if everybody looked the same.....


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Published: May 15th 2011
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After a couple of days relaxing, we were running out of time. We had had booked a week in a Spanish school in Quetzaltenango (helpfully called Xela for short) and we had to get there soonish. so we decided to go to Rio Dulce, stay one night, then straight through to Antigua. We got a ticket from a tour mob for 80 qs each, which worked out a little more expensive (by 20qs) than finding local buses. We were told to wait for Sergio in a red car in the morning.

Sergio turned up in his red car in the morning and took us across to Santa Elena and the bus station. The bus was an old American interstate type Greyhound that had seen many better days. The bus driver was a bit nuts, so I closed my eyes for a bit. This was to become a habit on Guatemalan roads. Happily, he didn't kill us or anyone else, and we made it to Rio Dulce, after travelling through the denuded jungle.

Rio Dulce was a yachties hang out. Apparently, the US coast guard says it is the safest harbour in the Caribbean, so it's popular. There was a place called a place called Bruno's down by the marina (such as it was) but they had no rooms left, so we found a place over the road under the bridge called La Posada. It seemed largely empty, some of it under construction (our rooms were located amongst a charming forest of rio), but it wasn't too bad.

Not a lot to do in Rio Dulce for one night. You could do various boat trips around the place, but we simply went down to the marina and had a few beers at the yachties bar and looked at the boats, then had a bit of a look around the local markets. Happily, right down the street we found a cheap place with plastic chairs to sample the local speciality – basically a huge tortilla with all sorts of stuff chucked in. Not dissimilar to all the different version of okonomiyaki you can find in Japan, really.

After a night in Rio Dulce we headed to Antigua, this time opting for a proper bus. We had to change buses in Guatemala City, and after our short look at the place were not disappointed we had decide to skip it. In the half an hour we were there we saw the immediate aftermath of a shooting, one street back from the main plaza.

The first impression of Antigua was that Antigua was another UNESCO World Heritage place, supposed to be one of the best preserved colonial towns in Latin America. It was very nice, I admit, but by this time I had come to a realisation.

McDonalds builds its stores around the world, thousands of them, and prides itself on keeping the basic design and the stores, the basic menu on the walls, the whole feel of the places as similar as possible. It occurred to me that the Spanish were the McDonalds of imperial powers. As beautiful and interesting as these old towns are, they bear an undeniable similarity. The Spaniards wandered about the world, pillaged the locals, sent the proceeds back home to pay off the debts the crown owed to the Poms and the Belgians, and built carbon copies of Sevilla and Madrid everywhere.

There again a Plaza de Armas. Oh, look, a cathedral at one end, and a government building at the other. All in a grid pattern. Walled compounds, forbidding, cobbled streets, but the great wooden doors open to reveal inviting courtyards, rooms around the sides – a mirror of the Plaza de Armas.

Antigua inspired that feeling. Sure, it was very nice, and definitely worth a visit, but no more beautiful than a hundred other Spanish towns.

All this we saw while we wandered about trying to find somewhere to stay. The first couple of places from the Lonely Planet were full, so we started simply wandering into places that looked okay from the outside. At one point I went in to have a look at some rooms, into a place that looked, well, not as bad as all that is the best that could be said. The lady took me upstairs and showed me one room – it was tiny, and dirty and not at all inviting, She told me the price – 50 quetzales.

She clearly mistook the look on my face for one of surprise about the price, as she quickly showed me some others. As we walked down the hall she pointed out rooms. The rooms got smaller, as did the prices until we got to one for 10 quetzales for, and I kid you not, the broom closet.
We eventually found a place out from the centre a bit, and it turned out to be pretty good. A kitchen, rooftop terrace, and private rooms with bathrooms for quite a good price.

For the next couple of days we did a bit of walking around, and picked up a tourist ticket type thing which gave us entry to a couple of places.

The collapsed monastery was worth a visit, and we were the only people that seemed to have bothered to have a look. Admittedly, it was right across the road from the hostel, so not exactly out of the way.

Antigua also offered a ton of Spanish schools, but the one we had booked in Xela was a lot cheaper, and Xela reputedly offered a town with more opportunity for practice. We soon discovered what that meant – with so many tourists in Antigua it was tough to find someone that would talk to you in Spanish.

And being at altitude Antigua was cold, well, at least compared with the Caribbean coast.

From Antigua we headed to Panajachel, a small town on Lago Atitlán. There were a number of different towns we could have stayed at on the lake, but Panajachel seemed to be the best. Others were more expensive, or to far, or full of fippies.

We had decided to stay in Hotel El Sol. The hotel was really a stroke of luck. We booked it on the net, not really knowing where it was, and it did turn out to be a little way from the centre of town, as we discovered to our chagrin as we started out to walk there.

Eventually ferried there by a couple of mototaxis (tuktuks) it turned out to be owned by Japanese-Guatemalan family. Anybody thats ever been to Japan can understand how incredibly neat the hotel was. And not simply neat. There was something, well, something so very Japanese about the place. There was a Ojiisan watering the perfect garden out the back, a cheeky Japanese kid running about the joint, pretending to be Spiderman and shooting us with invisible webs, and all the signs were in Japanese and Spanish, some only in Japanese. It happened that the we were the only gaijin staying there (it seemed wrong to use gringo).The reast of the guests were Japanese on various package trips. For a moment we were a few thousand miles away...until the little kid gave the game away, crying to his mum in Japanese first, then in English, finally coming to Spanish.

His mum was Guatemalan, and his dad was Japanese. They had moved there from Hiroshima, then brought ojiisan over later – it was him that made the awesome Japanese food we splashed out for for Klaire's birthday. They had been there for about 7 years.

The walk back into town, as always, was shorter than the trip out, especially without our backpacks. Past a couple of residential streets, past some buildings built to close to the river, and then you were there. There wasn't a hell of a lot to it, but it wasn't bad.

One thing to do in Panajachel was to hire a boat to see a bit of the lake, and some of towns around it. There are a few different towns to choose from, so we opted for , skipping San... , the aforementioned town with the fippies (we figured we would simply visit West End when we got back to Brisbane). The trip around the lake gave us a great view of the incredible damage unfettered development was doing. Every year people die in Guatemala when the rains come and the side of the mountain decides it's sick of the view from the top and wants to check out the bottom, but still farmers at the summits clear every last bit of vegetation and plant shallow rooted crops. All around the lake it was possible to see evidence of land slippage, but it didn't look like a hell of a lot was being done to address it.

At each town we did the inevitable shopping, but the stuff was nice, some made to help schools and the like. And the setting itself, well, nothing short of idyllic. Cool, fresh water, men waving from flat bottomed fishing boats, a farmer lifting a had from a hoe in a lakeside field, rows of women washing stinky fishing and farming clothes in the sparkling waters of the lake. All surrounded by some very nice houses.

We did notice that some of the houses looked to be a lot closer to the water than they should be, indeed, some where no longer houses but boathouses. The lake had risen 4 metres with the record rains in 2010, not a small amount. On top of that it was also situated among 3 active volcanoes, making for a picturesque but nervous place to live.


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17th May 2011

Looks beautiful!
I love the Japanese hostel pics (are you surprised?) and the lake looks so pretty! More posts! More posts!

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