It is a hard life !

Hi !
We are in Guatemala at the moment. We had a really pleasant border crossing and were lucky enough to meet up with an Italian couple and travelled the whole way with them. We decided against the gruelling chicken bus journey and paid the more luxury option and caught a mini van (almost door to door!). We headed down to Panajachel, to catch a boat across the lake to our next planned week long stop.

We have now at the lake side village of San Pedro. Lake Atilan is a massive lake around 17km wide, clear (quite cold waters) with really hippy type laid back Gringo hangouts!
We are staying at a lovely new hotel called Mikaso. It is low season and so we managed to get the price down to $4/night each !!! Room small with bunks, but clean, new and an on-suite. Not too bad at all !! The hotel has a great view of the lake from the restuarant on the 3rd floor terrace. Liter beers are $3 (yes...I am training myself to drink beer!)
We signed up for Spanish lessons. 4 hours a day for 5 days, one on one. Brain frying stuff!

Town itself is really hap-hazard, with windy alley ways and lots of hammock hanging, weed smelling gardens....nearly all with the most fantastic food! We are slowly trying them all! Fallafels, fajitas, yoghurt smoothies, cheesecakes....you name it they have it here!

San Pedro is itself is quite cheap and seriously laid back...hence you can see that some travellers have almost moved in permanantly !! Lots of serious weed smoking is done here!
The other day the most decent looking old man walked up to Ken and offered him some great Mango weed! Really weird because we had expected to be approached by the nature loving dreadlock wearing hippy types and instead it was the cleanest cut grampa!

It was Ken´s bday yesterday. I even managed to find some balloons here.We had school in morning then went to the other side of the lake to Santa Cruz....not much there at all. We did see an add for a catamaran cruise from Rio Dulce (Guatemala) to Belzize cuays. We are now seriously tempted. It is only a 5 day cruise all in for $300 each.....

Today we tried another village (San Marco). It is smaller and even more relaxed than S Pedro and well known for its holistic massages, reiki and meditation. Jade ....this is your kind of paradise!

Going tomorrow to a place called Chichicastenango (Chi Chi for short!) for the mercado (market). It is supposed to be a big one. The clothes are nice here and the jewelery, is especially good for jade stone.

14 March, Tuesday

Really hard to keep track of the days here. I have to really think hard to work out the day, never mind the actual date!
Chi Chi was fantastic. A massive rambling market with hundreds of people pushing and shoving along. Thank goodness we have rather full back-packs to restrict our spending as we seriously could have gone wild there!
Beautiful flowers for sale, incredible embroidery and amazing bags, clothing and carvings.
We went as an organised day trip, so no squashed chicken buses for us. The chicken buses are apparently an experience in themselves. Old US school buses painted bright colours, bellowing thick black exhaust fumes! We have yet had the pleasure of travelling on one!

We had our last day of Spanish today (well some of us....Ken decided to bunk) and are heading off to Antigua tomorrow morning.
Sitting here in internet cafe making the difficult decision of the day....where to eat dinner!!
We are still amazed how good the food is here, and really cheap.
We worked out that the ketzal is around the same value as the SA rand....so we eat dinner and a few cocktails (for me) for a round 70-75 ketzals or rand equivalent. Not bad !!!

We might even attempt a chicken bus tomorrow!!!
Will keep you posted
Mel x

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