Stuck on the Gringo Trail: Travels in Guatemala

Copyright © Mark Moxon 2024

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This version was compiled on 30 March 2024

This work has been released under the Creative Commons licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). This means you are free to distribute this work to others as long as you retain this copyright notice, do not use the work for commercial purposes and do not alter, transform or build upon this work. For more details please read the full licence.

Front cover: Along Avenue 5a Sur, Antigua

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Preface

This book is a collection of writing from the road, covering a one-month trip I made to Guatemala in 2013/14. This was part of a larger, six-month journey that took me through Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia during 2013 and 2014.

The travelogue for all these countries and more can be found on my personal website at www.moxon.net, where you can also find travel tips, recommended journeys and further free books for you to download.

I’ve released this book and its companions via a Creative Commons Licence, which means you are free to distribute it to everyone and anyone, as long as you distribute it on a non-commercial basis and make no changes to it. If you know someone who might like this book, please pass it on; I make no money from it, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading it and recommending it to their friends.

Finally, please be aware that this book attempts to be humorous every now and then, so there’s a slight chance that it might cause offence to those who think my sense of humour is as amusing as a puddle of mud. On top of this, some parts will be out of date – which is why each article is dated – and others will betray the naivety of a traveller who discovered his way in the world by throwing himself into it headfirst. It is, however, an honest account of how I felt as I travelled through Central America for six months, and as such, I hope you enjoy it.

Mark Moxon

June 2014

The North

Flores

Written: 8 December 2013

Flores is the traditional first stop for travellers on their way from western Belize into Guatemala, and it’s easy to see why. It’s a small island off the southern shore of Lake Petén Itzá that’s joined to the mainland by a short causeway, and its winding cobbled streets and easy-going tourist vibe make it an excellent place to relax... so that’s exactly what we did.

We came in by colectivo from the Belizean border, which was a rather more crushed affair than the posh colectivos in the Yucatán, with five people squashed onto our three-seat row in the traditional manner of developing countries the world over. After taking a taxi from the bus station onto the island – or should I say tuk-tuk, as the taxis round here are identical to Thailand’s classic moped-taxi – we wandered around, looking for a place to stay. As we walked around the streets, cars drove past with terrible engine troubles; they kept backfiring in the most astonishing way, every few minutes. It was most odd.

But despite the noise, we soon found a room overlooking the lake in a pleasant hotel that was almost totally empty; we saw one set of guests in our entire four-night stay, and breakfast in the morning had a slightly eerie, post-apocalyptic feeling to it, as we sat alone in the large restaurant, wondering what the rest of the world knew that we didn’t. The atmosphere wasn’t helped by the breakfast itself, which was a typically tedious egg-and-tomato-salsa type affair, with black coffee and limp toast, and although the hotel had a swimming pool, it was full of so much chlorine that you’d only consider dipping your toes in it if you were trying to cure athlete’s foot. Still, it had a nice terrace where absolutely nobody else was trying to hog the sun loungers, and our corner room had brilliant views across the lake to the small village of San Miguel, so we were happy enough.

For it’s the lake setting that’s the real attraction here. The island, which you can walk around in 20 minutes, has a pleasant promenade all the way round the shoreline, and although the water level in the lake is currently a bit higher than normal following the huge storms of late October, only a small part of the walkway is flooded (and that part is shallow enough to be a haven for thousands of madly wriggling tadpoles, so it’s still an interesting part of the promenade experience).

Inland from the island shore, pretty cobbled streets rise steeply up to the hilltop centre of the island, which is dominated by a white church and a small park. Here the islanders have erected a massive Christmas tree, which looks slightly surreal next to the palm trees of the plaza, but it’s a reminder that round here, the festive season is really important; we’re now back into the ex-Spanish colonies after our brief visit to Belize, and the Catholic faith is strong round these parts.

