So life in Guate has officially made the switch from slow to busy… somehow I always end up with less free time than I initially anticipate. Hopefully I’ll have some downtime this weekend to jump back in time to cover what’s already happened. For the time being, I’m going to pick up with this weekend so that I don’t become even further behind.
This past weekend I traveled from Antigua to the small hippie community of San Marcos on the Lago de Atitlan with a few other folks from Safe Passage to enjoy our 4 day weekend (Tuesday, September 15th, was Guatemalan Independence Day and we got Monday off as an added bonus). The four of us piled into a little red volkswagon around noon on Sunday to embark on our adventure away from Antigua. The drive up was an experience in itself as we passed incredible landscapes… along the sides of mountains, through valleys, across ridges. The road itself was quite nice as well as it had just finished being widened into a 2 lane highway.
Some hours later we arrived in Panajachel (Pana) where we caught a ferry/water taxi to San Marcos where we spent two nights at Aaculaax (http://www.aaculaax.com/) which was just cool… there’s really no other way to put it. Each of the rooms had a slightly different theme with beautiful glasswork and other paintings throughout the entire place. I could have spent hours puttering around with my camera–though I tried to refrain from being that guy (I’ll include some photos later).
The first night there we stumbled upon a nice little language school/restaurant/hotel called Paco Real where we enjoyed a nice dinner, some live music and a few locals beers.
On Sunday we woke up to sunshine and a nice breakfast at the patio restaurant Las Mananitas (I went for the Desayuno Typical… nothing like eggs, fried plantains, frijoles and a large cup of coffee to start your day). From there, after stretching breakfast out to occupy a couple of hours, we went swimming in the Lake, which had the most incredible aqua-marine-blue water, and cliff jumping off of the nearby cliffs. In the distance we could see the volcanos rising steeply out of the water and a few small towns, villages and compounds (belonging to some rich Guatemalans) nestled in amongst the hillside.
From there we grabbed a late lunch at another restaurant/hotel/language center called La Paz recommended to us by this Italian guy we met at the cliffs… who happened the work there. Being in holistic healing hippie central I thought it would be a good call to track down a massage–which it was–and far less expensive than in the US at a little place down the street. We then all reconvened at the sweat lodge-style sauna at La Paz and spent another hour or so sweating out all the evil from the previous days and nights followed soon by showers and another dinner of curry at Paco Real with some live music.
We hit the hay relatively early that (Sunday) night and woke up relatively early to yet another sunny morning, which followed roughly the same course as the day before as far as breakfast was concerned. Unfortunately, we ran out of money… and no one in San Marcos really seems to accept credit cards… so we rented some kayaks and kayaked across the Lake to San Pedro–a slightly larger town that has an ATM as well a a number of interesting bars and restaurants. It felt like a bit more of a party town than San Marcos, although everything’s relative.
After hitting up the ATM and having a crazy (?) old local lady call me Maximon (or San Simon), a tobacco smoking, rum drinking pagan god, we grabbed some lunch at a little restaurant overlooking the deck. About half way through the trip back across the lake the wind really started to pick up and the clouds started rolling in… awesome… and then the lightning started. Luckily the wind was blowing us more or less in the direction we had to go anyway… we tried to surf some of the waves that the wind was kicking up… though they weren’t actually that big. For the most part, however, we just got soaked between the rain and the waves that were splashing over us.
Wrapping things up, we took the ferry back over to Pana hopped in the car and zoomed home dodging parades of kids running with torches (Independence Day tradition) and other kids that were throwing water balloons and buckets of water at them as they ran by (another Independence Day Tradition).
On Tuesday (yesterday) I spent the day in Antigua trying to catch up with life and enjoying all of the school marching bands that paraded through the streets to the Parque Central for the ceremonies and the singing of the national anthem.
Today, Wednesday, was back to work. After 4 days off I almost forgot where to catch the bus in the morning. The kids are still great though. More on work at Safe Passage, what Safe Passage is, and my first week in Guate to be filled in retroactively as time permits.
Hope all are well.
Chris
ps. mom and dad, sorry I didn’t call back tonight like I said I would. I spent 2 hours wandering around the grocery store (La Bodegona) here trying to make my first attempt at buying food for the apartment. I’ll try again tomorrow.
