Category: Guatemala

We seem to be waking up earlier and earlier while we are here, eager to get the day started. On our 8th day in Guatemala, we were awake by 5:30am, cooked breakfast, cleaned up, got ready, and ventured on down to our canoe.

The day before, we had taken our waterproof camera out on the canoe just in case anything happened. The water had been so smooth and calm though, that this time, we decided to go ahead and bring our good camera. We made it about 50 meters before realizing the waves were way too rough and dangerous to have the good camera on us, so we turned back around and let said waves help us back along to our dock. I held on to the ladder on the dock with one hand so that the canoe and myself didn’t go floating away, and with the other hand, I held my oar out against the dock to keep the canoe from continuously bashing up against it. I sat there like this while wave after wave came crashing into me while Anthony took the camera up the hundred stairs to our house. I was getting quite the abs and arms workout. Anthony decided to take his sweet time so that I was nice and frazzled by the time he came back down with the waterproof camera.

Being… I don’t know, insane I guess, we decided we still wanted to canoe. So we went back out, paddling away. Everytime I tried to get a picture, a giant wave came toward us.  The locals on shore were staring at us, probably repressing the urge to laugh. It felt like we were canoeing in the ocean. But we just kept on keeping on.

But then we saw a lancha approaching… and another lancha approaching from behind us. Freaking great. We could feel the canoe being pushed toward the stony shore, so we kept paddling backwards while the water kept knocking us around. It may not sound like it, but we’re pretty smart individuals- we know you’re supposed to turn into the waves… but that’s a little difficult when they are coming at you from every side. We managed to back out enough to avoid a crisis, and finally decided that it was time to give up and head back. I had been feeling like Pocahontas in that “Just Around the Riverbend” scene during all this, so I was pretty sad that we didn’t make it around the bend to find Grandmother WIllow.

Once that fun was over, we gave ourselves a small break and then decided to go on to a village on the lake we hadn’t seen yet- Santiago Atitlan.

Apparently this was more difficult than I was expecting. We got dropped off at the dock in San Pedro and were told to walk about 10 minutes down the road to a different dock. So we walked to the end of the road, and there was nothing there. We asked a woman working at a store, and she said to go down the alley by her store and then turn left, and it’d be about 15 minutes. So then we just kept on like that with this maze of roads and alleys. Every time we reached a dead end, we would ask someone the way, and every time, “Si, down that road”.

Eventually, we made it only to be told that the lancha wouldn’t be leaving for 45 minutes. We backtracked a bit and stopped at a restaurant with the view below and had a beer, then went back.

The water was even choppier than when we had taken the canoe out. A different lancha pulled in, completely unable to be controlled and nearly wrecked into ours. Then it was our turn to venture out in the waves.

The first couple minutes were kind of fun. We kept hitting huge waves, and everyone would laugh a bit like we were on a roller coaster. But then it just kept getting worse. Our little boat was being tossed all around, and each time we crashed into a giant wave, a gush of water would come flying in at us. You know those scenes in movies of boats caught in a huge storm at sea? That’s about what we looked like. The boat needed to be turned one way to face the waves, but we needed to go a different way to get to Santiago. The captain did a bit of a zigzag dance, trying to turn into the big waves, and then turn the boat for a few seconds toward shore, and so on.  I started looking around and noticed that even the locals were looking worried. I started forming my plan of what we would do if we tipped over, but we were way out from shore.

We were finally able to turn into the cove where Santiago is located, nestled between the volcanoes. The water was much calmer there, so I started breathing more easily. Anthony asked one of the locals if it was always like that, and he shook his head emphatically. “No, normalmente es mas tranquilo.” No, it’s usually calmer.

Forgetting about the near death experience (for my camera and phone at least) of the boat ride, Santiago is beautiful. It is the largest village on the lake and is almost entirely indigenous.

Once you get off the dock, there is a street full of little markets and colorful shops.

A boy walked us up to the top, giving us a little bit of information on the town and showed us to a tuk tuk, who took us through town and over to a restaurant and hotel on the bay.  Trucks packed full of indigenous Mayans, usually all girls or all boys, kept driving by.

The restaurant was nice, and the bathroom stalls had notices of the different famous people who had been there. Reba McEntire was the only name I really recognized, but the last one on the list made me laugh:

We were going to tour the town a bit more, but having that lancha ride back to San Pedro hanging over my head, I knew I wouldn’t be able to enjoy myself until I got it over with. So we went back down to the dock to get on the lancha.

 

It was completely packed full. We managed to get on and sit, but after that there was zero space left on the benches, and the front of the boat had 2 baskets full of live chickens.  But then some rather large woman decided she was going to climb on anyway. The locals next to me were trying to say it was too full, but she sat down with the chickens. They all looked at each other and started kind of smiling and reaching at the life vests ahead of them, jokingly (ish).  I had a little Mayan boy next to me staring out at the waves, obviously excited.