But it isn’t European Catholicism, it’s distinctly Central American, and one of the best examples hit town a couple of days after we did. We’d assumed that the bangs on our arrival were down to badly tuned Central American engines, but it turned out we were wrong; it wasn’t the traffic making the bangs, but the build-up to the Quema del Diablo festival (Spanish for ‘Burning of the Devil’). This festival signals the beginning of preparations for the festive season, and starts with locals giving their homes a spring clean and piling the rubbish out in the street. Because they believe that the devil lurks in dark places like dirty corners of houses, behind the sofa and in piles of rubbish, this symbolises them cleaning the bad spirits out of their houses. As 6pm approaches on the 7th of December, they light the piles of rubbish, and often they’ll throw an effigy of the devil on top, just to make sure that he’s good and gone. There’s also a lot of firework action, and Chinese firecrackers are all the rage. Sometimes the devil effigy is stuffed with the things and pretty much explodes the pile of rubbish, scattering it among the cobblestones, which is exactly what happened to one burning devil we saw in the Flores backstreets; they just kept throwing on more firecrackers until there was nothing left of the Prince of Darkness except a burning pair of shoes.

The festivities continue with street parties. Homes and restaurants set up stalls on the street, where they sell local favourites like pastel boracho (rum-soaked sponge cake), bollitos de platano (plantain dumplings) and tamalitos de elote (corn tamales). There’s loud music from blaring speakers, dancing in the street and, down by the waterfront, an old-timer marimba band playing the most godawful music you have ever encountered; I swear that it was indistinguishable from plinky-plonky videogame music from the 1980s, and it went on for hours. Still, if what you need to banish the devil is the spiritual opposite of the Rolling Stones, then so be it.

But what I don’t get is how the fireworks keep on going, and going, and going. These aren’t fireworks in the western tradition, they’re just about noise, and while I can understand the appeal of Chinese firecrackers, I’m less convinced by those that simply explode in a massive bang, with no discernible point to them other than to induce coronary arrest through sonic assault. We’d thought the cars were backfiring, but no, it seems that the devil can only be flushed out using noise terrorism, because that night, the bangs went on through dinner and all the way to midnight. At least they didn’t go on all night... but they did start up again at 3.45am, when someone thought it would be fun to let off one of the loudest bangers every five minutes until 5am. And every time they did, they set off car alarms (yes, they were that loud), and then the local dogs took it as a personal attack and started barking at each other, and then the local cockerels started up, cock-a-doodle-doing insanely until eventually they sorted it all out between themselves, before the next bang kicked off the whole cacophony once more.

And this went on all through the wee hours, in a small village on a picturesque island in the middle of a lake, and that, I don’t understand, because surely almost everyone was in bed by then. Every bang, I thought I heard a crowd clapping and cheering... but it just turned out to be the dogs starting up and the cockerels kicking off, and I realised that it must be a small group of firework nutters who were committed to making sure nobody got any sleep, including us poor devils.

Apart from jumping out of our skin every time the firecrackers went off, we did precious little, as Peta wasn’t feeling too well and the weather was a bit hot to go far. We did manage to take a boat over to San Miguel where we visited Tayazal, an old Mayan ruin that had some good views over the lake; this was where the people of Chichén Itzá fled to after being forced out of Mexico in the mid-15th century, and they survived here until the Spanish conquered them in 1697, by which point they were the last remaining independent Mayan state. These days there’s not a lot to see except some pyramid-shaped mounds of overgrown rubble and some rather weatherbeaten stelae, but the views are worth the sweaty climb through the mosquito-infested forest.

But we mostly lounged around, reading books and drinking beer in hippy-themed lakeside bars, enjoying watching the people swimming in the lake in front of us. At this time of year, the high water levels in the lake cover the main boating quays in a couple of inches of water, hiding them from view but giving the swimmers concrete pathways just under the waterline that they use to walk out into the lake, before diving off into nothingness; it makes it look like they can all walk on water, which presumably proves that the devil has indeed been flushed out of Flores.

Now if only they’d stop letting off those military-grade explosions, we can start enjoying the festive season without jumping out of our skin every five minutes...

