decided to take a year off to travel the globe.

“My year off ended up being many years off,” he said. “I gained residency in New Zealand and I just kind of started to explore parts of my personality I hadn’t before now that I had time on my hands. I was finding what I appreciated about myself.

“I spent some time on a boat Australia, planted trees in New Zealand, and I did some volunteer work for a school there and just kind of explored some aspects that had been only interests up to that point, not potential careers — just looking at myself from a different perspective and a different country.”

Yoga eventually captured his interest as well, and he returned to the U.S. not only to study it, but also to teach it in prisons, health clubs, veterans halls and other such venues.

It was during this time he met Wheelock, and the two discovered they each had been blessed with top-notch educations (she had studied at Harvard and Stanford), solid upbringings and a desire not just to see, but rather experience, the world.

Together, they’ve been to more than 50 countries. According to their website, they “lived in Costa Rica, volunteering to protect leatherback turtles and helping with a local recycling initiative,” and have traveled “throughout Ethiopia and Tanzania, with a highlight of climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.”

It turned out to be fulfilling part of the lives that they wanted to share.

(Tomorrow: Going to Guatemala).