San Salvador

So let's travel back in time a bit, dear readers. Put yourselves two months or so in the past and journey with me to the city of San Salvador, country of El Salvador. I jumped on a bus (which, by the way, was an adventure in itself) to San Salvador from Guatemala City sometime in early March so I could get cracking at the newspaper archives at the National Library and start making contacts with journalists, public opinion people, etc. Getting from Antigua to San Salvador was not as easy as you would think, since most of the direct buses from Antigua (well, all really, or at least all that I asked) don't actually go to the capital but instead take you directly to the beach. So I had to catch the bus from Guatemala City early in the morning, a feat which was preceded by at 3 am walk through Jocotenango and Antigua with my enormous backpacker backpack (hehe) to get to where the shuttle to Guate would actually pick me up. Stupid shuttle drivers who won't make the extra five minute drive to Jocotenango! The bus ride to San Salvador from Guatemala City can last between four and six hours, depending on traffic and how long it takes to cross the border. The border crossing was rather anticlimactic and felt a little like crossing the border into Canada from the US. Ok, much more low-tech, but still, very low-key. They didn't even stamp my passport! All I have is the exit stamp from Guate to prove that I even left the country. A heads up for anyone who wants to stay more than 90 days in Guatemala...leaving to spend time in El Salvador or Honduras or Nicaragua still counts towards your 90 days, so head toward Mexico or book a trip to Costa Rica or Panama.

I thought San Salvador would be a lot more like Guatemala City than it was. There are, of course, many similarities...they are more alike than say, Boston and Guatemala City. But you can definitely tell you're not in Guatemala anymore. The most obvious clue, of course, is you don't see people walking around in the traditional indigenous dress that is ubiquitous in Guatemala. El Salvador does not have the same indigenous population that Guatemala does. Also, the Salvadoran accent is different than in Guatemala, as is (of course) the slang used. I had to learn or at least become familiar with a whole new range of slang...it got a little confusing! I spent most of my time staying in a hostel in the colonia Centroamerica, a neighborhood that is relatively safe (but not as safe or ritzy as the Colonia Escalon neighborhood where many of the slightly more expensive hostels and guest houses are located) and that is close to the MetroCentro mall. Which, apparently, is the biggest mall complex in Central America. The thing is enormous. I later learned that to get around, especially on buses, people tend to navigate around landmarks and malls. So you can tell people that you live near the naked lady (a statue of a naked woman) or the naked man (a mural of a naked man on the side of an art museum next to the Sheraton Hotel) or near MetroCentro or one of the other big malls. The shopping centers are the new big thing in San Salvador apparently (well, relatively new). Don't picture them as a mall in the US...things change in warm climates (are malls different in California? I have no idea). This is more of an open-air thing, with shops facing plazas or patios with fountains and seating and cafe's etc. And this is where much of the partying happens at night...bars and restaurants in these shopping centers are the hip place be if you are part of the young Salvadoran middle and upper class, somewhat replacing the bars in the Zona Rosa as the cool nightspots. Or so my friends tell me. So if you want to go out in San Salvador you head for a mall....or the beach, which is a thirty to forty minute drive. Friday nights are nuts for driving down to the coast, especially in tourist towns like El Tunco (where we ended up one Friday night). It seems like half the city of San Salvador heads to the beach to party on the weekends. Kind of like what happens in Antingua on the weekends (and Tuesday nights, haha), but a little less family friendly in some places. And with more of a beachy atmosphere, of course.

I'll skip over most of the boring bits of my trip to San Salvador. A lot of it was spent sitting in the basement of the National Library, where the newspaper archives are kept. The National Library takes up one of the sides of the main plaza in the downtown, alongside the Presidential Palace and across from the National Cathedral. The main librarian at the archives is this skeezy guy that couldn't stop himself from hitting on me...I have to admit it was a little creepy. He had no problem sitting down for a chat every once in a while while I was working and at one point told me this long story about the first woman with blue eyes he had ever met, who was a nurse from the States who had come to his village to give vaccinations. He told me he fell in love with her and went back everyday to try to get a second vaccination so he could see her again. I got this story one day after he noticed I have blue eyes. There wasn't much in the way of noise control in the archives...the librarians would talk loudly on the phone or chat with each other or with other patrons. I finally ended up going to the library with my ipod and headphones in an attempt to deter the librarian from talking to me and to drown out the noise of conversation.

