Antigua and Panajachel
Trip Start
Mar 28, 2008
1
8
11
Trip End
Apr 25, 2008
Antigua Guatemala,
Guatemala
Friday, April 11, 2008
Ruins in Antigua
The buildings here are all very old, and similar to Granada such that they are all brightly coloured, and alternating colours from one store/restaurant to the next; each building attached to the previous. There are quite a few ruins within the city as apparently a very large earthquake leveled the city sometime in the 1800s (remember this detail for later on). But to truly explore Antigua, you have to venture into all the restaurants, cafes and stores because beyond the initial shop is a courtyard with some sort of garden or fountain followed by a spiderweb of connecting passages that lead to other stores, markets, cafes, etc. Around many corners of these passageways, you'll often find Mayans with a small kiosk selling more of their wares. In one restaurant we entered, there were 5 other establishments all connected with small corridors, and once Vicky spotted the Greek one, there was no turning back. We had such a good time our first day, we skipped our plans to move on, and stayed another night.
For day 2, we signed up for a coffee plantation tour just outside the city. This was actually a lot more interesting than I thought it would be. We toured the coffee plants, picked our own beans (which looked like a cherry type of fruit) and then walked through all the different stages of how its fermented, dried in the sun, stripped of its shell, etc
Volcano towering over Antigua
. I'm not a very good student, because there were probably 15 different stages, and thats all I can remember. Our tour guide was devastated when he found out that I quit coffee, and almost seemed to take it personally :) Interesting tidbit: All the rejected beans (ie rotten) aren't wasted. They're the beans that are used to make instant and decaf coffee. Buyer beware!On day 3, we caught a bus to Panajachel, two and half hours through some really crazy winding mountain roads. The small town is located on a large lake, surrounded by ... yes, more volcanos (bet you didn't see that one coming). Guatemala seems to have the volcano market covered. Apparently there are over 30 volcanos in Guatemala, and 3 that are active - none in the immediate Panajachel area. Unfortunately, there was some pretty heavy cloud coverage and we couldn't see the tops of any of the mountains. We caught a small boat that rocked our way across extremely choppy water to the town of San Pedro. I can confidently say that none of the 15 people on that boat escaped without a enduring at least one wave soaking some article of clothing they were wearing. We toured the tiny village in both the touristy area and the very much ranshackeled area where the locals live. Its hard to see people living in such poverty. The next day (day 4) we were planning to go to the famous Chichicastenago market, but we didn't know what to do with our backpacks, so we just wandered around the neverending street markets in Panajachel until our shuttle back to Antigua departed at 4pm. We came pretty close to kidnapping the cutest little Mayan girl that sweet talked us into buying some of her stuff.. Vicky and her became famous friends after we fed her some of our pizza, and after that we constantly ran into her during our day and a half in Pana, usually buying her a little treat at the nearest store
Coffee beans that we picked
.I spent most of day 5 arranging our transportation for the next day, and our volcano hike for later in the afternoon. The tour involved hiking up a *live* volcano to see the lava. A bus left Antigua around 3pm (scheduled for 2pm, but *nothing* in Guatemala ever leaves less than 30 minutes late), which travelled an hour and a half up a mountain, just outside of Guatemala City. Once we got out of the bus, we were swarmed by little boys who were selling walking sticks and flashlights .. important details for later on. Our guide appeared (zero english) and led 10 of us up a fairly steep moutain through a forest. Ninety minutes later, we emerged from the trees to at a hardened lava flow resulting from a signifcant erruption back in December of 2006. I'm sure we were all wondering if today would be the day it happened again. We crossed over tons of the hardened lava, which was black as night, and somewhat frail and very loose rock. And then we could see it .. lava glowing bright red in the early evening night. We were led right up to an area of lava and jammed our walking sticks into it, which created a huge fiery flame. You couldn't do that for very long though because it was unbelievably hot being that close to it. Our guide brought over what first appeared like more hardened lava, but there was actual lava flowing underneath the rocks we were stepping on, and some pretty awful smelling gases
Vicky and Sandra (mayan)
. We had to step over a number of small crevices that had bright red and yellow lava sifting by, and I couldn't help but think "only in Guatemala". No way you could do something like this in Canada, if we had volcanos that is. I think we spent about 45 minutes playing in the lava area, and then we walked down the mountain in the dark and back to our bus.We arrived back in Antigua at 8:15pm, went for a quick dinner and started heading back to our hotel when we ran into an Irish guy who was on our volcano tour. While we chatted for a few minutes, the ground started shaking and went on for 5 or 6 seconds (felt like a lot more).. an earthquake! Found out a few days later that it registered 5.8 on the Richter scale. Cool! Potential disasters aside, we absolutely loved Antigua (and area) and wished we could have spent more time here.
