Blogs from Laguna Chicabal, Western Highlands, Guatemala, Central America Caribbean

Friday afternoon was spent shopping in the large market a 15 minute walk from where we live. It´s huge and stocks almost everything you can imagine but takes a while to find your way around. The fruit and vegetables are excellent and very cheap - we bought a huge pineapple for around 50p and only paid about twice that for the rest of our veg to last us a few days. Hugh was feeling a little under the weather so collapsed in a heap on the sofa when we got back and I made some dinner. I think we were both asleep not long after 9pm! The alarm went off at 5.30am the next morning as we had arranged a trip to a nearby dormant volcano which has a lake in the crater which is a ... read more

It probably doesn't deserve a whole entry to itself but I thought it'll be easier on you guys if we split our stories up a little. You don't want to be reading throught pages and pages, you'll get bored and I'll stop waffling now ;) On Sunday we booked a trip to a place called Laguna Chicabal. It used to be a volcano and now there is a lake in the volcano crater. It is a sacred Mayan/Mam place and lots of indegenous people go there to make offerings etc. It is forbidden to swim in the water but funnily enough you can fish there...very strange. It is a beautiful place and definitely worth going. The village is around 45 minutes from Xela and it is a 1 hour hike to the lake. According to the ... read more

Yesterday was an adventurous day. I took a "chicken bus" about 45min out to a nonactive volcano to do some hiking. These busses are hilarious. They´re actually old school busses (complete with little-to-no leg room) all painted up in crazy colors emblazoned with religious sayings "dios es amor" "mi dios es real" etc. etc. as if that will keep them from getting out of accidents. (In my opinion, they could use some new brakes!!) We were all packed (and I mean packed) in there and the aisles were about 1/4 the size of regular school busses, so you can imagine the ordeal it was to enter/exit the bus. Especially for the old people. I ran into some ppl going to the same place, but they were hiking too slowly, so I (graciously) ditched them and ... read more

Hello everyone, I finally made it back to Xela yesterday from two weeks at the mountain school. I spent this past weekend in Tilapa Beach (near the border of Mexico) doing a volunteer project. More about that later though. The mountain school is about 1.5 hrs southwest of Xela. It was developed in 1997 as a sister school to Proyecto Linguistico Quetzalteco in Xela. The mountain school is within two communites- Fatima and Nueva San Jose. Both of these communities are very poor, and the mountain school serves as a means of income for these families. These communities have a very interesting history, but I only know the history of Neuva San Jose from a conference that we had the other night. Abelino gave us the conference (he is the uncle of my host mother) and ... read more

Holy Frijoles, Just a few days ago Travis and I climbed Vocano Pacaya. HOnestly words cannot describe this experience. It was spiritual. We had no idea when we signed up for the trip that we would have the opportunity to climb to the summit. Pacaya is 1.25 miles high and the hike to get there is over two miles. We were winded after fifteen minutes of hiking the trail. After an hour an a half we reached a beautiful plateau that overlooked Guatemala City and the surrounding farm land. From that point we had a 360 degree view of the verdant landscape covered with more volcanos. We were also standing on Pumus sand from the daunting black hill towering over us. The wind began to pick up to about 30mph and the low growl of the ... read more