Guate can ( The downtown of San Salvador is not really all that much like the downtown in Guatemala. Ok, for a gal from the States I guess it is pretty similar, but it felt completely different to me. Inyou don't see that many stalls selling blackmarket goods once you get off the Sexta Avenida (6th Ave.), the main plaza is enormous and the central market is mostly underground. In San Salvador stalls selling food, clothes, pirated cds and dvds, and really anything else youthink of fill the streets. There are streets that I figure must have been built to hold twolanes of traffic that are crowded and narrow and barely let buses through due to the amount ofstreet vendors. A Salvadoran acquaintance told me this is partly due to the world economicrecession, since there is little hope for the average Salvador to get a job with a living wage once they've lost theirs and many more have resorted to the informal sector to support theirfamilies than in the past. Walking around in downtown San Salvador is quite an experience forsomeone not used to this kind of thing. Being a blond, tall, blue-eyed foreigner in this part oftown definitely made me stand out. The only time I spotted any other obvious foreignersobviously I'm not counting foreigners who are from other Central American countries) was during the commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of murder of Monseñor Romero. I'll try to talk about Romero in a separate post, but for those of you who haven' t heard of him, he was the archbishop of El Salvador (I'm pretty sure that was his position) during the height of the Civil War how broke with the Church's positions on some things and defended the lives of those targeted by the Salvadoran military during the Civil War. He was assassinated while holding mass by the Salvadoran military in 1980, one day after he preached a sermon calling on Salvadoran soldiers to lay down their weapons and stop violating the human rights of their fellow citizens. During his funeral the military opened fire on the crowd of 250,000 mourners, killing between 30 and 50 people. He is currently undergoing the process of consideration for cannonization as a saint in the Catholic Church.

What else can I say about El Salvador? Let's see.... Well, the buses are much cleaner and easier to get around on than in Guatemala. They even have turnstiles to get to the seats and bus stops where people actually get in line to get on the bus. This was a shock to me the first time I saw it. In El Salvador I am not canche (blond) like in Guatemala but am chelita (light skinned). Both of these words, of course, are slang, so don't go around using them thinking it's universal spanish. I was recently told that canche in Peru isn't a very polite word. There are not many hostels in San Salvador, partly due to the lack of tourist attraction in the capital....if tourists come the usually are the a day or two before heading to the beach. But there are guest houses, which apparently got their start when FMLN (who was the group on the left of the Civil War) militants began to open their homes to travelers in order to demonstrate their way of life to those interested. Or so said a guide book and a few websites I checked out to confirm this one. It's a lot hotter in San Salvador than in Guatemala City, which made sitting in the basement of the library with no fan or windows a lot less comfortable than you would think. Sure, basements tend to be cooler, but not when it's wicked dang hot outside. Then it's just slightly less dang hot and much less well ventilated than being at street level.

Ok, so that's as much as my brain can handle for today.... Jenn, I'm sorry I took so long writing this. I have no real good excuse other than pereza. But I'll see what I can do to get back on track.

Another Apology for Not Writing

Yeah yeah yeah, I know I suck at updating my blog. I apologize once again for being a bad sister/daughter/friend/stranger who can't seem to keep her blog going. The sad thing is that it's not even that I have been so terribly busy that I can't find the time to write. I'm just lazy, I suppose. So there's my apology....harumph. Think I'll start another post separate from this one to keep the narrative stream. So, again, SORRY!!! And on to the next thing...

Semana Santa 2010

I swear I really will post something of substance soon. But while you're waiting, take a look at my favorite photos from Holy Week in Antigua. I spent a few days following my friend (who is a professional photographer) around taking photos of the processions. So here's a selection for you to enjoy..

2 Months! Oh My!

Holy heck, it really has been two months since I last wrote? What could possibly be a good excuse? Would you buy that my life has turned into a soap opera which I want to eventually turn into a novel and am therefore keeping things under wraps? Hmm, well, the soap opera part is mostly true, anyway. As for keeping things under wraps, this has less to do with writing a novel and more to do with the fact that I really don't want to spread my private life over the internet. Not a ton of adventuring was to be had (although there was some adventuring) and so I didn't feel compelled to write on the blog. Although if you'd like to hear about the private life soap opera stuff, feel free to contact me for the sordid details.

