Christie Arrives, Pacaya, Lake Atitlan

Antigua Some More and the Arrival of Christie

My last real day in Antigua was spent in the morning going to breakfast with Bex, Michelle, and Alexi (a Spanish-American-French guy that tehy found the night before). We went to Cafe Condesa, which is a very nice and Americanize resturant, with a bookstore and handmade paper shop attached to it. Alexi invited all of us and then regaled us with stores of murder, ghosts, and superstitions that surrounded the locale. The resturant, it is said, used to be a mansion and as all mansions have, it had servants. The butler, had an affair with the Countess and then the Countess killed him when she was going to be found out by her husband. This sorid affair and corredsponding murder were all conjecture until earthquakes knocked down part of the wall in a back room and low and behold, our missing bulter was found. It is said that the butler then haunted the mansion until and exercism was preformed. The tourism industry states that the ghost is no more, but Alexi was adamit that the ghost still wanders and that is why the locals avoid the backroom, especially at night.

This story was so facinating that I had to be the nnerdy tourist that I am and enter the haunted lair and then shut all the windows and call out. Nothing happened (sigh), but I got a few neat photos.

After breakfast, we said goodbye to Alexi, and then shortly thereafter I siad goodbye to Michelle and Bex. They were headed to Lake Atitlan and I told wait for Chrisite´s arrival.

Christie showed around noon at the appointed coffee shop...only and hour later than expected, but for Guatemalan time, that´s pretty good. We dropped her bags at the hostel (Michelle, Bex, and I had moved to the quiter and slightly safer for our luggage Hostel de Viajero the previous night) and proceeded to explore the town. As Christie is as adventurous as me, we wandered where few tourist dare to tread and ended up in the locals food and everyday products market. This was fine except for the fact that once we were in it, we couldn´t figure out how to get out. Some 20 minutes later were emerged to the cloudy skies and realized that the circulous wandering had only landed us a block further away than we had started.

While waiting for Chrisite, I had been reading my Rough Guide and located a few things that I wanted to see in town and due to their early rolling up of the streets, we only managed one thing. But that´s okay because it was awesome. We wandered over to Las Capuchinas, the ruins of the convent of the Capuchin nuns. The ruins are some of the best preserved in the city and used to house an order of nuns that were not allowed any contact with the outside world. Food was passed to them through a turntable and they could only talk to people through a grille. Sounds like a dismal existence. The sad thing is that some of the nuns that lived here, were not there by choice. Many families would give their girls to convents and such if they couldn´t marry them off or couldn´t afford to feed them. The coolest thing at the ruins was the remains of their cells, and cells they were. Each was about 5ft by 10ft, with three shelves built into the wall and a hole that acted as a toilet. There were 18 of these all forming a circle at the top of a tower. Maybe it wasn´t as creepy then as it is in ruin form now.

The convent was damaged in the 1751 earthquake and then again in the 1773 quake, as which time the nuns were relocated and the building abandoned. In 1813 the ruins were sold and then given to National Council for the Protection of La Antigua Guatemala in 1971 and made into the tourist attraction that it is.

One other small thing about the ruins. There was a small gallery of religious paintings and sculptures in one of the other rooms of the convent where the guards prohibited photos, but the pictures were so over the top and there were all of these ones with baby Jesus holding a flaming heart that looked like a cupcake on fire that I had to sneak a picture of Mustacheio under one. So ask to see it sometime.

Volcano Pacaya

Christie and I booked passage to see the Pacaya Volcano. Pacaya first erupted approximately 23,000 years ago and has erupted at least 23 times since the Spanish conquest of Guatemala. Pacaya rises to an elevation of 2,552 metres (8,373 ft). After being dormant for a century, it erupted violently in 1965 and has been erupting continuously since then, with the last activity reported has been the eruption that peaked on May 27, 2010, causing ash to rain down in Guatemala City, Antigua and Escuintla.

The sad thing about the fact that the volcano erupted so recently is that there isn´t currently any flowing lava to be seen. Tourists loved to climb the volcano because you could take a picture with red flows behind you. It was still pretty cool though. We hiked it at 7 in the morning and there was heavy mist that gave the trip an air of searching for Shell Mountain through the swamp of sadness. Everything had a misty and mysterious feel to it. Add to that the black of the actual ash and molten rock and it was a pretty niffy experience.

From Volcano Pacaya, it was back to Antigua to wait for the shuttle to Lake Atitlan. The transportation situation in this country is interesting. There seems to only be chicken buses and shuttles. I´m sure that there are actual bus buses somewhere, but I think that they only travel between the countries and not just between the different cities of a particular country.

