Antigua

---

Last saturday, after a good breakfast by the lake in Flores wondering where to head next, the owner of our hostel came with this great offer to us: he could arrange transport to the airport in Flores, flight to Guatemala City and transport from Guatemala City to Antigua for only 40US$!! After asking around a little and finding out that this wasn´t anything strange as it´s lowseason and hurricane-season and everything, we decided to take the offer. Of course the plane was a small 14 passenger local plane but the local assured us it was "segurísimo"! And so it was! Only three hours after leaving Flores we arrived in Antigua, having travelled from one side of the country to the other, instead of a 11 hours bumpy busride.... The driver that took us from Guate to Antigua was very nice and told us a lot about the guatemalan culture, I of course had millions of questions...

We didn´t see much of Antigua when we arrived as it was dark, and not that much the next morning either, because we decided to go straight to Chichicastenango ("Chichi") as it was market-day there. No tours, thank you, even though they were offered to us again, we´ll take the local bus! It´ll be an adventure, said the nice driver from saturday night. It´ll be terrible and expensive, said the tour-operator... It was NICE!! The buses here are old american schoolbuses, you know the yellow ones, and there´s no passenger limit. We got a seat between Antigua and "Chima" (Chimaltenago) but no seat from Chima to Chichi (2 hours...). Pressed between staring locals (I was staring at them too...) we where happy because this was a real local experience!

In Chichi the bargaining started... I got crazy with all the colourful textiles and bags and wanted to buy everything!! There were indigenous people everywhere in their beatiful colourful clothes selling all kinds of things in all kinds of colours! You can imagine the range of colours in that place! But the bargaining made us exhausted and we ended up not spending that much money after all... We bought a few tablecloths and some worrydolls and then we went back to Antigua again, this time more experienced with the local way of getting from one place to the other.

By that night we had seen enough of Antigua to have noticed that it´s a beatiful town full of small old colonial houses and cobblestoned streets. There´s lots of nice cafés and bars here and today for sure they´ll be full as it´s halloween... Unfortunately Antigua is very touristic, there´s almost more western language students than locals when you walk down the streets, so the prices are according to this fact.

Tomorrow we´ll try to go to this village where thay have a big all saint´s day celebration, the local people fly huge colourful kites to communicate with their ancestors. It´ll be a nice contrast, again... We just realized that we´ve travelled quite fast the last days: we´ve spent 4 nights in Guatemala and we´ve seen the beachlike Flores, the sunrise above the Maya riuins of Tikal, tkaen a local plane to Antigua, seen Antigua and the market in Chichi... It feels good with an empty day today, we´re just gonna go from lunch (soon) and then siesta to be followed by fiesta! :-)

Take care, Mette

---