I spent a good part of the last two months in Guatemala, writing and doing background research. Which any good field researcher will tell you is not what you're supposed to do while in the field. But hell, that's what I did. I'm not proud, necessarily, but I don't deny it, either. I'm starting to think of Guatemala as a sort of pleasant quicksand (for me at least). It partially has to do with the fact that I lost my way a bit when I found out that I had been denied a grant that I was really hoping for (let that be a warning to anyone relying on a grant proposal to get something important in their project completed....what do I do now?). And of course some of my inertia had to do with the aforementioned telenovela that had taken over my life. Sometimes that stuff gets in the way. Anyway, lets just say that I spent a lot of time writing and looking things up online and listening to podcasts and reading novels and drinking with my friends. There was a rather productive four days spent at a conference in New Orleans (ok, three days, since the first day was Mardi Gras). And I finally got my butt down to El Salvador this week. So it's not like things are completely stagnant. Nor were they. But hindsight, you know...

What interesting things did I do in these long months? Well, I can tell you the story of the Nativity Party. Apparently there is a tradition in Guatemala (I have no idea if this goes the same for other Latin American countries) that if someone steals your Baby Jesus from your nativity scene during the Christmas season, that person can ask for a ransom. Traditionally this means that the person whose Jesus was stolen has to throw a huge party for which the thief will eventually pay (from how I understood things, the victim of the theft can spend whatever he or she likes and the thief has to reimburse him or her....but you take a risk thinking that every thief will pay!). I took me a while to get this all straight, since almost everyone explaining it to me had had something to drink. Plus there was the added bonus that one of the uncles at the party that I attended (at a friend's house) kept comparing me to the huge painting of Jesus on the wall (he had blue eyes like mine). The nativity party happened to coincide with a rather strange parade through town, full of kids and adults dressed as cartoon characters that did silly coreographed dances to reggaeton music. It was a bit surreal, all told.

I also took a trip to the famous Sunday market in Chichicastenango with some friends. We piled in to my friend's car early Sunday morning (after a late Saturday night I might add, which belongs in the soap opera category and will not be discussed here) and drove the 2.5 hours or so to the Chichi market. We didn't even get lost on the way there! It's not that much different than other markets I've been to in Guatemala in terms of what kind of stuff is sold. But it's just so much bigger! You could definitely get lost. One of the friends I hitched along with is a photographer and he had a field day taking pictures of anything and everything. If you ever find yourself in Chichicastenango, don't forget to make a stop in the church. The church is particularly interesting (I think) because of the stone altars running down the center aisle where Mayan shamans conduct syncretistic rituals pulled from traditional Mayan and Catholic cultures dating back to the conquest. Lots of flowers and candles and incense.

Hmm, what else can I tell you about the last few months? I started running three times a week with a fellow norteamericana. Before I started running in Antigua I thought the cobblestones were a small pain in the butt. Now I am convinced that they have a grudge against me. Running on the sidewalks and roads around Antigua are kind of like trail running in the woods around Sewanee with the added bonus of buses and pick ups trying to run you down or drowning you in black exhaust smoke. And all at altitude! But to tell the truth it was fun to get up at 5:45 am, run for 30-45 min., take a shower and crawl back into bed. Such a tough life, right? I'm attaching some photos of the sidewalks so you can see what I mean about the footing. The first photo is, granted, the most narrow area on the walk/run between Jocotenango, where my house is, and Antigua, where my running partner lives. We usually start running towards each other and when we meet up we decide where to go next. The second photo is also of the road between Jocotenango and Antigua. The bummer is that one of us has to run in the ditch (and if someone is coming the other way, both of us end up there). You definitely want to keep your eyes on the road!

Stay tuned tomorrow or the next day and I'll update you on my trip to El Salvador and my impressions of San Salvador. Granted I've mostly been in the basement of the library, so I haven't seen too much of the city. Well, unless you count getting lost while trying to walk to the library from the hostel where I'm staying. But I pretend that didn't happened.

back again

I’m jumping around a bit in time for this post, dear readers, so please forgive this lapse in chronology. I still haven’t written about my last trip in December before heading home for the holidays, nor have I updated you on my adventures over the break. But since it’s fresh in my head I thought I would give you all a quick post about my trip back to Guatemala.

