Chapter 2 - The Force Awakens

Prelude

Firstly, I should apologise for not providing the latest travel babble chapter earlier than now. How is one to unravel the travel babble when the travel babble has not been delivered to the unraveller? It’s a great question, and I’m glad I asked it to myself.

"Where that babble at?"

The ‘Force’ in the title above refers to my internal health force, and the fact that it has well and truly recovered from a fateful night of tacos in Antigua (see Chapter 1). However in saying that, last night we literally went to an all you can eat tacos feast and it is now Cat that is feeling a little seedy from tacos. Lesson not learnt.

But anyway, the above is merely unnecessary bants joy that more appropriately belongs in the bantry cupboard. A lot has happened since the 1^st chapter, some of which is expressed in words, pictures and videos below…

Chicken Busses

I feel that comment on the local Guatemalan chicken busses is worthy of its own sub heading. So there it is, just up there and to the left. But on the other hand, I’m hesitant to go into any detail on the chicken busses, given that the (only) readership of this blog includes our mothers. We have been taking chicken busses everywhere as they are cheap as chips to get around the country compared to private shuttle transportation. But there’s no escaping the fact that the busses are absolutely nuts.

We had one particular encounter winding up the mountain from Panajachel on Lago de Atitlan to Chichicastenango for the weekly Thursday market. The “Chi Chi” markets are all the rage here so we thought we’d better check them out even though we don’t really want to buy stuff that we’ll have to carry around for a year. But anyway, as we wound our way up the mountain on our bus it connected with an oncoming small van. The van hit the middle of our bus as we turned around a corner, and it ricocheted away towards the edge of the cliff. Given that even the locals on our bus all had a look of panic on their faces, we knew that this must have been bad. Our bus was absolutely fine but the safety of those in the small van was the big concern. I thought for sure the van was a goner. It turned out to be a very close call - the van was able to stop literally on the cliff’s edge. The result of the encounter was a heated debate between the driver of our bus and the driver of the van, which is illustrated below:

The scene of the crime

Moments after this encounter we saw another chicken bus tipped over on its side on our way to the markets. And we later had a conversation with a couple of Germans who said they had seen 3 chicken busses tipped over in 1 day before. It’s reasonable to conclude that chicken busses in Guatemala are not the safest form of transportation.

Lago de Atitlan

Lake Atitlan is shweet. The actual lake is an old crater – the remnants of a huge explosion in the earth’s crust hundreds of years ago where rocks and lava spewed out into the air, apparently as far as to Panama. That’s one heccerz explose’ if you be asking me this question. We spent almost a week at the lake, and stayed at 2 of the many villages dotted around the lake; San Pedro and San Marcos.

Lake Atitlan

San Pedro

Things happened at San Pedro, including this: 

• We climbed Volcan San Pedro. On the descent we walked by a medicinal tree whose prickly leaves provide relief from muscle soreness. Naturally I whacked a bunch of leaves on my left calf. The following day my left calf felt completely limbered up and ready for a marathon, but my right calf was akin to the right calf of Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz.

View from summit of Volcan San Pedro

• A Spanish/Guatemalan legend named ‘Cisco Chico’, who looks exactly like Vinny Chase, climbed the volcano with us and told us true tales of the hectic gangs that rule Guatemala City.

Cisco/Vinny look-a-like telling tales of GC, "and the gun was THIS big"...

• A local Guatemalan on holiday in the room next to us brought his own 90’s style mega sound system to the hostel. He played death metal music at the beginning of the night before progressing to Beethoven’s symphony in F sharp by the end of the night.
• We watched the Superbowl at an American bar. One American was into the game so much that in the excitement he accidentally shouted “F*** you” directly to a random bunch of pleasant but startled Austrians who were sitting quietly on a table and not even watching the game.
• We stayed 1 night in a room akin to a jail cell that urged guests not to stick gum on the wall.
• Hippies ran rampant through the village, all with an adopted street perro (dog) or 5.

San Marcos

While we thought at the time that hippies were everywhere in San Pedro, it wasn’t until we stayed a night in San Marcos that we realized we had uncovered the nucleus of the hippy world. It was hippy to an intense level. And by my scale system an intense level is greater than maximum levels. Here's a little video of the lake from San Marcos:

That night we went to what was advertised as an African drumming party. It turned out to be heaps of hippies around a fire hitting drums, getting into spiritual trances and quite literally convulsing to music. I saw no trace of an African.

