Guatemala Days 4 and 5 Lake Atitlan and Panajachel |

Breakfast in Mexico

We got up reasonably early and cooked up eggs with bagels and some of the vegetables that were left over form last night’s dinner. After breakfast we cleaned up the apartment and then ordered up an Uber to take us to the airport. The Uber arrived quickly and we were on our way to the airport. We had no trouble locating the check in counter and getting Luke checked in. Luke had difficulty using the online checkin features due to the hyphen in his surname. This was a common issue, but it was simple enough to get sorted at the checkin counter.

The flight

We made our way to the gate where Luke was able to get a coffee. While we were waiting at the Cafe we met a French lady who had stayed in Mexico for a month and a half. She was also on her way to Guatemala where she was going to stay for another few weeks. We would cross paths again a few days later when we were taking some drone shots under the arch in Antigua Guatemala. The flight was straight forward and getting through customs was a breeze. We had some fruit with us, the sniffer dog picked it up and the handler said to eat it or just put it into one of the bins.

Budget Car Rental saves the day

We quickly located the Hertz rental office and were told that our booking had been cancelled and that they didn’t have any cars available for hire. I pushed the guy a bit and asked how it was that the the booking had been cancelled when we didn’t cancel it and how it had come to pass that a car hire company didn’t have any cars to hire. In the end he just shrugged and suggested that we try his friend from a couple of stalls down. The bloke at that stall quoted us $800US for the four days, this was a substantial difference to the $600US we had originally been quoted. We decided we would ask a few more people. The next bloke we asked didn’t have any cars either, he did however say that if we crossed the road outside the terminal building and went up to the third level there were a whole bunch of car hire places. We left the building went through a massive crowed some of which had car rental signs, they also wanted around $800US for their cars. Sure enough when we arrived at the third level there were indeed a whole bunch of car hire companies. We found a Budget car hire place and asked there. Those guys were awesome, they quoted us $600US, the same price as the original vehicle, they had a car ready to go. We filled in the paperwork, took some photographs and were told to bring the car back full and in the same condition as it left and to have fun.

The Journey to Lake Atitlan

The streets in Guatemala City start out as multi lane arterials and then quickly turn into windy narrow pot hole filled roads that remind me of the ones that I learned to drive on when I was growing up, they even had the random busses and trucks that would be coming the other way as you went around a narrow hair pin bend just for authenticity. We navigated our way out with only one wrong turn and were soon out of the city and on our way to Lake Atitlan.

The road to Lake Atitlan was narrow, windy and steep, a cross between Kangaroo Valley and the Nerriga Road. We wound our way down a steep mountain and came to a causeway covered in water at the bottom. Now here in Australia they have been pushing hard the advertising tag line that if it is flooded forget it. I am pretty sure that as Luke was looking at what appeared to be a fairly wide expanse of water, especially in the dark through our heavily tinted front windscreen, he was having flash backs to these adverts. I hesitated as I pulled the car up to the causeway and Luke had enough time time to say ‘you aren’t going to drive through that are you’ before I decided that based on the cars building up behind us, and considering that the cars we had passed coming the other way must have passed through here, we were just going to have to take the plunge. Thankfully my gamble worked out and the causeway was relatively shallow with a solid base, we made it safely through and started the climb up the other side much to everyone’s relief.

It took us around four hours to get from the city out to Lake Atitlan. We checked into the Pescador Hotel, Santiago Atitlan. We chatted with Thomas, the manager of the hotel, he advised us that we would get some great food from the Baja California Grill, which was just down the road, this was a relief as we hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast.

Santiago Atitlan

We put our gear into the room and then wandered down to the Baja California Grill to order some food. The food was delicious and well priced on average each of the meals cost around G100 each, the ambiance was great as well, with a large group of tourists all chatting away in Spanish giving the place a fun atmosphere.

After dinner we drove into the small village of Santiago Atitlan, this was also full of tight winding roads, many of which were blocked off due to markets and other festivities. I managed to pull in somewhere so that Christine and Luke could go and get some water and throat lozenges for Christine, who had been nursing a sore throat for most of the day. They would soon discover that none of the places would take card and that they would need cash to purchase anything. Thankfully someone pointed them to an ATM, it wasn’t cheap but it gave them cash. They were then able to use their cash to purchase some supplies. While all this was going on, I was having to incrementally move the car as various vehicles were trying to get past in the narrow streets, there was even one point when a semi- rigid truck came trundling along the narrow roads and squeezed past. Thankfully I didn’t have to move far each time and Luke and Christine were able to locate me once they had secured their goods.

