Lakes and Volcanos
Trip Start
Mar 22, 2005
1
8
26
Trip End
Sep 09, 2005
Antigua,
Guatemala
Sunday, May 1, 2005
A couple weekends ago, I decide to climb Pacaya, one of the active volcanos near Antigua. Really amazing -- the views from the top were incredible and the drive there through really interesting towns. We had a great guide who kept us moving up the crazy hike with promises like "familia, familia, 15 minutos mas".... I wrote this email to my sister the day after:
I had a great weekend ... I went to a nice yoga class saturday morning, then (because I was feeling in shape) randomly decided to climb a volcano sunday morning. Had to get up at 5am and didn´t sleep that well for fear of oversleeping. Picked up at 6am, packed into a mini-bus, drove for an hour then hopped out with our guide Jose and started climbing. After about an hour, I was dying (my hamstrings were super super sore from yoga) and we were only 1/2 way there! The last bit was up volcanic gravel and sand -- you slipped a half step back with every step and I felt like the wind was going to push me over and I`d slide down the hill. But, when we finally made it to the top, oh my! So gorgeous, and the volcano is freakin´active! Lava flowing down about 25 feet from us, sulfury steam all around and it started spewing ash and smoke while we up at the top. Probably not safe, but really amazing. We literally skiied back down the cone on the sand -- our guide Jose took me and another girl by the arm and just started running and sliding.
Anthony at Casa Del Mundo
So crazy, thought for sure I might break an ankle, but so fun. You would have loved it.__________________________________
A few days after, my friend Anthony from NYC arrived. We spent an afternoon wandering around Antigua (a very fun place to "show off" as it is starting to feel like home), had a great meal and went out for drinks with my friend Claire who lives here. The bars seem to have deemed a proper rotation for ladies nights, which means women can drink for around 2Q per drink almost any night of the week -- that`s less than 25 cents. That night, we went to Monoloco which I`m not a fan of because it reminds me of bad sports bars in the states, but it was packed. (The drinking scene here reminds me a little too much of going to university in the midwest, which is not a good thing.)
The next morning, we got up to go to Lake Atitlan. The drive took us through Guatemala`s highlands and about 3 hours from Antigua. We arrived in Panajachel and hopped on an overpriced boat (overpriced because we didn`t know how much the going rate was and paid about 8x what we should have) for the 10 minute trip across the lake to our new home -- Casa del Mundo (house of the world). This place is just amazing. Built over the course of 10 years, it sits just above the lake and rooms climb up the hill. You can jump right off the balconies into the lake, which is just stunning. The lake is smooth as glass in the mornings -- like being in a huge swimming pool. Neither Anthony or I are that good at "doing nothing" (blame corporate culture for that one) and I think we both thought when we first arrived that we might be bored at Casa del Mundo for a few days -- we were discussing plans to visit all the nearby towns, go to the markets, etc.
base of volcano cone
After a couple hours, though, any thought of leaving just disappearred. We were super content to stay there, laying in hammocks and reading all day, for as long as possible. Dinners at night were a social affair -- they pushed all the tables together and all the hotel guests (there are about 14 rooms) eat together. Tons of interesting people. One night, we shared the wood-fired hot tub with 8 other guests -- including two couples from the US (Bay area and Phili), a retired British couple who were the life of the hotel, and a french couple. (As I side note, I think I should start keeping track, but I`m guessing that 60%, maybe 75% of the Americans I meet here are from the San Francisco Bay Area or have ties there. Same was true in Thailand and Cambodia.) We did manage to pull ourselves away from the place for one morning to go to Solola for the markets. This is a traditional market (ie, not a lot of crap for tourists) and in the town, the men and women both wear traditional mayan dress. Fascinating.
Alas, our stay at the lake had to end. After another night in Antigua, Anthony had to go home and back to work and I had to go back to classes. I moved in with a family on Sunday. I met them through a friend here who lived with them for 4 months. They are wonderful. Its kind of like being adopted by surrogate parents -- in all the best ways. Their house is great, with views of the volcanos from the second level. Jose has a huge movie collection that he`s eager to share. Isabel is a great cook -- and it was easy to explain that I don`t eat meat, because they really don`t either (whew!).
Casa del Mundo from the boat
Isabel is so gracious and generous. She actually ran out of the house down to the corner in the middle of lunch yesterday because we ran out of tortillas. (There`s a woman who makes tortillas by hand on the corner and I`m certain they are the best in all of Guatemala, another woman who comes by selling avocados and mangos -- heaven.) And, every interaction is like a mini-spanish class -- even the brief prayer before each meal. A couple days ago, Isabel asked if I wanted to say the prayer, adding that I could do so in english. I had to decline but promised "la proxima semana en espanol" -- next week, in Spanish. I´ll have to study for that. Its mentally quite a workout to speak spanish most of the day -- I have 6 hours of one-on-one classes, plus another couple hours sitting at meals -- and I have been exhausted all week. But, the stacks and stacks of color-coded flash cards and hours of repeating verbs are are starting to pay off -- I can struggle through most conversations now and can speak a decent amount in past, present and future tenses. Hooray!I have another three and a half weeks of classes before more friends come to visit. We`ll travel in Guatemala for about a week the end of May, then go to the Bay Islands in Honduras around the first of June.
Hope everyone is doing well!
Best wishes,
Jen
More random thoughts below.....
