So, having woken up feeling fairly hungover, I set off for the bus station in San Cristobal, confident that I would be able to make it to Lake Atitlan that day. Wrong! The tour buses leave with sober people at 6-7 in the morning, not hungover morons at 9.30. So I decided that I'd chance my arm anyway, as with the best will in the world, I'd had enough of San Cris. Got the 11.30 bus to Ciudad Cuahtehmoc and checked out of Mexico, paid 50p for a short taxi ride across the border, checked in to Guatemala and found myself in La Mesilla.
A blog I'd read before leaving had made it sound like dirt squalor hell, but actually it was fine and I was able to get money out the cash machine. It was getting dark though and I didn't really know how to get to Panajachel, the place where all the tour buses arrive for Atitlan. A barechested ogre (above 5.8 = ogre in this part of the world) gave me incomprehensible travel info and after checking it at a nearby shop, I jumped on his bus to Huehuetenango. Which I'd never heard of, but sounded like a good way along to Panajachel. As it was getting dark, I was a little unnerved, but it all went fine and I had a really nice chat to a guy on the bus who was local yokel (=campesino) but who'd worked in Cancun and was very interested in the world and history. Not what I'd expected and really, really life-affirming/heart-warming.
I decided to break the journey to Panajachel by staying a day rather than leaving the next morning and the town repaid my faith by providing a Sunday carnival, an internet place to do some blogging but sadly no laundry. So I bought some surprisingly expensive Guatemalan underwear :))) Oh, and for someone who has heard the song about a billion times in Russia, I was quite amused to be staying in, you guessed it, the Hotel California!!
After the dirty hole in the ground that was La Mesilla bus station, Huehue's was positively 1st world. Lovely and colourful though, the chicken buses! I didn't actually see any chickens, but I was the only foreigner on my bus and I only saw one other in all my time there. Another Huehue highlight was having egg and chips when I first arrived to settle my travel-and-Chiapas-ravaged digestive system.
The journey to Panajachel involved three changes (Los encuentros, Solalá, San Jorge) so I really got a slice of local travel - more chicken buses, pickups and a boat, from which I took this photo of the lake. I took a walk round Panajachel, hated it and decided to move on but, instead of following the recommendation I'd had, a boat tout collared me and suggested Santa Catarina as the smallest, least touristy place on offer. Obviously he forgot to mention that I could have got there for 4 Quetzal, instead of the 25 I paid him, but never mind :)))
Santa Catarina provided some of the worst accommodation I've had so far but it did have the annual 4-day fiesta too. Which meant lots of colour and decoration and incredibly loud music of, how shall we say, ... very variable quality. I hung out with a couple of locals whose mobile-phone reggae had caught my ear whilst watching a local footie match. Two nice guys who showed me around with varying degrees of disorganisation and ineptitude and we put the world to rights in Spanish which was great for me to follow up on mornings studying in cafés.
The guidebooks (which I don't have) said it was dangerous to walk in certain areas as tourists had been mugged etc of which I was oblivious, and this photo was the reward for my lack of caution. The rest of the time I was with Pedro and Rambo (nickname) anyway so it didn't matter. They both spoke Kachikel, a local Mayan language, and you could definitely see large similarities between the local indigenous folks and those in Chiapas. Sadly my stay in Santa Catarina was fun but also collapsed my immune system, so after being woken up at 5am by my landlord asking for beer money, I packed and hurriedly set off for the relative Western comfort of Antigua. And, after dosing myself up with loperamide following some extremely dodgy street chips, went up the volcano Pacaya a day or two later...
As I chose the evening slot, it was pretty chilly as we went up, and there was no lava as such but the landscapes were brilliant. It was also nice to chat in English with a couple of really nice Italian-descended guys from Milton Keynes.
This was as fiery as it got, which was good for roasting marshmallows and phenomenally hot if you stood close, but no rivers of fire...
I pointed the camera up into the darkness of the next feature, called the 'sauna' which was a cave-type thing which was pretty damn hot and deliciously scary.
This is me, James Hetfield, inside a volcano.... rock 'n roll....
After a week of studying Spanish one-to-one with a pretty robust teacher, I felt I needed to treat myself and do something exciting as my guts were just starting to be a bit more normal and energy levels resuming after lots of morning yoga and meditation in the various hostels of Antigua I stayed at. So I looked on the internet and found the prospect of churches and ruins which I'd already seen from the outside, to be rather unappealing. So I decided to spend my birthday money from Mum, Dad and Pete on this...
A 2-stroke, 175cc boy's own weekend. Actually I spent 4 hours on Saturday riding in ever-decreasing u-turns, doing emergency stops and more advanced cone-obstacle courses, another hour of the same on Sunday, then we set off into the hills of Antigua. Was bloody good fun, and boy, a 2-stroke engine sounds like a nest of hardcore hornets that have just been challenged to a fight by the local competition. I didn't realise it was possible to accelerate up through the gears when going up a 50% gradient, but with this rocket-powered device, you can. Doing 60 miles an hour down the free way put my underwear to the limits of its capacities, but it was all fine in the end... Mine is the Yamaha on theft...
Myself, Dave, the very large, unflappable teacher from Portsmouth and a pleasant Yank called Mark visited various lookout points and a local village taking in some dirt track stuff as well. Awesome...thankfully, no emergency stops required
And this is why most people go to Antigua, for the pretty buildings and such like. As I realised I was still pretty knackered and feeling like things just hadn't been as good in the people department since Mexico, I sacked off two world-class tourist destinations (natural splendours of Semuc Champey and the amazing Mayan ruins at Tikal) and headed back to Mexico to see people who I had met in DF (Luke & Drew) who were at a beach which would be just striking distance from Oaxaca where I had agreed to meet my parents for Christmas from the 17th...
More about Zipolite, nude beaches and poetry nights next in Steve's Latin American Adventure :))))
Tara,
luv
s
xx
Like the 'tache. :-)
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