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Published: October 9th 2006
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For our change of scenery after our week of city life in Antigua we chose to visit one of Guatemala's largest lakes and stay in one of the small villages on its shores. San Pedro was a bus and boatride away from Antigua and we were there by lunchtime. We were greeted off the boat by the usual group of people touting for their hotels and got chatting to one whilst we had some lunch by the quay (using our newly developed Spanish skills!!) and he offered us a double room for 20 Quetzals which equates to about 1.40 in English pounds! An offer to cheap to refuse we went to check it out; needless to say it wasn't what you would call luxury accomodation but then Guatemala isn't really a 5* holiday destination. We also had a small basic kitchen that we could use as well which was handy as San Pedro had a good daily market with lots of fresh food.
San pedro is one of those places where lots of travellers seem to plan on visiting for a few days and end up staying months. Because of this there are lots of cool things going on that
The class picture!
This is a mixture of teachers and pupils - if they look hispanic then they're teachers!! you miss when you're away, the main one being that every bar had a cinema and would have a nightly film showing. We took advantage of this on our first night along with another tourist favourist - cheap beer (at about £1.75 for 2 litres you can't really go wrong)! We followed this up with another little taste of home when we discovered that the same bar offered a traditional English sunday roast. Fantastic! We ate our roast by candlelight as just after it arrived the power line to the bar blew out in a big flash of sparks and we had our own personal powercut!
Spanish Lessons Part II
We enrolled for a second week of Spanish lessons to give us an opportunity to try and cement all the gramamr we had learnt in Antigua! Our school envionment was very different to Antigua with our lessons being conducted in private gardens on the lakeside with the little two person classroom shacks dotted around the gardens tucked between trees and bushes. Our teachers were both very nice and spoke slightly less English than the ones we had in Antigua which aided our practice: by the end of
the week my Spanish was getting good enough that I could give my teacher a basic English lesson, which makes you realise how strange English gramar is - or at least the way everyone uses it anyway.
We had 5 days of lessons for 4 hours each morning leaving the afternoons free to explore the surrounding area and the lake. One afternoon we took a trip to the local beach, which included a bumpy ride in the back of a flatbed pickup truck - the local way of getting around. The beach was tucked away in a little bay on the lake, obviously no waves as there's no tide on a lake but it was nice to relax on the beach for a while until the afternoon clouds started coming over (you could set your watch by the rain in San Pedro). On our way back we shared a pickup with a load of other tourists and got chatting to a guy called David from Israel. He noticed my hair and asked who had done it for me, when we told him that Tash had done it he asked if we could do his as well, we didn't think
Looking through the coffee
We walked through a coffee farm on the way to the beach, which was actually quite high up! it would take too long with two of us doing it so agreed to start it that afternoon. I ended up becoming our project for the next four afternoons after Spanish as we had massively underestimated how much hair he had!! This actually worked out quite well as we ended up spending some nice chilled out afternoons with a really cool group of people whilst we were doing it and David took us out for dinner to say thanks when we'd finished.
A day on (in) the lake
After we'd finished our Spanish lessons we thought it would be nice to take a kayak out on the lake to admire the views of the surrounding mountains and volcanos and to maybe visit another one of the litle towns dotted on the lake's shore. We hired our kayaks to go out in the morning and as we were leaving the guy who sorted us out mentioned that we might want to try and come back at midday at the latest if we were going to San Marcos, as the lake could get "a little choppy" after lunch. As you can see from some of the pictures the
Tash hard at work!
Nearly finshed....... lake was like a mill pond (when we left) and it seemed hard to believe that it could change enough to pose us any problems. So off we went, and spent a nice morning paddling across to San Marcos and wandering round, had a bit of lunch (about 12ish) and left at about 1pm. When we left the lake wasn't quite as flat as it had been on our outward journey, you might have even called it "a little choppy" if you were a local in the know!
With no other option than to go back by kayak so we set off back to San Pedro bouncing over some small waves and getting a bit wet from water splahing up, but this was no real problem. Then as we got out more towards the middle of our journey - kind of in that no-mans land where it is neither easier to turn round and go back or just carry on going - the waves were starting to get a little bigger. In fact it was almost like kayaking in the sea! The kayak was riding up over bigger waves and then dropping down so the nose went under the
All done!!!
30 hours and 78 dreadlocks later David was a fully fledged rasta!! next wave causing the boat to start collecting quite a bit of water. With nothing to bail said water out of the kayak we just carried on slowly sitting lower and lower in the water until we had collected enough water to make it difficult to balance and every stroke was making the caone rock quite dramatically. One more big wave was all it took and the kayak capized, dumping us both and all our stuff into the lake!
At this point it is worth mentioning that whilst we have been travelling we have generally not gone anywhere without a number of things: our passports, all our cashcards and money and of course our cameras. Thankfully before we left England we had been bought a dry bag as a present by Paul and doubly thankfully we had had the foresight to put all of the above mentioned items in the dry bag before setting off on our little adventure across the lake.
Back to the story: we were now floating in the lake holding on to our capsized kayak (and the oars (which annoyingly didn't float!) You would think that being upside down all the water might have
The canoing destination
it didn't look that far away when it was nice and calm!! drained out of the kayak and we could have gotten back in. This was not the case and after several attempts it became obvious that this was not going to work, in fact it was actually sinking more! Fortunately we could see one of the ferry boats coming and waved to get their attention. The driver very kindly helped us empty our kayak of water and held it steady so we could clamber back in. He advised us that it might be wise to try and get back to San Pedro before we sank again! We agreed and headed off as fast as we could although we only just about made it and arrived back at the dock half full of water again!
Back on the dock it was the moment of truth for the drybag, which thankfully worked a treat and all our valuables were completely dry. Thanks again Paul!!
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dawn
non-member comment
geez louise guys, the whole sinking in the lake thing, you take it a lot more cas' than I would of, I would have been convinced I was about to die, you make it sound like, ahh, so the paddles aren't floating, but hey! our passports are dry, so we're all sorted...