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August 21st 2007

Published: August 24th 2007

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Al and Lise

The central park in Antigua

We were keen to get to Antigua in Guatemala but we clearly weren’t as keen to get there as the driver of our bus who obviously wanted to demonstrate how well he knew the road between Copan Ruinas and Antigua. It was a six hour journey during which we found lots of handholds in the back seats of the bus.
After crossing the Honduras/Guatemala border, and paying the obligatory bribes, we were again having to work out another exchange rate and were constantly asking each other what something cost in ‘real money’.

We passed Guatemala City at speed, although through the smog and pollution we were able to catch glimpses of a concrete city built on the hillsides. We were glad that the driver tried to keep his foot on the accelerator through the city and weren’t sure if he was anxious to get home for his tea, or whether he was afraid of getting his wheels stolen.

Arriving in Antigua, we thought that the nativity had started early because we were told by about 15 hotels that there was no room at the inn. Eventually we found a bleak cell-like room, unloaded our backpacks and then set about

antigua

exploring the city.

Antigua is the former capital of Guatemala. They decided to relocate the capital to Guatemala city after Antigua was wiped out twice by volcanos - that would tend to happen if you build a city in a valley surrounded by active volcanos! Present day Antigua (as you can probably see) is a beautiful, quaint city (UNESCO listed), full of cobbled streets and colourful houses. There are also many churches. The city is laid out in a grid so is simple to navigate, and if you lose your bearings, you just look for the big volcano in the south. We decided we wanted to stay here a while and as luck would have it, we chanced on a small newly built studio apartment for rent and were able to check out of our cell. Our studio also gave us the ability to cook - fortunate as the quantity of beans available in the local restaurants would have had a damaging effect on the studio! (Lise: that’s because of Al.. not me!)

After having suffered with our lack of the local language, we both enrolled in one of the many Spanish schools in town and hit the

The market in Antigua

books, every afternoon for the two week course with our teacher, Gustavo. Lisa also managed to find a good horse riding school and yoga class so Al whiled away his time walking round the town and trying to get the hang of his camera.

We discovered that while the cobbled streets look very pretty, they also act as great traffic calming measures, Lise bounced herself around in a taxi on the way to class several times! We also had a great time discovering lots of local cafés with chocolate cakes (Lise was in heaven, cafés with beautiful cakes on every corner and ice cream parlours sometimes 4 to a block!) and had a lot of fun practising our newly learnt Spanish at the market which sells everything! Strawberries and papayas are very cheap here so we have been gorging ourselves on those and the fresh veggies are plentiful and organic (well, they look organic anyhow.. not like you get on the supermarket shelf) so we’ve been eating very well.

Fortunately we are a long way out of the path of Hurricane Dean although it caused us to review our onward journey it looks as if our plan of