Guatemala Day 5

Yoga and a jog

Christine and I work up early and kick started the day with some yoga on the balcony overlooking a large volcano. We then did a bit of Duolingo while we waited for Luke to get up. When Luke woke up I checked to see if he wanted to go for a run, he wasn’t keen so I went for a jog on my own. I jogged through Santiago and out the other side. I jogged up a track that led to a lookout that overlooked the lake, one of it’s volcanos and the village. It would later turn out that this point was about 3.5km away from hotel. I stopped to take in the view and then jogged back to the hotel. On the way back I decided to take a different path which took me up the side of a mountain and back down to the hotel, I checked with a couple of people on the journey to make sure that I was actually going to come out on the other side and that the road didn’t just terminate, after they got over the surprise of seeing a random foreigner jogging through their town, they assured me that I was on the right track. I had a freezing cold shower, many of the showers in Latin America only have cold water as the climate is usually too hot to require warm water, some places have an inline heater, this was not one of those places. I got dressed and went to meet Luke and Christine at the Baja California Grill. We ate some delicious food and then got ready to tackle the day.

Panajachel

We caught a tuk-tuk into the village and down to the public dock. We then organised with one of the tour boat operators, for around G30 each, to take us across to the lake to the other side to a village called Panajachel. It was a rough ride as we were going later in the day and the wind had come up and chopped up the lake. Having said that, it was a stack of fun. We wandered through Panajachel looking for a Western Union, alas we hadn’t counted on today being a Sunday and as such all of the Western Unions were closed. So far our Western Union strategy was not going as planned, this would continue to be the case until we reached El Salvador. After a couple of false leads we ended up at one of the 5D ATMs, the same bank that Christine and Luke had used the night before. We were chatting to a lady who was also in the line waiting for the ATM and she told us that she was from Guatemala and that 5D is the preferred Bank among the locals. With Cash in hand we went in search of some tasty food.

We found a restaurant not far away, it was packed with people and the waiter was actively spruiking. We sat at a table overlooking the street which gave us the opportunity to watch the world go by. This restaurant was just down the street from a coffee shop that according to Luke served the best coffee that he had ever tasted. The coffee shop had 5/5 for over 300 reviews, it was run by a group of people from Japan and served coffee from locally sourced beans. While we were waiting for our meals to come out spruikers came past and tried to sell us things. With the benefit of hind site I should have bought a few things from them, however we figured that we would be able to get similar types of artesian goods in other Latin American countries, this would turn out not to be the case. The hand crafts that are produced in Guatemala are quite unique and if you like them, buy them there, you won’t find similar things in other places. We did end up buying a few friendship bracelets that were super brightly coloured. I would however advise washing them before use as the colour will run, as Luke would later discover. Lunch was both spectacular and tasty.

The journey back

After lunch we wandered through the street side vendors and picked up a brightly coloured cooking apron for Sarah. We also checked out a chocolate shop where they were going through the process of making chocolate right from peeling the individual beans. We bought some chocolate, we took in the sights and sounds of Panajachel and made it back to the boats just in time to catch the last boat home. The boat ride back was best described as fast and furious, I am guessing that the skipper was late for dinner. He took off out of the dock so fast that the boat stood up on it’s prop. He slowed down for a moment and directed Luke and Myself to sit at the front of the boat, then he gunned the engines and we were back in Santiago Atitlan in no time. We wandered through the artesian market and then took a tuk-tuk back to the hotel.

Back at the hotel we took a moment to have a rest and change into some warmer clothes. Generally during the day the temperatures are quite warm, in what would technically be Guatemala’s winter as it is in the northern hemisphere, the nights are a little on the cool side especially for us Queenslanders. Christine was still nursing her saw throat and was feeling a bit average so she decided to rest at the hotel while Luke and I went in search of snacks for tomorrow’s road trip and some more cash.

Dinner and a tropical storm

We walked the 2km into the village and tracked down the 5D cash machine. We collected some cash and then picked our way through the market. We picked up some fruit and bits to take back to the hotel. We discovered that a useful phrase to ask is ‘does it have seeds?’, this was after Luke bit a prune seed into tiny pieces when he was trying some of the dried fruits. We also picked up a large bottle of water. Afterwards we went looking for a restaurant where we could have some dinner. We found a place selling quesadillas in a meal. There weren’t many restaurants open as it was Sunday night and it is kind of the off season. The place we found was actually pretty cool, it was being run by a couple of kids who when they weren’t serving us were wrestling with each other behind the bar. I don’t think they were dong the cooking, but they did do the spruiking and were waiting the tables. While we were eating a huge tropical thunderstorm kicked off and flooded the street below with its’ deluge. There was also some spectacular lightning strikes that knocked out the power periodically. We ate our meals, which were delicious and waited for the storm to subside. We chatted with an English couple who were also in the restaurant, they had been doing some fairly extensive travel through Guatemala. Their daughter was over here for an extended period of time so they had decided to come and see her for the Christmas period.