So here is how things stand. I flew into Guatemala Sunday after a little less than a month in the States. As most of you know, I decided to move everything I own out of my apartment and into a storage unit so I could travel for the better part of this next year without worrying about rent payments etc. Let’s just say that the move was interesting. Actually, setting aside that the fact that the move itself caused a few minor tiffs among my family over logistics and that moving day brought with it more than a few inches of snowfall, things went pretty well. My friends in town stepped up to my desperate call for help and fate arranged it so that I could guilt my sister into staying a few extra days (yes, Jenn, I know you didn’t really help out of guilt). Continuing this streak of generosity on the part of my friends, another friend put me up Friday night (we emptied my apartment on Thursday) and I took advantage of the commuter train into Chicago Saturday afternoon. My flight was scheduled to leave O’Hare at 6 am, which meant that I had to be at the airport somewhere between 3 and 4 (given that international flyers are encouraged to get to the airport 3 hours in advance and that security has been even more tight since the bombings on that flight from Amsterdam to Detroit around Christmas). So I checked into a hotel near the airport on Saturday night after the 2.5 hour train ride to downtown Chicago and the 1 hour ride on the “L” to the airport itself.

Things started getting interesting once I made it to the airport. I hauled myself out of bed at 2:30 am to catch the shuttle to the airport and put myself at the end of the reasonably short line in front of the Spirit Air counter just after 3:30. Once I got to the front of the line, the airline representative cheerily informed me that I was lucky, since I would most likely make my connecting flight despite the delay. Delay? What delay? Sunday was one of the best days we’ve had in the middle and eastern parts of the country in weeks. Clear sky for most of the country east of the Mississippi and the temperatures were rising. This lovely weather, however, didn’t stop one of the flight attendants to call in sick that morning, and, apparently, the flight cannot take off without the minimum number of flight attendants. So we were stuck waiting to hear whether or not they would be able to fly a substitute flight attendant in from Detroit. To make a long story a bit shorter, after several contradictory assessments of my ability to make my connection in Fort Lauderdale and two trips through security I actually made my flight and the connection despite the two-hour delay. Plus I had a lengthy conversation with a very nervous woman on her way to a cruise she didn’t really want to go on, shared a copy of the New York Times with a friendly older gentleman who regaled me with his opinions of Fox News, had difficulty not laughing at my neighbor as he tried to hide the fact that he was talking on the phone with his girlfriend while the plane was getting ready to take-off even though the flight attendant stood right in front of him to give the safety demonstration (he ended up putting a sweatshirt over his head and told his girlfriend she could talk to him but he couldn’t answer her for a few minutes), and had to fend off numerous taxi drivers when exiting the airport in Guatemala City who just couldn’t seem to understand that no, even though I look like a backpacker, I don’t need a taxi to Antigua (my big backpack must have been misleading…plus being a blond gringa doesn’t help either).

Somehow my friends found me in the crowd outside the door at the airport (apparently some famous singer on a reality show was flying in that day and people where waiting for a glimpse). But of course, as things go here, we didn’t actually head straight towards our destination. We walked upstairs to the departures area so that one of my friends could buy a plane ticket to Chicago (ironic, no, since I had just come from there?) for the next day and ran in to some acquaintances of my chauffeurs. Which led to a quick meal at one of the restaurants in the airport and an hour or so of chatting. The rest of the evening consisted of breaking into the trunk of my friends car (the key had been broken off in the lock by a would-be thief) so that he could give the suitcase inside to his friend who had been basically clothes-less for a week while his worldly possessions were stuck in the trunk, a tour of my friend’s office (he is a professional photographer), changing a flat tire (in record time, I might add…I think they’ve had lots of practice), a trip to drop off the previously stuck suitcase, a stop at my other friends house to pick up a few things, another stop for food, and then, finally, the drive up to Antigua. Truthfully, it was a great way to be welcomed back to Guatemala. It reminded me why I love this place. Nothing is ever simple or straightforward and even a quick trip to pick someone up at the airport can turn into a journey of epic proportions.

Cuevas y Lagunas III

Feels funny to be writing this two weeks after the actual trip. Things just keep coming up, I suppose. Or something. Anyway, where was I? Ah, yes, arriving in Lanquin. Much of the road from Coban to Lanquin is a not really well maintained dirt/gravel road. I'm glad that I wasn't the one driving, to tell the truth, or at least that it wasn't my car. But we made it to the hostel just in time to grab the last cabin and catch the family style buffet dinner the hostel is apparently famous for. And it was well worth the Q45 (just a little bit more than 5 bucks). We ended up in a pretty cabin overlooking the river and slept like the dead until early the next morning.