In general, it was going more smoothly than the way there. The first big wave we hit, the little boy shrieked and yelled “Me gusta!” and started laughing. Once he realized that I was completely terrified, he kept laughing at me, having the time of his life.

We started approaching San Pedro and were so close when suddenly, the boat was tipping, everyone was sliding to one side, yelling “Woah!”, and then… the boat steadied itself again. Huge sigh of relief. We made it to the dock, and Anthony and I found our way back through town to the other dock, still having two more lanchas to go.  As is, we were feeling a little unsteady on our feet.

The lancha to San Marcos was not quite as bad. We still got sprayed a little, and the captain had to do some dancing around the waves, and there was one point where we stopped for some reason, and then we noticed there was some completely insane person swimming out there.

We ate dinner in San Marcos at another veg-friendly restaurant. San Marcos has really grown on me. It’s definitely a bit gimmicky with all its New Age-ness, but the restaurants are yummy and picturesque, and it just seems so much calmer and more peaceful than San Pedro.  We paid quickly to catch the last lancha heading the direction of our house.

When we climbed on the lancha, we noticed everyone on it who had come from San Pedro was wearing a life vest. And there were no life vests left. Anthony, looking and sounding a little worried, asked them in Spanish why they were all wearing life vests which made them all laugh. Because of the giant waves, of course!

When we were telling this story to our host and her guests during drinks later, they were incredulous. In the 8 years they had lived on the lake, they had not once seen an indigenous person put a life vest on. Yet here we were, an entire boatful of them with life vests on.

As the lancha pulled out and toward our house, we kept getting sprayed by the cold water and everyone would shriek and laugh, and Anthony joked around with all the locals on board. We stopped in the middle of the water, again, and the old Mayan woman next to me said to Anthony, “No hay bastante gasolina,” (There’s not enough gasoline) and then laughed. Funny woman. The lancha started up again, and we were back on our way, her sharing her shawl with me to help block the cold water. When we got to our dock, they were all jokingly asking Anthony in Spanish if they could get off there with us.

Feeling very relieved to be back on solid ground and to be done with lanchas on this ridiculously windy day, we ran up the steps to our house and got cleaned up. I contacted the paragliding company to see if we would be able to go paragliding the next day, but of course, it’s too windy and dangerous right now.

Our hosts had invited us down to their house for drinks that evening because they had some house guests they thought we would like to meet. It was two women who had written a book about charity in Guatemala. One of them had lived in Kansas when she was younger and knew my home town. She now lives at the lake part time and Colorado part time. We all went through several glasses of wine, discussing politics, travels, and charity while the sun set and darkness descended.

It was a really pleasant evening, and they were all fascinating people who had traveled all over the world and met and interviewed incredible people. But it was getting late, and we had to get up early the next morning to hike a volcano, so we climbed back up to our own home and crashed.

We woke up nice and early on our 7th day (in addition to every other day) so that we could take the canoe out on the water before it got too rough. I had forgotten to grab my sunglasses, so I was a bit blinded by the sun, but otherwise, it was perfect. The water was glassy smooth, the weather glorious, and the only sign of life so far were the occasional lancha, birds, and the local fishermen out on their canoes, throwing the line out and quickly scooping out the water coming in through holes in their boats. It was so peaceful. I told Anthony that it made me want to live a simple life like this. I would start a big garden for fresh fruits and vegetables, and he would go out in the mornings and fish, and life would be good. We might have to go into town to a restaurant anytime we wanted wifi, but that’s ok.

Once we started approaching the village of San Juan, we turned back around and went to the house to get ready for the day.  We waited for the lancha to take us to San Marcos and stopped at a mini grocery store that sold Claro minutes and data (for cell phones) so that Anthony could buy more data for his phone.

He couldn’t remember his phone number here, so he gave up and started walking away, but the nice Mayan woman asked for his phone, put in some code, and all the information for his SIM card popped up. She said she’d be back and just wandered off with his phone. So my husband, the software developer getting his Masters in Computer Science, was schooled in technology by some young Mayan lady working at a store in Guatemala. It might be awhile before I let him live that one down. While we waited for her to come back, Anthony talked with the boy working the store. Then she walked in with the phone, we paid, and moved on.

We stopped at a really pretty mostly-veg restaurant set within a garden to use the wifi and drink some chai. Once they started cooking lunch, we took part in that as well.

We walked around a little bit so that we could find some more super awesome signs and advertisements.

Then we asked the lancha captain to drop us off in San Juan, which is a small and much less touristy village, made up of 95% Tz’utujil. It is full of women’s textile “cooperatives” and some beautiful art galleries selling paintings of different aspects of the Mayan and Guatemalan culture.

