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Published: August 3rd 2010
Ok so I pinched these photos off our American friend Donny... thanks Donny! No more photos of ours since the camera got stolen...
So the mini-van we caught from Semuc Champey was packed to the gills and very cramped. So we arrived feeling a bit cranky, which was further compounded when it started to pour on our arrival in beautiful Antigua. We had a hostel booked which we thought we could walk to (according to our map).. but it was pouring and a wily cab driver saw us stranded under cover waiting for it to stop. We haggled on a price and got dropped off at our hostel. We treated ourselves to a private room and headed off to explore once the rain stopped.
Antigua is gorgeous! The central city itself is very small, you can walk around it in less than a day. It is dramatically presided over by the huge Volcan de Agua (volcano of water), which looms in a perfect cone shape over the city. The roads that come into Antigua city have barriers to prevent any large vehicles from coming in. All of the streets are cobblestones and most of the buildings are single storey,
except for some churches and government buildings. A lot of the homes and businesses are built in a square donut shape, with beautiful carved wooden double-doors to the street that hide any indication of the grandeur inside. Past the grand entrance there would be an outdoor courtyard and the living areas would be around the edges, both upstairs and downstairs, with open walkways on the upper level so you could see down into fountain and/or garden in the courtyard. None of the businesses have big ads or signs on the street, they are only allowed small and inconspicuous plaques by their front door. Even Burger King only had a small bronze plaque outside with their logo etched into it.
We had little time left in Guatemala, so next morning, we quickly hit the road for our first destination... the market shoppers delight called Chichicastenango. Our bus driver there was a bit crazy, but we made it in one piece and made a new friend the moment we got off the bus.. Donny.. an American from New York (but living in Texas.. woo hoo a Texan.. think of the joke possibilities!) who would end up travelling around with us for
the next week. The three of us got to know each other over some brekkie and some awesome Guatemalan coffee, in the main street of Chichi.
We walked the market streets together for a while, but we inevitably got separated in the chaos. There were soooo many things to buy. Beautiful carvings and woven blankets, jewelry, clothes and so much more. We had a little shopping list and set off to try and buy a bunch of presents… well.. I rephrase that.. I had a shopping list and I dragged Aaron off to buy stuff. The market was busy, colourful and stinky in some parts.. due to the large array of open air meat and interesting local food. There was a big church at the end of one of the market aisles, the stairs covered in people…. tourists mixed in with the faithful. There was incense being burned, flowers left as offerings and tourists taking photos of the scene. We ran into Donny several more times that day and we ended up going into a café for a beer when we were all shopped out. Here we met one of the most memorable characters of the trip.. well, in my
opinion. It was a gorgeous little local girl, who had a rather good grasp on the English language. She was a pretty little thing with a name that I can’t recall, and she was a very very shrewd business woman! The café we were in was upstairs but the hawkers were still allowed in to hassle the tourists. This little one was already having a go with the tourist couple sitting behind us and the three of us were having a little giggle at her arguments. She eventually gave up on them and started on us, offering us a little stuffed turtle or some bookmarks. We would say ‘no gracias’ (no thankyou).. so she would go ‘si gracias’ (yes thankyou). So we would go ‘noooo gracias’, so she went ‘siiii gracias!’. She had us laughing straight away and we played the game for a while. We would say we didn’t need a little turtle and she would say yes we do. We would say we already have one, so she would say you need one more. We finally tried ‘we have no money’… so she said ‘you banco!’ (you are a bank), and pointed the way to the nearest ATM.
She made us laugh so much that I bought a bookmark off her for cinco quetzals.. only 80 cents. 80 cents is a sweet deal for that little bit of entertainment, that little girl will go far and end up a rich young lady!
We left Chichicastenango with smiles on our faces, heavier bags and lighter wallets.. onwards to Panajachel on the banks of the ancient Lake Atitlan. The lake is a volcanic caldera, formed 84,000 years ago in an eruption. It hasn’t been fully researched yet, but it’s depth is believed to be about 340m! We arrived in Pana in the afternoon and found a hostel room to share (Pana is quite expensive due to the high tourist turnover) and headed down to the shore to check out the lake. The view was misty but beautiful. The view is clear in the mornings and the lake is calm, but in the afternoons the lake often becomes rough and a mist rolls in to obscure the view… so maybe a better view tomorrow. We had a funny night on the beers that night. Found a local watering hole and made the most of the cheep booze. We met a few
Americans that night. The first was probably in his 70’s but may have lived there as he seemed well known. He was very drunk and even asked me if I had my own kangaroo back in Australia.. of course I couldn’t help saying yes and added in that I also had a koala and he bought it hook line and sinker. Later that night we met another American.. probably in his late 60’s and a former pilot in the Vietnam war and then a pilot for Singapore airlines later. He had been to Guatemala in his flying days and liked it there. He got the opportunity to live there when a colleague found a seam of jade and needed somebody who knew the area to navigate his yacht to get the jade back to the states. He made enough money on that to stay in Guatemala permanently. He was a really interesting guy!
