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Published: August 1st 2013
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After hearing stories about Guatemala City and the lack of things to do there I decided to head straight to Antigua in Guatemala rather than staying a night in the capital. A few hours after we crossed the border (and I had my first attempted border scam - unluckily for them this wasn't my first border crossing!) and arrived in Guatemala City. In order to get out to Antigua we needed to catch a taxi from the bus terminal to a public bus stop. The taxi driver at the bus stop told us that it was super dangerous for us to go to the public terminal and if he dropped us off that someone would come up behind us with a gun and rob us - clearly he was trying to play on our fears and get us to pay him to drive as all the way to Antigua as when he dropped us off at the terminal ($8 for a 4 min drive an absolute rip off) we walked straight past the police on lookout and onto a chicken bus.
Stepping onto the chicken bus was however where the walking ended. The isle of the bus was
so narrow that even I couldn't fit through it, let alone the average size Guatemalan! The layout of the seats was literally that they were 2.2 humans wide, with a ridiculously small gap between the two seats and then another 2.2 human wide seat. As the bus filled up it was highly amusing to watch people try to squeeze through the isle. After the bus was full with two people per seat they kept stoping and the real amusement begun. The logic that seemed to apply was that if another two people joined the row and sat down shoulder to shoulder they could brace against each other over the isle and semi comfortably sit with six people across a row. Instantly the 44 seater bus became a 66 seater. Talk about efficiency. The icing on the cake was watching the ticket man clamber over the people and the seats to collect everyone's money. It would appear that the people of Guatemala are not as precious about personal space as we are back home.
When we arrived in Antigua we checked into a hostel that we'd reserved based on another travellers glowing recommendation called Hollistico. It wasn't too
long after we checked in that I realised that someone else had been checked into my bed. When we went out for drinks I let the owner know and he said that it was no problem at all and that he'd put my friend and I up in a hotel for the night and sort out the beds the following day. We then went off to dinner thinking that all was well. Apparently during this time the hostel owner was having dinner with a group of other guests and he was implying to them that we hadn't had a booking and that we were causing a lot of drama which was just not true at all.
When we returned to the hostel at about 2am there was someone sleeping in my bed so we went up to the terrace to ask the hostel owner what was going on. As soon as we did some of the other guests that the owner was with arced up at us for causing trouble. We asked them to keep out of it and to let us talk to the owner as they didn't know what was happening, but they wouldn't let
it go and before I knew it the hostel owner, my friend and some of the other boys staying at the hostel were all yelling at each other, the police were called and the whole hostel was woken up. By the end of the ridiculous arguing, my friend was instructed to pack up his things and was moved to a hotel next door and one of the guys who had started the arguing was insisting that I slept in his bed while he slept on a mattress on the floor.
During the whole nine months that I have been travelling I have never seen so much drama go down. Practically the whole hostel was woken up at 2 in the morning because a group of very drunk men couldn't put their attitudes aside and work out a simple problem. I am sure that if everyone wasn't so drunk that it certainly wouldn't have gone down the way it did.
Following a couple of days in Antigua I headed down to Santa Cruz on Lake Atitlan for a few nights of R&R before my friend from back home was due to arrive. By the time my shuttle actually made it to the lake, the rainy season weather had clouded the view and I had no idea what the lake would behold. When I checked into my lakefront hostel on Saturday afternoon I could have been on an oceanfront property rather than a lake as it was impossible to see the other side. The following day however, I awoke to a picture perfect blue sky and an incredible landscape of huge volcanos decorating a beautiful shoreline.
On morning I got conned into doing yoga at the hostel with some of the other guests. While the first 2/3 was pretty good, and I was really getting into the balance work, the last third was nothing I had ever experienced before. Usually in yoga they get you to do some inner spiritual stuff while you lie on your back with your eyes closed and listen to what the instructor is saying - but this lady just took it to the next extreme. I have no idea what she was actually saying, but to me it sounded like she was telling me to let my inner piranha move around my veins and I all I could think of was it swimming around and chewing up my innards. It was almost as good as when she said that I needed to have unconditional love for my inner bliss. Oh my. And this wasn't some cute little 10min spiel- oh no - it went on for a good 25 minutes! Needless to say I did not volunteer for yoga again while I was there!
On my last morning on the lake we headed over to San Jaun to have wine and cheese. The restaurant was amazing and the cheese was oh so good! It had been absolutely ages since I'd had good cheese and the 'journey' that the cheese chef took us on with about 15 different cheeses was amazing. Too much time spent enjoying the wine did however mean that I was a bit late returning to the hostel and catching a boat to my pickup point so everyone else from the cheese experience partook in operation Panamajal as we distracted the boat driver and fed him beer to delay him as the others ran off to get my valuables from one persons room and I retrieved my pack. In the end I got to the transfer in time and spent the next three hours wishing that I hadn't broken the seal.
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This was hilarious Tam! It\'s good to see your fellow travelers are looking out for each other too