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Published: December 5th 2012
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From the moment we step out of the airport lobby and into the Guatmalan sun, our senses are overtaken by the city. An offbeat orchestra of car horns, shouting, motorbike revving, and mariachi music echoes through the streets. Swaths of colors sway past us as groups of Mayan women walk along the sidewalks, baskets of fabrics balanced precariously on their heads. Black exhaust puffs out of the back of old trucks in big, angry clouds, and heads straight for our noses. Boxy North American schoolbuses dressed to impress, adorned with bells and tassles and fresh coats of bright orange, red, and pink paint, are no longer toting eager schoolchildren to and from class at a safe and steady pace. Instead these Chicken Buses, as they have been newly baptised, honk and zoom past us, chocked full of passengers, only a nickel width away from colliding with the oncoming traffic. But no one but us seems terribly concerned.
We arrived in Panajachel after an eventful 3 hour cab ride with Luis....chugging our way up and over mountains, zooming past stretches of dry cornfields alongside rows of concrete houses topped with tin roofs. A little boy weaves through speeding traffic
for a runaway soccer ball. Lines of skinny dogs trot smartly down the sides of the streets, careful not to get in our way. Our cab careens past pot holes the size of bathtubs, and over unpaved mountain roads where loggers in straw hats carry bulging bags of woodchips on their shoulders, and the ting ting of metal hitting rock echoes around us as men in quarries sit, slowly chipping away at the stones surrounding them.
At one point, we hear the scraping sound of car parts on pavement, and Luis hops out to asses the situation. He digs around under the hood for a half a minute, and then smiling, pulls out something from underneath the car that has been badly crushed and plops it in the passenger seat. The windshield wiper solution dispenser, he explains. Not a neccessity. And so we continue on. Luis is happy to entertain our broken attemps at speaking Spanish, and tells us that he has a brother in Georgia whose sons birthday is today. He says he spends five days at his house with his wife and two little boys, and then makes the trek into Guatemala City for a fifteen day
stretch of work. He sleeps in the back of his cab just outside the airport each night. Yet he insists it is fairly comfortable, considering.
In Pana, we are dropped off at the dock that will take us to Santa Cruz. First we must find our way to a market, as Santa Cruz is one of the villages on the lake that is only accessible by boat, and lacking in any sort of modern conveniences. For food, money, or medicine, Pana is the place to be. We are too dazed to buy much, but we do manage to snag some hot tortillas from a street vendor, and select a couple of things to tide us over until we venture back across the lake. Once we have settled into the boat, we can finally see the lake, rippling blues and greens, reflecting the last bits of the sun,. Ahead of us, three volcanos stand side by side, proudly, as if assigned protectors of the lake. As the sun fades, the clouds lower, and it seems for a moment as if our little boat has floated up into the sky.
The next morning, after crashing at 8pm, and sharing our
bedroom with at least one scorpian and a half a dozen spiders the size of air hockey discs, we awake, hungry, and ready to take on the rickity plank walk that will lead us to breakfast. We traipse across the slats of wood that have been nailed into a makeshift path over the lake, leading us from our dock toward the little town of Santa Cruz. Along the way we are greeted with teeth chattering "Holas!" from little naked boys swimming and splashing below us in the icy, early morning water. An old man climbs into a traditional canoe and begins fishing. Teenagers mingle around the public dock, tossing tortilla chips to the dogs, and laughing when the dogs miss the catch.
We take the boat back to Pana to stock up on fruits and vegetables from the market, and learn that much of what you are expected to pay is directly related to how much you seem to be willing to shell out. We begin negotiating for things beforehand, and find that our meek ways simply will not do. Brian pushes back his shoulders, deepens his voice, and voila! We are charged a mere five quetzales instead of
the previous 20Q.
We clean up and head over to the Iguana Party Hostel for a beet burger dinner. The views are killer but the company is prediminantly loud white boys in dresses trying to top one another's harrowing travel adventure. We never figure out why they have dressed as women for dinner, and we head back early, thinking the planks will be easier to traverse before it gets dark. We are wrong.
At the very edge of the trail, before I can jump safely to our front gate, I hit a rock, and slide, my foot getting caught between the rock I stepped on, and another. Brian has to carry me like a sack of avocados back to our casita, and we think, Oh, the foot will be fine in the morning. I ice my foot, pop some pain pills, and crash, fingers crossed that I can make hike to Jabilito the next day.
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Joani
non-member comment
Glad you guys are having fun!