Last of the lake adventure and onward to Antigua

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With the foot on the mend, we make big plans for Tuesday. We start with a morning of kayaking, which is included in our stay at Santa Cruz. We race around corners of the lake, and the lie back and relax as the ripples from passing boats send us swaying back and forth in the water.

Afterward, we decided to hike to a little town to the west of us, Jaibilito. The hike was up and over the mountian via a Mayan trail that was centuries old. We passed women in traditional garb carrying sacks of banana leaves and holding machetes at their sides. Little boys leapt ahead of us with handfuls of wood and big grins on their faces. The path laced around the edge of the mountain, giving way to amazing views of the lake. We stopped at a hotel, La Casa del Mundo, for a light lunch of hummus and pita and coconut milk sorbet, and continued down the path to the little town of Jaibilito. A gang of rascally boys ran past us and asked for quetzales in exchange for pieces of raw chicken from the black garbage bag they were carrying around town. When we said gracias pero no gracias, one of them threw a pebble at us and laughed.

The next day we ventured over to two of the other lake towns, San Pedro, and San Juan. San Pedro seemed to us to be just another Pana, loud, busy, touristy, and not so pretty. But we had come mainly for the atms, of which there were two-- other than Panajchel, this was the only place to get your money out of a machine. Unfortunately both of the ATMs were wiped out of money, and so we waited alongside the curb with other white folks until two men with big guns came marching down the sidewalk with sacks full of more money.

Our pockets lined with a fresh stash of crisp quetzales, we then took a tuk-tuk to San Juan, the town next door, and when we ran out of gas along the way, a lady ran out of her house with a small plastic jug of pink gasoline and refilled us and we were on our way. In comparison to primary-colored San Pedro, San Juan was a picture of tranquility and muted colors. The town was tinted in the colors of a dish of after-dinner mints, and the fabrics seemed to be similarily hued. Instead of the bright blues and shimmery golds and pinks were had seen elsewhere, the colors here seemed to have been pulled straight from the earth....colors of sand and shells and wheat and sky. And we seemed to be the only gringos in sight. We strolled around until the sun started to set....which it does rather early in Guatemala, and then we tuk-tuked it back up and over to San Pedro, where a boat was waiting to take us home.

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