We stopped in some of the shops along the way up the steep road.  I bought myself a new Mayan woven dress, and we also bought a new painting.  From what I understand, you can pretty much always haggle them down to around 50% of what they are asking, but we just don’t see the point. These people do not have nearly the money we do, so I figured we would make their days by paying their asking price, and as is, my new dress was around $17, and our new painting, which is original and decently sized, was around $45. Here’s a picture of both:

We then caught a tuk tuk, a little 3-wheeled vehicle, over the hill to San Pedro. It was a pleasant enough experience for Anthony, who just conversed with the driver in Spanish the whole time, but I spent most of it feeling pretty certain that either I or my new painting or both would be falling out of the side and down the cliff to the lake when we hit all those deep potholes.

After stopping at the ATM and getting a lemonade, we caught the lancha again back to our dock.  The sun was beating down on us pretty hard as we walked all those steps up to our house, so once we got in there, we decided to change into our swimsuits and head right back down.  We both jumped in the water to cool off, but it was pretty cold and the waves were starting to pick up. I am not the world’s best swimmer– though I can if it’s necessary– so I was dog paddling against the waves and getting pretty darn exhausted after a minute or two of this.

Feeling plenty cooled off, we hopped back up on the dock and hung out there, reading for awhile.

We decided to stay in and cook for once, so I made some spaghetti (the easiest possible meal to make when traveling, I think), after which we went out to our terrace and started a fire again. So then we sat there, living the good life. We sipped wine and listened to the waves and the fireworks (it’s a festival day for a local saint) and generally just pretended we were royalty while the fire roared in front of us.

Our first morning at the lake, we woke up with the beginnings of sunlight streaming in through our window over the water. The waves were gently crashing on the shore as the winds had not yet picked up.  We cooked and ate breakfast and then walked down to our dock.

We absolutely love all of the plants and trees around our house here, but the completely unobstructed view down at the dock is pretty great too. We hung out there for quite awhile, enjoying the cool morning breeze and the different birds flying over the water. A man from Michigan who retired here was swimming by us, so he stopped and chatted with us for awhile and pretty much had us convinced we should move here as well.

We changed and got ready, and then came back down to the dock to flag down a lancha coming our way. Pretty much all transportation around the lake is via “lanchas” or little motor boat taxis. It took us across the water to San Pedro, which is kind of the backpacker mecca of the lake.

We didn’t venture around it much, but we stopped at the ATM and spent the rest of the morning at a restaurant with excellent wifi, good food, beer, and the sweetest little miniature schnauzer who was more than happy to stay curled up at my side.

One great thing I have noticed about the areas around the lake is that it is extremely easy to find vegetarian meals. And speaking of which, after lunch we hopped on another lancha to go to San Marcos.

San Marcos is… interesting. Living in Kansas, I have always considered myself to be a bit of a hippie. I’m a vegetarian, love yoga, and believe in living a pretty green/eco-friendly lifestyle.  That’s pretty out there for a Kansan :). Then I got to San Marcos and realized that I actually am not a hippie at all. Other than the local Mayans, everyone there was walking around barefoot (and it is not exactly clean there) and their dreads pulled back or falling down their back, having conversations about their “inner energy” and chi.  Every building you looked at was a “holistic center” or “healing massage center” or… I don’t know what all… and yoga studios. So many yoga studios.

 

The layout of the town took some getting used to as well. It is labyrinth, made up of little pathways, so you never really know where you’re going… you’re just walking down some dirt or stone path between a bunch of trees. It was a little unnerving at first because I felt very closed in. After we had walked around for awhile, though, we got a better feel for the place and could figure out where to go.

My favorite part of San Marcos though is that the hippie vibe of it does tend to draw the animal-loving types of people like me. So whereas in other parts of the country, the poor stray dogs were largely ignored or shooed away, people in San Marcos tried to care for them. A woman stopped Anthony, asking him if he could speak to these kids in Spanish and tell them that they were scaring the dog they were trying to play with. After I fed a dog walking by, the woman in front of it asked if we knew him because he was following her so she felt responsible for him. When we said no, she called him along with her again. We ate at a restaurant that had a sign saying dogs not allowed, but 5 dogs walked around while we ate, and when we left, we saw the worker feed our leftovers to one of them.

There are also several vegetarian restaurants, or at the very least, several vegetarian options at the restaurants which is awesome for me since sometimes, it can be difficult for me to find food while traveling.

Once we were done with San Marcos, we caught the lancha again and had them drop us off at our private dock a couple minutes away. The day was still young, so I changed into my yoga clothes and went back down to the dock to do some yoga. The weather was perfect, and it is really special having the views we have while doing yoga. However, it is also difficult to stay balanced when you have a dock moving underneath you. I managed with only falling out of my poses a couple times and probably got a better workout than I would have on solid ground.

The sun started going down and the chill was making its way back, so we started a fire on our terrace outside and hung out there for awhile before coming in to take a bath and go to bed.