The next morning we packed our stuff up in the car and started to walk into town with the intention of grabbing local transportation to Semuc Champey. The road from Lanquin to Semuc is an even less well maintained dirt/gravel road with the added fun of steep inclines. Fun for a pickup, but not so fun for a four door sedan. So our plan was to grab a ride in the local minvans that serve as buses to and from Semuc. Lucky for us a truck working for a hotel closer to the national park stopped and offered us a ride and we spent the half-hour or so chatting with the driver in the cab. He didn't even charge us very much, just Q20 for the pair (outrageously cheap if you were actually hiring a tourism truck to take you around and much less than what he charged the other gringo he was taking to the park). Seriously, people are ridiculously friendly here.

Here's a little bit about Sempuc Champey. It's a series of limestone pools hidden up in the mountains. Just above the pools the river dives deep into caves that run under the whole area. Just below the pools the river emerges and the water from the pools joins the river in a series of waterfalls. The water in the pools themselves comes from runoff coming down from the steep mountainsides that surround them. It really is an incredible sight. The national park is simple but well maintained. It's an incredible place to hike and to swim, and can get very busy on holidays and weekends, especially during Holy Week. There are well hidden lifeguards (I had no idea they were there until the yelled at someone for jumping into the pools from a stupid spot) and a few guides here and there to make sure no one falls into the river or off a cliff (which does apparently happen every once in a while). We didn't have a lot of time to spend in the area since we had to return to Guatemala that night (my friend had to be at work at 7:00 the next morning) so once we got to the park we headed straight for an overlook platform high above the pools. It's about a 30 to 45 minute hike up the side of one of the surrounding mountains. A fun hike, and well worth it, but we were certainly ready for a swim by the time we got back down to the pools. I took the picture above from the viewing platform. Truly an amazing sight, no?

Once we made our way down from the overlook we did a bit of exploring. We wandered around to see where the river enters the caves underneath the limestone pools, being very careful not to slip or fall. The rocks just underneath the water (the areas of the photos that are more brown than turquoise) are slick and it would be easy to loose your balance if you're not careful. I was amazed at how much a difference it made with the tiny bit of extra traction provided by a pair of well-worn havaiana flip-flops. The next photo is a picture of the river as it rushes down underground. My friend was telling me that a co-worker of hers drown here a little over a year ago because he had walked up close to the edge that you can see here on the right and slipped and fell into the water. It's hard to see in the photo, but the water is pretty fast moving and rough and it more or less plunges straight down into a hole just underneath where we were standing when I took this picture. I'm not sure if they ever found his body. We were standing behind a wooden fence when I took this photo that protects those who want a view of the river from just such a fall. But if you cross the pools at this point, as you can see from the photo there is no fence up close to the edge of the river itself. It was definitely a dizzy feeling standing there and not only seeing but also hearing and feeling the river rush underneath us.

We spent the rest of the afternoon swimming in the various pools. The water was pretty cold, but it felt refreshing after the climb up to and down from the overlook. There were very few other people around and it felt like we had the place to ourselves. The water in the pools is crystal clear. The turquoise color doesn't come from the rocks or from the water itself but from the depth of the pools. The deeper the pool the richer the color. But when you're actually swimming the water has no color to it at all and you can see all the way down unless you're in a particularly deep area. The little fish that live in the larger pools are fearless and will come up and nibble on your skin in order to eat (I'm assuming) the dead skin and other tasty (yucky) stuff that they can get off of you. It's a strange feeling...you can actually tell they are nibbling on you. It's not that they bite, but it definitely tickles. Sit still for even a little bit and there will be a swarm (or school?) of little fish surrounding you.

