Monterico

Ok, well, I'm going to post this half-done and get the rest out later...

There's really not much to tell about our trip to San Pedro La Laguna. It's considered the party town of the lake and is full of backpackers and low to mid-range hostels and hotels. If you follow the hill up from the dock you'll end up in the actual town, which seemed to be filled with signs declaring Jesus as Savior and other Christian slogans. We also saw a ton of quite large Protestant churches. We wandered around for a while, had lunch at the edge of the lake and took a relaxing boat trip back to Panajachel in time to check out of the hotel and catch the shuttle back to Antigua. Although I will add that Kristian got quite a sunburn that morning; it's easy to forget that we are at altitude here and that much closer to the sun. The trip back to Antigua was much less harrowing than the ride to Lake Atitlan (well at least for me...poor Kristian was starting to get sick about then).

I'm going to gloss over a good bit of the next few days, just to save you, faithful readers, the gory details of a case of traveler's diarrhea. I'll just say that we had to get the shuttle driver to stop rather quickly at a street corner while Kristian jumped out of the back of the van and fled to the hotel, leaving me somewhat stunned at her ability to disappear. The rest of the evening consisted of a miserable Kristian turning green at various intervals and dashing for the bathroom. I bowed out of some of this and had a quiet dinner with our German friend that we had met on the way to Panajachel.

The next morning we were supposed to catch a 8:00 am shuttle to Monterico, on the Pacific Coast, but we had to beg off due to Kristian's paralyzing stomach issues and postponed our departure until later that afternoon. Oddly enough, later that morning we ran in to Kristian's aunt and her aunt's sister (who lives in Antigua and teaches yoga classes here) in the Plaza Mayor. And, incidentally, the hotel we stayed in that night was really terrible. The travel agent who booked all of our shuttles earlier in the week had recommended it to us, but it turned out to be a nightmare. For starters, the sink didn't work unless you used the valve under the sink
to regulate the flow of water from the faucet. It was unbearably noisy (we could hear the nightclub next door all night through the wall) and not really all that clean. I don't recommend it to anyone.

On the ride to Monterico we met up with a nice girl from Idaho (but originally from Vermont) who we ended up spending the next two days with. She's a firefighter out in Idaho and is therefore unemployed four months out of the year (I guess there aren't any forest fires there during the snowy months). Once off the shuttle in Monterico we were accosted by a bunch of kids telling us that they had the best information on the best hotels in town, which was a little overwhelming. Within the first few minutes we had three "official" tour guides/turtle hatchery employees accost us as well. And it was wicked hot, especially compared to the places in the highlands we had been earlier that week. Think New Orleans in the early summer. We ended up in a hotel called "Las Brisas del Mar," a rather nice little hotel equipped with mosquito nets, a fan, and (supposedly) hot water just off the beach.

Will fill in more later....