Next day we headed down to the shore to haggle for a speedboat ride to one of the other ports on the lake. The view was beautiful and clear that morning, with several volcanoes looming in the distance. We found ourselves a good deal for a
ride and headed off the lake for the half hour ride to San Pedro. There wasn’t much there but we had a really nice day wandering around the cobbled streets. The views over the lake were just gorgeous with the green mountainsides in the distance and the turquoise waters of the lake. We had to catch a minibus back to Antigua that afternoon, wish we had had more time at Atitlan.
Our next mission in Guatemala.. Volcan de Pacaya… an active volcano. Pacaya is 2,500m high and last erupted violently in 1965 and since then it has been erupting constantly, normally just with a constant and slow lava-flow down the mountainside. The walk up the mountain was surprisingly cold. There was a thunder storm brewing in the distance that sometimes made me wonder if the deep rumbling was the thunder or the mountain! We finally came to the top of the hill and saw the cone of the volcano, spewing out a constant stream of grey smoke. Another 5 minute walk and we could see the lava, what an amazing sight. We never thought we would be this close to real live lava! We headed down the path of
dark grey ash and rubble to get to the river of red hot lava. It was awe inspiring to be this close. The cone of the volcano was off in the distance and it’s path of destruction went all the way into the fields far below us. We were walking on hardened lava flows, grey, spiky and sharp formations that would cut your feet to pieces if you had no shoes. Right in front of us was a huge river of red lava, flowing ever so slowly down the mountain. The sound it made is hard to describe, a slow, molten sound with the sound of crackly hardening rock on top of that.. way too hard to describe! The wind was chilly, but if it blew towards us we had to walk back a few paces as the heat from the river was massive. Up on the hill we could see separate rivers of lava, flowing slowly but sometimes overflowing so a large chunk of lava fell with a splash into the river, so amazing. We bought a pack of marshmallows up especially for the occasion, so we loaded up our sticks and toasted marshies on the lava flow.. now
who do you know who has done that!! We took some great photos that day, both of the mountain and the breathtaking view over to Volcan de Agua.. but sadly these photos were lost with our stolen camera a week later.
On our last night in Antigua, we met up with our mate Donny again. We found a cool place where the locals hung out and were lucky enough to see a set by a Guatemalan funk band! Very cool. When the band finished we headed up the road in search of another drinking hole, only to find that most places were closed. A bar staff-member near our hostel spotted us walking past his bar and was nice enough to open the door and let us in! We walked into a cosy little dingy bar, full of locals.. us 3 white tourists made ourselves comfortable in the corner and got ourselves some more beers and picked up where our conversation left off. We hadn’t been there long when the big Guatemalan next to us introduced himself as Danny. Danny was hilarious! He regaled us with stories of his time in the army.. telling us gross and disgusting stories of
how to get by in the jungle and some even more gross and disgusting stories of um.. hmmm… lets say ‘natural’ remedies for wounds when you are too far from a first aid kit. Lets just say he was highly entertaining and kept us laughing the whole time. He really was a character to add to our list of cool people we met on our trip.
That’s about it for Guatemala… after this bit we flew back down to Santiago. From there we caught a bus up to the apparently beautiful beach getaway town called Vina del Mar. Our time in Vina ended up disastrous when our camera got stolen while we were occupied watching a movie. A devastating loss, not for loss of the camera, but for loss of the 4 weeks of photos on the memory card (our whole Central American trip). The night ended funny enough though when we got escorted out of the shopping mall where the movie theatre was, getting stares from the locals since I was in tears and Aaron was trying to comfort me. The night got even better when we got outside with the cops only to see a paddy wagon
waiting for us and I was half sobbing half laughing as we got in the back of the armoured van.. our first ride ever in a paddy wagon and we didn’t even do anything bad-ass to earn it! The happy end to the story is that we got the insurance money back… so we can replace the camera but alas, not the photos… but hey, we still have wonderful memories.
No time to be sad though.. let’s go to Vietnam!!
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