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Crazy/cute old lady in Panajachel
She kept hugging me while I was eating my lunch I'm way ahead of you...
Oh I've been waiting a long time to say that!!
So you can imagine how loathed I was to discover that these extremely hot chilis (grown in Quetzalacatenango by inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum) exist only in the world of The Simpsons. Rats.
That's not to say there isn't something a bit mad about Guatemala though...
After stamping out of Mexico (this was a while ago... I´m a bit behind on my blog entries) we drove through a no-man's-land of vultures circling rubbish dumps and Market stalls selling jeans as far as the eye could see, before crossing the border into Guatemala. As soon as we stepped into Guatemalan soil, we could tell we were somewhere just a little more lawless - there were pimped out tuktuks blaring music and chicken buses (old american school buses with souped up motors and flashing lights) all over the show, and that was even before our eyes caught sight of all the men with guns milling about everywhere (though I'm pretty sure most of the guns I saw were for defensive, rather then offensive, purposes).
Our first night in Guatemala was spent in
Me and Melanie
in San Jorge la Laguna Panajachel, on the shores of Lake Atitlan - a lake ringed by no less than eight volcanoes. Apparently three of the world's eight tectonic plates meet in Guatemala, giving it the proud claim of having the most volcanoes per square mile... One of which we got particularly close to during our stay in Antigua, but I'll get to that...
After a fairly uneventful night in Panajachel, it was a short trip to a small village further along the lakeshore. We were in San Jorge La Laguna for our homestay with an indigenous Mayan family. The hospitality Victor and his family showed us was really lovely, they were really patient with our limited Spanish (and luckily Victor spoke a decent amount of English too) and shared their food and home with us and then thanked US profusely for coming to stay!! Such sweethearts. I think little melanie (6 years old) especially enjoyed our night there - I took this pop-open frisbee I got as a giveaway from a supplier at work in London, so melanie and I spent most of the evening popping the frisbee open in each others faces... Then when she got bored of that she came and
sat next to me and tried to get me to teach her to read the writing that was on the frisbee... The irony of trying to teach a 6-year-old living in the Guatemalan highlands to read "Ca-pi-tal I-Q -a sub-si-diary of sta-nd-ard a-nd po-ors" made it quite hard to keep a straight face while doing so.
The following day we headed to Chichicastenango, the biggest market in Central America, for a spot of shopping. Guatemala's textiles have the most amazing, vibrant colours I felt like I was in danger of getting intoxicated by them... So I bought a few samples and quickly made my way out of there before I made any overly extravagant purchases.
We then headed to Antigua, the old capital and a UNESCO world heritage site. The old colonial town was quite picturesque and had a very cosmopolitan vibe to it, but what I was most excited about was the opportunity to climb a live volcano...
Volcan Pacaya started erupting in 2000 or so, and it didn´t take long for the guatemalans to cash in on this with trips to see the rivers of lava. Unfortunately with the eruption in Iceland in April (the
Molten Mmmagmma at Volcan Pacaya
Not as much as we'd hoped, but enough to freak us out a little one that shut down European airspace for a week... what about that time? Mental) this Volcano was starting to get a little to active for even the Guatemalan´s risk-tolerant government, so they limited the area where tourists could go just a few weeks before we got there. Gutted. Even so, I was really quite surprised about how precarious the whole thing was... once you got to the old lava flow (after hiking for over an hour up an extremely steep hill, for which I cheated and got a horse up :-P ) you had to scramble over razor-sharp scoria (i fell over once and slashed my shin and hand, but not badly) for about half an hour and once you got closer to the end-point you got see that the scoria you were standing on was about 10cm thick and underneath was a hollow tunnel, out of which steam was coming and you could feel some pretty intense heat at some points. There was quite a deep, base instinct telling me I really shouldn´t be there.... i think it´s called survival.
But we stayed at the pinnacle of the allowable area long enough to eat enough toasted marshmallows to
make us sick, and melt one guy´s shoes cos he stood too close to the molten magma (which you could see glowing from a hole in the rock) for more than a few seconds, then headed back to the relative safety of Antigua.
The following day we got to enjoy another winning 9-hour bus ride (managed to stave off cabin fever for about 7 of those hours) to Flores in the north of Guatemala in order to visit the third, last and biggest set of mayan ruins - Tikal. In addition to the sheer scale of the Tikal ruins, and the extent to which they´re still being excavated (there were hills everywhere which are apparently unexcavated ruins), they trump both Chichen Itza and Palenque with the monkey card - spider monkeys swinging through the trees inside the grounds of the ruins. Hard to top really.
And with that, (I´ve got to say it) we´re not in Guatemala now...
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