Panajachel, Guatemala

We were dropped off in the Central Plaza after our trip to the Pacaya volcano, so we sat there for a bit to soak up the sunshine. This really is the land of eternal spring. The first few nights here in Guatemala we stayed a nice little hotel near the Church of Our Lady of Mercy (known locally as La Merced), a yellow and white rococo church that also includes the ruins of an old monastery. It has a lovely garden on the roof from which you can see the whole city and the volcanoes that surround it. The photo of La Merced I've included I took from the roof of the hotel. That afternoon, Kristian got a lecture from a bank manager when she went to change money…two days before she changed some money and the bank teller gave her $20 worth of quetzales more than what she gave him in American dollars. This particular bank makes a photocopy of your passport when you change money (for security reasons, they said), and they recognized her from the day before. The manager scolded Kristian and made her pay the money back (not that Kristian had any issue with returning the money…it was just odd seeing her get sternly reprimanded by the bank manager, who tried to explain things in broken English and just made us more confused).

Later that afternoon we hopped on a shuttle for Panajachel, in the department of Sololá. This is one of the few places that I had visited in my previous trip to Guatemala, and I was really excited to see it again. Truly, Lake Atitlan is one of the most beautiful places I have been. Since we would be arriving in Panajachel (the most touristy of all the towns on the Lake), we decided to stay the night there instead of trying to catch a lancha (basically a water taxi) to a quieter town. We more or less picked a hotel at random and had called in a reservation the night before (we “rented” a phone from a Guatemalan version of a 7-Eleven). The hotel turned out to be pretty nice and very cheap, only Q180 between the two of us (that’s about $22.50). If any of you every want to stay a night or two in Panajachel, the hotel is called El Chaparral. It had a lush garden courtyard, a small but comfortable pool, and clean, relatively spacious rooms. We had met a friendly German guy named Heinrik on the shuttle bus from Antigua, and he ended up staying at the same hotel. We ate dinner with him that night in a restaurant overlooking the lake.

Hells bells, I forgot to mention the harrowing drive to the lake! Picture yourself on a rollercoaster, but then replace the rollercoaster car with a fifteen-passenger van and the metal frame of the ride with narrow roads with no shoulder or guardrail. I checked the speedometer at one point, and we were going 90 km/hr around hairpin turns. For those of you who have ever taken the back road from Sewanee down to Winchester, picture those curves on steeper hills and then imagine driving on them for three hours at about 50 mph. Then add in bicyclists and runners at the side of the road, other vans and cars, and a handful of chicken buses (brightly painted ex-American school buses used for mass transportation). I first thought the chicken buses were called chicken buses because you can carry chickens on them, but I’m now almost certain it’s because the drivers play chicken with everything else on the road. I thought I was going to die in a horrible car crash at least five times on that trip.

We spent two nights in Panajachel, both at the same hotel. The first day we took an overpriced private lancha to the town of Santa Cruz, a sleepy village about 20 minutes by boat from Panajachel. A word of warning: go to the dock on the Calle de Embarcadero to catch a public boat and don’t listen to boatmen who try to convince you that there aren’t any public boats in the middle of the day. Learn from our mistake. Lucky for us Santa Cruz was worth the trip, otherwise I might have been a bit more annoyed at being ripped off. We hung around in hammocks at a fantastic backpackers hostel called Iguana Perdida for the day…it’s a fun little spot that I will probably go back to later during this trip. It’s run by a British woman and her American husband. For those of you thinking of taking a trip down here, they offer free room and board (and at-cost drinks at the bar) for anyone willing to volunteer their services at the reception desk for two weeks.

That night we tried to find our German friend but ended up eating alone at a funny little restaurant called the Circus Bar. We caught up with Heinrik later, just as we were getting ready to pack it in for the day, and ended up grabbing a few drinks at one of the few bars still open. Unlike in Spain and Argentina (the other Spanish speaking countries I’ve spent some time in), restaurants and bars tend to close relatively early; they keep hours more like the ones kept by bars and restaurants in the States (well, except for those in places like New York and New Orleans). But this place stayed open until around 1:00 am, and we definitely closed the place down (Kristian is now facebook friends with one of the bouncers). It was an odd but very fun evening, and included drinks that were lit on fire and drunk through a straw. I didn’t try it myself, but Kristian did. We tried to find out the name of it (it was dark tequila in a shot glass that you light on fire and then drink quickly through a straw). One of the Guatemalans we befriended that evening (who, incidentally lives in Connecticut) said it was called “elephant pass,” as in it could make even an elephant pass out, but I’m not sure that that’s really what it’s called. We ended up making quite a few friends that night, did a little bit of salsa dancing with a salsa instructor/salesman from Xela, and Kristian was hit on by a very drunk woman who claimed she was there with her husband (the Guatemalan from Connecticut) but whose “husband” claimed he had just met her a few days ago. We keep meeting the strangest people.

I’ve just realized that this post is getting a bit too long, so I’ll save the rest for later. I’ll just add that despite our debauchery (which actually wasn’t all that bad), both Kristian and I were blissfully un-hungover the next morning and we spent the day in San Pedro, which is across the lake from Panajachel. This time we were able to get ourselves onto a public boat. I’ll fill in the details of that day later. Until then, then….