The shuttle was an hour late and we got to watch the rain pour down and talk to the local kid handing out flyers and telling me how he wanted to use my water bottle as a soccer ball and have it fly up and crash down on my head and explode. He was a sweet kid.

Lake Atitlan

The Lake is one of the most traveled to destinations in the Western Highlands of Guatemala and contains the largest groups of indigenous peoples, with the lake being lined with 13 diverse yet traditional Maya villages. In some of them they don´t even speak Spanish, but their own native tongue, that are becoming extinct.

We arrived in Panajachel, which is probably the most cosmopolitian of all the villages as it is the main traffic hub and where most of the tourists shuttles drop their fares off.

Panajachel offered mainly two attractions, shopping and hanging out. There is a main street, Calle Santander, that sells the tradition things that you can find almost everywhere in the country and over-priced tourists resturants. There is also the beach, but I wouldn´t recommend swimming here, there are a lot of lanchas (small boats that act as taxis around the Lake) and the water is pretty dirty from all the deisel fuel. This town is more of a lanching pad to the other villages.

On the morning of the 4th, Christie and I set out for exploration of the villages that surround the Lake. We grabbed a lancha to Santiago Atitlan. It´s almost directly across the Lake from Pana and is one of the last bastions of traditional life here. It serves as the main center for the Tzútujil-speaking Maya people and many of them still wear traditional dress (for the men it seems to be comprised of long shorts of white with dark colored stripes and for the women it consists of wrap around skirts, huipiles, and bright colored shirts with flower and bird motifs; where the skirt and the shirt never correspond to eachother).

We wandered from the boat dock to the main plaza area and into the Catholic Church at the top of the hill. This church is dedicated to Father Stanley Rother, an American priest who was labeled a Communist by President Garcia for his defending of his parishioners and assassinated by a paramilitary death squad in 1981.

The other main attraction in Santiago is Maximon, the "evil" saint, locally known as Rilej Mam. This is a saint from Folk Catholism and the saint is moved around from home to home every May. You ask a local child on the street and they will take you to where he is currently residing. The fee is 2 quetzales to see him and pray. Just because, we had to go, and because I really wanted to take a tuk tuk (motorized carriage), we paid 10Q to get there.

We visited Maximon and wished for safe travels and then it was on to San Pedro, the party village. We didn´t especially want to go to San Pedro, but had to go through there to get to Jaibalito, which we did want to see.

San Pedro La Luguna is considered the party destination and contains tons of hostels, bars, and clubs. I think the main attraction point is that it´s open past 7 pm in many places.

We were dropped off at the docks on one side of town and had to hike up and over the hill that comprised the village to get to the other dock that we wanted. That was our tour of the town and we didn´t fell that we were missing out on much.

Jaibalito is a small village and completely different than Pana or San Pedro. There are tons of shops nor any tourist markets. It´s isolated and remains resolutely Kaqchikel (very little Spanish is spoken here). We were dropped at the docks with a British couple that were staying at one of the hotels that are nestled among the trees here and built up the hill so that you get some exercise climbing from the docks to the reception room to your actual room.

The dock where we were left off was about an 8 minute walk from the Brit couples hotel and took you through town. It was neat cause we arrived at the same time as a shipment of food and almost got run over by all the locals as they raced to the waterfront to help carry the goods back to town. There was also what appeared to be a community project going on with the building of a bridge or road using a gabian method (rocks inside metal). All these kids were carrying rocks in bags secured to their heads. Interesting way to employ child labor, but they were laughing and didn´t seem to mind it.

The main reason that we can to Jaibalito is that there is a nice walking path through the greenery to Santa Cruz. The trail start from the top of the hotel Casa del Mundo and winds along the mountain to Santa Cruz La Luguna. It takes about 45 minutes to an hour and was quite beautiful. There were stunning views, catipillars and a lost little crab way high up from the water.

Santa Cruz is another one of the island villages without a lot of tourism. There is a hostel right on the water that is run by an English-American couple. The one bought the place from the old owner and then met the other when they were backpacking and married them. The place is like a commune with a work for room and board mentality. Or you can just pay and enjoy. It´s very quaint and serves a great avocado and pineapple shake. We didn´t actually explore the town itself because there isn´t much of note there and I didn´t feel like hiking the hill to get there.

Well, I think this entry is long enough and I´m about out of time. So it´s off to Coban tomorrow, but that´s for the next entry.