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Published: April 12th 2008
The Guatemalan antics have kept rolling on since my last blog. My next stop was to Antigua for Semana Santa (or Holy Week) celeberations. Semana Santa is the week that runs from the Sunday before Easter until Easter Sunday, and all throughout Latin America its a time for big celebrations, street fiestas, carnivals and so on - i had to make a reservation to be in Antigua over Semana Sanata quite a while back, as everyone knows that the festivities are on a grander scale in Antigua than anywhere else in Central America. There were heaps of processions through the city, especially over the thursday, friday, saturday and sunday - with each procession having its own theme and timed to coincide with what was supposedly happening on the very first Easter when Jesus was being crucified (kinda like the TV series "24", Semana Santa in Antigua is peformed in "real-time").
My favourite procession was when I happened to be out and and about at 5am on Good Friday morning when a whole bunch of Guatemalans dressed to the hilt as Romans were charging around the city at high speed in horse-drawn chariots shouting their tits off in spanish something about
how Jesus has to be arrested now as the order had been given to take him in. Good Friday, a public holiday and most important day in the Catholic calendar, turned out to be a scorcher with thousands of people in the streets watching the processions, food and drink vendors everywhere, and little Guatemalan kids eating ice-cream and wandering around with helium balloons of one cartoon character or another. Talk about all the fun of the fair! Some more fun involved all these "carpets" that they would make in the night using stencils and wet sawdust dyed in lots of different colours, to create intricate pictures all over the street - only to have the processioners walk all over them the next morning. The locals that make the carpets are only too happy for gringos like me to join in, so I stopped my evening antics for a couple of hours from 3am till 5am one morning and helped a group of Guatemalan friends decorate the streets.
Antigua itself is a bit of a freak - its like nowhere else in Central America that I´ve been to so far - while a few cities I visited in Mexico showed
obvious signs of being Spanish colonial cities, Antigua felt like it actually was a small medieval city in Spain, I had to keep reminding myself that I was in Guatemala. Antigua wouldn´t be out place nestled in the hills of Spain somewhere. Cobbled streets, brightly painted wooden-buildings in contrasting colours, balconies overhead, manicured gardens, a plush plaza (or square) with a massive cathedral, with plenty of al fresco dining options to boot. The main visual difference would be that whereas a Spanish village in the mountains might be surrounded by craggy peaks, because of Guatemala's position on the same tectonic "ring of fire" as New Zealand, there are towering volcanoes about instead, including a massive one just south of the city which dominates the skyline from every angle.
On the subject of volcanoes, a daytrip to nearby Volcano Pacaya is definitely in the "Its-a-good-thing-that- this -is-in-Guatemala-because-if- it-were-in- most-other- places-it- would- probably -be-illegal" category. In most countries, when there is red hot lava rolling its way down a volcano side, the general populace isn't allowed within a country mile of it "for our own good". But in Guatemala, where they are pretty desperate for the tourist dollar, its simply seen
as an opportunity for people to do something different, and they've designated the area around it as a national park so there of course there is a special "non-Guatemalan" park fee to be paid by every Gringo that visits. But I had been told by absolutely everybody that its well worth it, so a group of us from my backpackers headed up there one afternoon, and played around on the lava fields, setting sticks on fire and so on, and quietly wondering if the text of a standard travel insurance policy covered any of this if something were to go wrong....
It was a fairly surreal experiences, we were so close to the rolling lava the heat was quite intense at times, one of the guys I went up with wore shorts and even had his leg hairs singed! We walked next to the lava on cooled black lava rock, however sometimes when you looked down through the cracks you could see red lava moving only 4 or 5 inches beneath your feet! Some people with cheap shoes had the rubber on the soles melt and contort, although fortunately my Clark's trekking boots withstood the pressure. And there´s no
Thats Where We Were
Right next to the orange stuff. Coool, eh?brownie points for guessing that it didn´t always smell so good up there either. We were leaving Volcan Pacaya just after the sun had set, and the lava looked especially cool in the darkness, illuminating the area around it with an orange glow.
After Antigua's Semana Santa celebrations ended, a crew of about 11 of us from my backpackers all left on the same day to come to Lago (or Lake) de Atitlan, and the town of San Pedro La Laguna which sits on its shore. Lago De Atitlan is pretty spectacular, ringed by 3 volcanoes and plenty of non-volcanic peaks too. I was aware that there was a particularly good Spanish school here that had been recommended to me by a few people, and when I leave San Pedro this wknd (ie. 13/14 April) I will have been here 3 weeks, and will have done weeks 3, 4 and 5 of Spanish school back to back here, on top of the 2 weeks I'd done previously in Oaxaca (Mexico) and Nebaj.