This doesn't adequately portray convulsions, but gives you the idea ...

The other unusual occurrence in San Marcos was that there was no running water in the village. At this point in time may I remind you that San Marcos is right next to a massive lake. But that isn’t even the interesting part. No sir-ree it isn’t. The interesting part is that there was a violent rumour as to why there was no water in the village. Apparently the recently deposed mayor of San Marcos is an avid hater of the hippies who had so noticeably taken over his village. The locals believed that, due to his anger at not being re-elected at the recent elections, he had somehow stopped the flow of water into the village. It kind of reminds me of that new Mad Max film where the evil guy controls the flow of water.

Other occurrences of noteworthiness:

• In Panajachel we went to a nature reserve where we walked over several extremely dodgy bridges.

Not watching your step could be fatal

• We travelled to the mountainous region of Quetzaltenango, otherwise known as Xela, by chicken bus. When we arrived at the bustling bus station we jumped off and waited for the bus helper boy to jump on top of the bus, as they do, and grab our bags. But as we waited on the side of the road the bus drove off with our bags still strapped to the top. Panic ensued for the next few minutes as we chased after the bus yelling out "PARE! PARE!" (which I think is 'stop' in Spanish). The locals looked on thinking it was hilarious. We finally realised that the bus was merely doing a u-turn further up the road and that it was much more convenient for our bags to be dropped off on the other side of the road.
• We climbed a sweet volcano in Xela called Santa Maria and from the peak watched an active volcano below us bellowing out smoke every 30 minutes. It also had a sweet view of the surrounding landscape. Here's a video of the small volcano erupting:

  

View from the top of Santa Maria

Lanquin and Semuc Champey

The small village of Lanquin and the surrounding Semuc Champey was probably our highlight of Guatemala. It’s an area of a huge river where heaps of natural limestone rock pools are formed. The journey to Semuc itself was an incredible one through glorious countryside. We went to and from via pickup truck – which is easily my favourite means of transport, as evidenced by the look on my face below:

"mmmyeeees, pickup truck transportation"

Semuc Champey is best illustrated by the below video and pictures:

The view from above

"Freedom!"

Also at Semuc were caves where we lit up a candle, Indiana Jones style, and went exploring, often in water up to neck level. The final descent out of the caves was a massive drop down the opening of a waterfall and into the abyss. It was a small hole in the rocks that we had to squeeze into and we couldn’t see how far down we would have to plunge. All we could do was trust the guide who spoke zero English and was rockin’ sunglasses in the extremely dark cave - very reassuring. But we made it.

In Lanquin there were these absolutely amazing bat caves. The caves are, to this day, largely unmapped but believed to continue for kilometres underground. At times there were four or five metre drops to the left and right of us as we wandered along the path. There wasn’t one sign or safety rope throughout the whole thing. The adventure was made particularly dangerous by Cat smacking her head on the first protruding rock as we entered the cave. I made her battle on, despite the fact she had mild concussion and a dying torch. We went at sunset and saw thousands of bats exiting the caves and pondered about the Australian and Guatemalan safety standards.

The most light in this cave was from this flash

Rio Dulce

We also went to ridiculous naturally hot and awesome waterfalls in Rio Dulce with some awesome Canadian folk. There were pools at the top of the water which you couldn’t put your foot in for longer than 5 seconds due to the heat.

"It's so hot on my shoulders"

"I feel no heat"

Here’s a coupl’a general observations about Guatemala:

• I’m taller than every Guatemalan
• Guatemalan kids don’t cry. That rule applies even when they fall off the handlebars of a bike and hit the pavement with their heads
• German and Canadian travellers are everywhere.
• There are Menonites who have moved from Canada (or got kicked out) to Guatemala to call it their new home. We ran into a group at the top of Santa Maria who looked like they had come straight from the 1930s. All the boys and men had the same hair cut, wore long pants and collared shirts and spoke in a deranged form of Spanglish. They were communicating with their female counterparts in their village not far from the erupting volcano with the use of broken mirrors and sunlight. 

Our Guatemalan guide telling tales of 21st century living and technology

To those who have made it right down here to the end of a long chapter, good for you. And below is a little bonus for making it this far.

In the next chapter we hit up Belize…