Once we finished swimming and changed back into our sweat soaked clothes (yeah, I know, yuck) we headed back out to the entrance of the park to catch a minivan/bus back to Lanquin. Much to our chagrin, however, the bus just never showed up. It passed us on the way up the mountain to the villages above Semuc Champey and never came back down. We ended up catching a ride in the back of a pickup with some guys heading to Coban. They even offered us a ride to Coban with them, but we since we had left my friend's car in Lanquin we had to decline the offer. So we spent a slightly harrowing ride (damn but they drove fast!) back to Lanquin in the bed of a pickup truck with an indigenous woman and her young son, two Guatemalan men from Lanquin and a Danish guy we met while waiting for the bus. I have to say transportation here in Guatemala is always interesting, no matter how you get somewhere. It's always an adventure to get from point A to point B. As soon as we got back to Lanquin we dove into the car and started our way back to Guatemala City. It took us about 5 hours or so and we went straight to bed, exhausted, for the third night in a row.

Cuevas y Lagunas II

So I lied....I didn't write the second installment yesterday. Sorry for the wait, those of you who were waiting with baited breath. Where was I? Ah, yes, I left off at the half-constructed hotel near Chisec. It really was a lovely place and should do well if they can get the tourists to fill it. Not sure how many get up that far away from Coban...we were the only tourists in the area as far I know.

The next morning we met the guide to the Bombil Pek and Jul Ik caves at 8 am. Bright and early. But since we had literally gone to bed around 8 pm the night before we were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. While the guide took us down the path to the caves (which took us a good 45 minutes to hike) he explained a bit about the community project that runs the ecotourism attractions in the area. These caves, for example, became part of the project because of two Peace Corps volunteers that were stationed in the community. They saw the value of the caves as a tourist attraction after visiting them with some locals and started the push to make them part of a community-wide effort to take advantage of the natural attractions in the area. The caves are very impressive. Bombil Pek, which means painted rock in Q'eqchi', is home to the only cave paintings found in Guatemala. The cave is truly impressive. To get to the mouth you have to pass down into a pit 60 meters deep. I've included a photo of the ladders the community set in place to help visitors get to the entrance of the cave itself. Seriously, I had to hold my breath a few times on these ladders, wondering if it would really hold my weight. Our guide told us that before these ladders were put in place the locals would climb down into the cave using the roots of the plants that grow on the edge of the pit. The actual entrance to the cave is incredible. I was able to take the photo to the left with natural light (no flash) because of the little bit of sun that comes in from above. But I decided not to take my camera inside after the guide warned us that we would be crawling through some small holes to get to the paintings. We would have to pass through two agujeros, he said, which is the Spanish word for buttonhole. The inside of the cave was reminiscent of the caves I used to play in back at Sewanee. Some really impressive stalagtites and stalagmites. And the small holes we had to crawl through also brought back some memories. You have to get on your side to pass through, with one arm ahead of you and the other at your side. Once you get your head and shoulders through you can then get your second arm through and then the fun wiggling and squeezing and pushing to get your butt and legs through. The guide and my friend were cracking up at my difficulties getting through the second hole. It was a little easier for them, considering that I am probably at least a foot taller than the guide and maybe ten inches taller than my friend. The extra inches made it difficult to get a foothold to push myself through the holes. The guide thought it was hilarious...me with me front end stuck in the hole and my feet flailing around looking for some sort of leverage. Well, ok, I thought it was pretty funny, too. I have to admit the paintings were a bit anticlimactic, but the journey to get there was well worth the trip. The paintings are of two monkey and a tiger, but they've been worn away some-what by unauthorized visitors.

After Bombil Pek cave we trekked down to Jul Ik cave, the cave of air. It is called the "cave of air" or "cave of wind" because of the vapor that appears above the mouth of the cave during the hotter part of the day. It makes it look like the cave is breathing. To enter this cave you have to descend down into a smaller pit (without the dubious help of home-made ladders [not that I would have wanted to get down to Bombil Pek without them]). This cave had much higher ceilings that Bombil Pek and we had an easier time getting around inside. There are certain spaces in this cave where local indigenous people still hold religious ceremonies.
The most exciting thing about this cave was the stalagtites. Not only are they immensely beautiful, but when you knock on the sides they ring like a bell. Each stalagtite has a small hollow space inside were the water passes through to the tip. I'm including a video I took of us playing with the stalagtites...I think it sounds like we're playing around with a marimba.

When we finally emerged from the caves and dragged ourselves back to the trail head we were hot, tired and ridiculously dirty (but quite content). After a quick lunch of jam sandwiches and a swift dip in the river to wash ourselves off we hopped in the car and high-tailed it to Lanquin just in time to grab the last cabin and a delicious meal at a lovely hostel on the river. More on this in the next installment....