Random things that make me think I could stay here forever:
-- Buying delicious food in the streets -- from snacks and fruit to full-on meals, you could eat everything from little stands that pop up on corners and in the parks or from women who carry baskets full of goodies on their heads.
church in Antigua
My favorite is peanut-brittle-esque snacks made from nuts and seeds and plaintain chips and, of course, tortillas with black beans and avocado. Avocados and mangos are available all year (on the streets and in the markets), but really in season right now. You can buy each for about 10 cents. -- An unbelievable number of NGOs doing -- or trying to do -- really amazing work here. The need is infinite, but there are a lot of inspriring organizations here doing everything from replanting forests to providing free birth control for women to teaching leadership skills to teens. I went to an event on Friday for an organization started by a Japanese woman to help replant forests. Interesting event attended by a ton by Japanese people living or studying in Antigua, which leads to the next point....
-- This city has a very international feel -- people from all over the world are here -- and at the same time, a very distinctly Guatemalan culture.
-- The tienda that has fresh tortillas on the corner -- amazing to watch women here make tortillas here. They grab a little ball of tortilla dough and pat in in between their hands and slap it on a hot grill. After a bit, they pick up the tortilla with their asbestos fingers and flip it. Tortillas are much thicker than our machine-pressed version and much tastier.
-- The markets -- you can get everything from pirated cds to toothpaste to fruit to half a cow (I´m less a fan of the latter).
-- A deli where I can buy organic pre-washed greens (sorry, you can take the girl out of California, but you can`t take....) -- they also sell Trader Joe´s brands but those are really expensive (apparently brought back from the US in suitcases).
cleaning the park
-- The weather right now: warm and sunny during the day, cool at night. A nice breeze most of the time. I´m trying to savor the temperature because as soon as I leave Antigua it is going to be hot hot hot for the rest of my time in central america.
-- High-speed internet access for 75 cents an hour.
-- Sleeping 8+ hours a night
No bueno:
-- The adventure travel company that advertises hikes up Acatenango and Fuego volcanos with posters and t-shirts that say "Pacaya is for pussies" (Pacaya is the volcano that takes only 2 hours to climb -- the others take 5+). Apparently this attracts the attention of adventure-seeking gringos, but is in generally bad taste and really annoying.
-- There is a butcher shop on my way to class that plays really great music but also has whole dead animals hanging on hooks, no refrigeration. Every, and I mean every, morning I manage to walk by and look into the shop because the music catches my attention. And, every morning I have the same reaction which is somewhere between wanting to throw up and wanting to slap myself for being so stupid as to a) not walk another route and b) not look the other direction.
-- Spanish keyboards. I`ve learned to type on them, but its painful. The letters are the same, but all the punctuation marks other places. And, sometimes you have an english keyboard that`s programmed for spanish typing, sometimes a spanish keyboard that`s programmed for english typing. So, you more or less have to guess where the right keys are.
CSA
I still haven`t figured out how to make an @ sign on a spanish keyboard, even though I have been given instructions like 5 times. This is all just a lengthy excuse for why my writing may or may not be grammatically correct. -- Air quality. I`m constantly having to hold my breath as buses drive by unashamedly giving off thick black exhaust. There are wood fires all over the place (including in confined quarters). My eyes are usually really irritated by the end of the day. And, much more worrisome, respiratory issues are one of the major health problems in Guatemala -- especially for young children who grow up in Guatemala City or who spend the first years of their life attached to their mom`s back as she cooks over an open fire.
-- Firecrackers. Guatemalans apparently love them, because they light them off for any occasion or lack there of, at any time of day. There are times when the combination of loud explosions and small crackle-y noises sound just like gun fire and bombs. More than a little disconcerting in a country that had several decades of civil war in very recent history.
-- Machismo and machista culture -- male chauvinism and a sexist culture. Its really eye opening to be in a place where a good portion of the population still thinks a woman`s place is "in the home" (or in the market buying stuff for dinner), where it is expected and accepted for men to cheat on their wives and girlfriends, where men don`t want their wives taking birth control because lots of children makes them "more of a man" (even when they can`t feed them all), where drinking makes you "more of a man", where many girls don`t go to school beyond the first few years, etc.
dvds ... pirated I´m sure
Whether you consider yourself a "feminist" or not, being here makes you realize we shouldn`t take for granted the opportunities women have in the US -- and it makes me realize just how astounding those opportunities are. Things that I love and hate:
-- Everyone walks so freakin´ slowly. I constantly notice myself hurrying along for no apparently reason (north american syndrom -- I need to get from point A to point B, and I should do so efficiently) while guatemalans take their time moseying along the sidewalks -- often at a snails pace. Maybe they´re enjoying a nice conversation with their amigo, maybe they are pondering the days events or enjoying the weather. Whatever the reason, many people seem to have absolutely no forward momentum whatsoever while walking down the street. When I´m late for class and wedged behind a slow group of people and in between parked cars and on narrow sidewalks, this drives me absolutely crazy. When I stop to think about how nice it is to be in a place where people aren´t rushed every minute of the day, this is one of the things I love about guatemala.
-- Antigua is SO small that you see the same people everywhere. This is good, in that it makes me feel "at home" but bad when they aren`t people you want to run into. This is true of some of the people who sell stuff on the streets (some who I really like and know by name, others who follow me as I try to come up with any more excuses for not buying things) and the other travellers, spanish students and English-speakers who live here. Over the course of a couple days I saw one guy who lives here (an american) so frequently that I started to learn all kinds of intimate info about him even though I have no idea who he is. Day one, he was talking to someone in an internet cafe about how his girlfriend is going home in a couple days and he`s really bummed. Day two, he`s at breakfast with that girlfriend. That night, I see them again -- at dinner and clearly having an argument and she gets up and leaves in the middle of the meal. A few days later, he`s looking cozy with some other girl. And, again, I have no idea who this guy is or what his name is.
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