Its been a nice place to relax for 3 weeks, and the homestay I was assigned is awesome. The mum is such an amazing cook, but
Lago de Atitlan and Volcano San Pedro
The town of San Pedro, where I spent 3 weeks, is just above my head what I also like is that the family acutally lives in the main house, but the 2 rooms they rent out to students are above the shop they own across the street, so I get all the benefits of living with a family, but also as San Pedro has a bit of a rep as a traveller party town I can go out at night and come home anytime I like and know that I won't disturb the family at all. I´ve also enjoyed just being able to stay put in one place for a while, I´ve gotten to know a few of my fellow travellers a little better than the ones that are gone again in a few days, and really gotten to know the town and the places I like - and have also gotten to hang out more with a few local people as well through my school.
The school and my teachers are really cool, and I've learnt a hell of a lot over the last 3 weeks. The setting of the school is quite amazing too - we all study one-to-one with our own teacher, outside in a lovely garden each of us under
Thatched Roof Palapa Amongst a Nice Garden
What a nice place to study spanish one-on-one with my own teacher. No wonder I stayed there 3 weeks! a small thatched-roof shelter, with the sight of the lake and the neighbouring volcanoes spread out in front of us as the backdrop - sometime I lose my concentration as I{m too busy checking out the view! As part of the program they also show us movies and host talks - usually around the theme of Guatemala's troubled last few decades and the Guatemalan Civil War that I alluded to in my last blog. They also organise quite a few activities, like last weekend they rented a bunch of kayaks for the students and we paddled across the lake to a fairly isolated beach. I´ve also climbed some of the peaks around here with fellow students. With a total of 5 weeks spanish school under my belt, I'm feeling way more confident about heading into El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua now, as I'm told there is not always a lot of english spoken in those countries.
Something else I've been able to get involved in is helping out at a kids school here that doesn't get any proper government funding and is largely dependent on charitable donations and volunteers. Needless to say, its in the poorer part of San
Pedro where the average daily wage for adults is about 3 US dollars a day - a different world completely from the gringo-fied lakefront with its hotels and restaurants, where bohemian travellers discuss dreadlocks, tofu, piercings and spirituality before going back to their comfortable lives in their home countries. One of my fellow language students, Megan from the USA, had been heavily involved in working with the kids school, and through her I've taken the opportunity to go up for a couple of hours most mornings through the week and help the kids 1-to-1 with their reading, as the teacher can never get much 1-to-1 time with each of the kids and we suspect they don't get a lot of help with reading at home, especially if their parents can't actually read themselves! I always arrive at the start of morning break, which is an opportunity for a fairly fierce game of "futbol" (Guatemalans, like every other nation in Latin America, are nuts about football) and during my first game the kids assigned me the nickname of "Gringo" and it seems to have stuck! I then read with the kids until lunchtime before heading home to eat something, and then
have my own language classes for 4 hours every afternoon.
I also made a fairly cool daytrip from the Lake to the market town of Chichicastenago, which every Thursday and Sunday is home to what is probably the most famous market in all of Central America. The market is pretty hard to describe, in terms of colours, smells, sights and sounds its a fairly full on assault on the senses. I was worried that it would be a little too gringo-fied for my liking, as the market is fairly famous, and although there were lots of tourists about (including me!) they were a drop in the ocean compared with the number of Guatemalans, and the market still felt as if it had a real character of its own. I spent a lot of time with a zoom lense on the front of my camera, trying to capture the different faces of the market. There was loads of different stuff for sale there - from art and crafts to live chickens, from fruit to cut flowers. I spent a good few hours wandering around, and then had the good fortune to bump into someone I hung out with quite a
bit a couple of weeks earlier in Nebaj so we went and got something to eat and caught up on each others news.
And thats about all for now, this wknd (pending my plans not changing...) I'm leaving Guatemala for El Salvador. Although when I leave I will have been in Guatemala 6 weeks - which is the 2nd longest stint I´ve spent in any country (not counting those I´ve actually lived in....) I´ve only done a longer stint in India a few years back. I guess you could say I liked Guatemala ;-)
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fernando
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tikal
i'am from guatemala the photos are nice but you have to visit tikal and rio dulce there are a nices places