Chapter 1 - In the Beginning

Let's be honest. I don't like blogs. You don't like blogs. In fact, If anyone has now made it to this, the 4th sentence, I would be quite surprised. And that's even considering that the first 3 sentences were very short. I like short sentences. Here's another. Because the readership of the 1st chapter of this blog is going down by the (short) sentence, here's a preliminary picture:

Coupla local Guatemalans

This blog will be a spot to concisely store only the most noteworthy of things that Cat and I experience throughout this year of travels. While the blog is primarily for you, the reader, it is also for our brains; keepers of memories.

It all began with 33 hours of traveling from Sydney to Guatemala City. This was long and shit. Enough said.

Guatemala City is big, dirty, dangerous, but kind of cool. Most travelers skip it but we decided to spend 2 nights there. There is a notable lack of gringos, and it doesn’t feel entirely safe to be wandering the streets at night. There is weaponry everywhere. If you were challenged to a street duel and you didn't have your AK47 and baton on you, you would be the laughing stock of the city. Every fence is 3 meters high and fence tops are sprinkled with glass for what is obviously a cunning booby trap to deter baddies.

Standard security for a corner store.

Other interesting occurrences in Guatemala City are listed in the following list, which is bullet pointed for your pleasure:

•  After reading up in the phrase book and practicing how to say 'we would like to eat the menu of the day', we tried it out at the market. We were met with looks of bemusement, laughter and jeering. Damn jeering. I hate getting jeered.

•  We accidentally crashed what may have been an Alcoholics Anonymous/political group meeting at a small local establishment. We were the only gringos in there and after ordering a couple of cervazas a group of locals took to the unnecessarily mic’d up stage to one by one (assumedly) discuss something.

•  Random loud bangs every couple of minutes at night - apparently it's teenagers playing with gun powder, so said local friendly man Diego.

After GC we battled our way to Antigua via the classic Guatemalan chicken bus with a couple of Scottish lasses who were heading in the same direction. We understood them about as much as the Guatemalans.

Cat on pollo bus

Antigua is awesome. It’s a cobbled street town surrounded completely by volcanoes, some of which are active and continually spew out lava and gases. Antigua was the capital of Guatemala back in the day until erupting volcanoes and earthquakes substantially destroyed the town.

Antigua oozing volcanic gas

It’s a Spanish School hotspot, and after inquiring at a couple of schools we ended up settling on Signor Geovany Flores, a rogue freelance Spanish teacher who was sick of Spanish schools not paying him enough denaro. He worked out cheaper for us and was a quality teacher and amigo. Cat and I are now both fluent in Spanish, as demonstrated by Geovany responding to my hilarious Spanish joke in this picture below:

I said: "Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the pollo bus!"

We also climbed one of the active volcanos in Antigua – Volcan Pacaya, after seeing it listed at #1 on TripAdvisor. Turns out it was a really cloudy morning and we couldn’t see anything from the top. Another lowlight of the volcano trek was having my Mayan horoscope read where I was told that I inherently had zero energy levels because of my date of birth. Cat’s levels were told to be very high. Damn Cat. On the plus side, my horoscope animal is a Turtle. We also classically toasted some marshmellows on the hot rocks.

Another noteworthy occurrence was the walk to the cross on the top of town. At the top there were, of course, a large group of cops just hanging out in the bushes as you do when you're a cop in Guatemala.

 The following things also happened:

•  I got violent food poisoning one night after eating 6 tacos from a deceptively friendly establishment. 2 nights later, after changing from a private double room into a dorm room at our hostel, I woke up with bed bug bites all over me…
• The day after food poisoning I was dragged through a grand total of 6 museums at Casa Santo Domingo.
• A random parade went through town with small children dressed up in mascot type costumes, complete with heads the size of 3 water melons. Small kids bordered on passing out from the heat. Poor niños!

• A local Antiguan transported his plank of wood and door frame to the other side of town via the chicken bus. Classic.
• After hanging out in the Central Park for a while we struck up a conversation with a local who turned out to be an ex professional triathlete who was very interested in the race in Panama that same day. When Cat informed him that her brother Tim was in the race the local couldn’t believe it. And when Cat returned to the conversation with a cerveza in hand and our friend looked up the live results to see that Tim had come 3^rd, it became particularly unclear to the local that Tim was Cat’s brother.
• There were some pretty awesome American buskers in Parque Central' too: 

    

     In the words of our amigo Geovany Flores, rogue scholar and maestro, "Que te vaya bien!" Until the next chapter...