Our first destination after Xela was Lago de Atitlan (Lake Atitlan), a huge crater lake encircled by three volcanoes. On Saturday, Ross and I crammed ourselves into a minivan with 10 other people to make our way from Xela to Lago de Atitlan, with plans to meet Kelly there later that afternoon (she’d opted to take the chicken bus).
The trip to Lago de Atitlan is off to a great start, with such landmarks as the "maniac workers ahead!" sign...
We passed a waterfall and lots of lush green vegetation as our bus wound down the mountainside to the lake. We boarded a lancha—small motorboat that holds about 15 people—in Panajachel, the most touristy of the towns surrounding the lake (and also a former hippie hangout in the 60s and 70s).
The boat ride across the lake to San Pedro was fun and refreshing, with the wind whipping through our hair and strikingly beautiful hills and volcanoes encircling us. We were excited to get across the lake to San Pedro, which is known as the scruffier, more mellow and backpacker-friendly of the lake towns….and we had the hostel to prove it! When we arrived and were shown to our room, our tuk-tuk driver immediately asked us if we wanted to buy weed. We declined, opting to venture out of our room for lunch instead. We chose a place right next to the dock, so it was easy for Kelly to find us when she made it across the lake.
Once Kelly arrived and we had lunch, we spent the afternoon exploring Panajachel (any excuse for another boat ride across the lake!). We were also on a mission to find the best bus/minivan deal for me to pick up Mama at the airport the following day. Unlike San Pedro or Xela, there were a lot of tourist-geared signs in Panajachel that made valiant attempts at English, enticing tourists with deals for “Thuesdays & Fridays only.” Once I’d made shuttle arrangements for meeting Mama at the airport and we’d gotten our fill of wandering around Panajachel, we lancha’ed back across the lake to San Pedro.
Our suspicions that we were in the lap of luxury were confirmed—when a small bird flew into our room, we were initially alarmed until we realized the bird could easily show itself out through the large gaps where the wall should have met the ceiling. Our room was also frequented by a red cat with a poofy tail—Ross called him Murphy and kept asking him if he’d gotten a blowout done on his tail. When it came time to shower, Kelly and I were just about to use the cold-water-only stalls (outdoors, of course, but in essence so was our room), when the hostel owner came running over to tell us about another set of outdoor showers with hot water. So we followed the guy and discovered there was a small problem—no light, and it was pitch black. Luckily, he had an extra bulb and just couldn’t reach high enough to screw it in. He looked at me hopefully, ran away to retrieve a coffee can and turned it upside down on the soil so I could step on the can and screw in the bulb. When the light came on, Kelly, the hostel owner and I cheered like the three bumbling idiots that we were, and Kelly and I rejoiced in our hot showers.
The next morning, I met Mama at the airport in Guatemala City, with plans to meet up with Kelly and Ross in Santiago de Atitlan, another town on the lake (apparently we were trying to set some kind of record for boat trips across Lago de Atitlan). The lancha docked at our hotel, and we climbed up several stone terraces to meet Ross and Kelly inside the dining room (and to nominate them for sainthood for moving my bags from San Pedro to Santiago so I wouldn’t have to lug them to the airport and back when I went to meet Mama).
As soon as we put our bags in our rooms, Mama jumped at our “when in Rome” suggestion to hitch a ride on the back of a pickup truck to take us to the local market. So we walked out to the road, flagged down the first truck we saw, and paid the driver a small amount of money to let us stand and ride in the back of his pickup truck, holding onto a metal bar, along with about 10 local passengers who had done the same thing and were carrying their wares to the market.
This wasn't our truck, but it sorta looks like the one we rode in the back of...
We wandered around the market a while, did a little shopping and cake-eating, and decided to hop in a tuk-tuk for our ride back to the hotel. Mama really wanted a picture of the tuk-tuk, so I waited until Mama, Kelly and Ross were inside and then snapped a shot of them. During this time, a Mayan woman came up trying to sell souvenirs to them, and the result was the following picture: [“Jessi! Get in the tuk-tuk!” (despite appearances, that teeth clenching is more “concern/pronouncing ‘Jessi’” than actual annoyance).
Jessi! Get in the tuk-tuk!
It was nice to walk around in Santiago because it has a stronger presence of more traditional Mayan culture than the other major towns on the lake.
I could get used to this...
We also had a great time at our hotel—during the day we could sit on one of the terraces or at the pool and look out over the lake at the volcanoes, and then at night we could be cozy in our rooms or in the main dining hall, chatting or playing Board games like Pictionary and Scrabble. We liked to make fun of Mama moving her lips while reading the menu (apparently “the music was loud and [she] couldn’t concentrate”), so of course we decided she probably:
- exaggerates her mouth movements when it’s a larger font
- holds her head to the side when reading italics
- holds two fingers on either side of her mouth when reading quotes
- stops and starts the lip movements as she holds the paper far away, trying to bring it in focus with her reading glasses.
Another fun thing to do was save all the bad pictures of Mama and enlarge her expressions...
As much fun as we were having at Lago de Atitlan, we left after a couple days to head to Antigua. Before we left, though, Ross made sure to purchase several postcards about the Mayan calendar’s prediction that the world will end in 2012—if the postcards are correct, we should be on the lookout for alien spaceships flying over Lago de Atitlan as volcanoes explode in the background.
To see more pictures:
http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8AZtGbhkzbNWWr&emid=sharshar&linkid=link5
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