Tikal

Written: 9 December 2013

There’s a strong argument that Tikal is the most impressive of all the Mayan sites in Central America. At a whopping 65m, the site’s tallest building – the inspiringly named Temple IV – is the second-tallest pre-Colombian structure in the western hemisphere, second only to the 70m-high La Danta in El Mirador (which is also in Guatemala but requires a difficult five-day jungle trek to reach, so it’s for die-hard fans only). Temple IV at Tikal is half as tall again as the main pyramid at Caracol, and it’s no surprise that the sunrise tour to Tikal, where you climb to the top of Temple IV to watch the sun rise over the Gran Plaza, is a popular jaunt.

But to get to the sunrise from Flores you have to leave at 3am, and frankly we’re too old and morning-averse for that sort of nonsense, so instead we decided to go for the sunset tour that leaves Flores at a much more civilised 1pm. We made the right decision, because this morning the skies were moody and looking for a fight, but the sun soon chased the clouds away and by lunchtime the sky was a beautiful blue with nothing but an innocent-looking collection of small, white puffy clouds.

This was a good thing, because in the end the tour part of our tour was fairly forgettable, especially compared to the high quality of the guidance we got from Diego in Caracol. I guess all tours of Mayan sites have to start with the same basic information about the development of the Mayan empire, the succession of kings, the way new pyramids were built on top of the old ones and so on, but that was pretty much all we got in Tikal, whereas Diego went into things a lot more deeply and a lot more enthusiastically. There was nothing wrong with the Tikal tour, but it paled into insignificance compared to the architecture, whereas Diego’s tour managed to bring the architecture to life. There’s quite a difference, but without taking the Tikal tour we wouldn’t have had such a long day in the park, and we also wouldn’t have enjoyed such a brilliant end to the day, so in the end it was worth it.

Like Caracol but unlike, say, Chichén Itzá, Tikal is still smothered in rainforest, and although the major plazas have been cleared and there are wide roads connecting the main temple complexes, these pass through rainforest that’s lain relatively untouched since the Mayans abandoned the site around 900 AD. Tikal, then, hides its beauty under a bushel. Even when you get to climb a pyramid or a temple – the difference being that pyramids have four staircases and flat tops while temples have one staircase and a temple building on top – you don’t get to see much beyond the top of the rainforest canopy and a few of the taller structures poking above the trees. The large panoramic model of the site in the visitor centre shows how the ancient city fitted together, but when you wander round the site today, it’s like walking between a series of disconnected buildings that only fit together when you get above the trees.

This manages to be both atmospheric and slightly disappointing at the same time. While Caracol’s remoteness makes the jungle-clad nature of the site really magical, with Tikal it’s somehow less satisfying, though that’s hardly Tikal’s fault; it’s a much more popular and accessible site, after all, so it’s hard to feel adventurous. But where Caracol’s ruins are fairly untouched and you can stomp all over them with free rein, Tikal’s ruins are smothered in signs telling you not to sit here, not to climb up there, not to write on the walls and generally to stay back and admire them from a distance. And when you come to climb those that you are allowed to climb, most of them have their main stone steps closed, and instead you ascend via safe and sturdy wooden staircases tacked onto the side of the building, which is certainly more efficient than schlepping up blocky stone steps to the top, but it’s also a lot less fun.

Also, the largest temple of the lot is completely hidden behind the rainforest; you just can’t see it. They are currently working to restore the stone steps on the front, but you can only really see the summit poking through the treetops. Much more interesting is the Gran Plaza, where the 44m-high Temple I and 38m-high Temple II face off across a wide grassy expanse, with an impressive hill of buildings called the Acrópolis del Norte (North Acropolis) along the third side of the plaza. You are allowed to climb up the acropolis, where more than 12 temples sit crumbling in the sunlight, and the views down over the Gran Plaza are wonderful. You can’t climb Temple I any more, and Temple II’s wooden stairs were closed when we visited, but for me, wandering around the acropolis was the highlight of exploring Tikal.

As the sun sank slowly towards the horizon, we visited the twin pyramids of Complejo Q (Complex Q), which we climbed for tantalising views of the top of Temple I to the southwest; the Acrópolis Central (Central Acropolis), on the south side of the Gran Plaza, which has lots of small rooms and was probably a residential palace for Tikal’s nobles; El Mundo Perdido (the Lost World), where a number of large pyramids sit crumbling among the forest; and Temple III, which is still smothered in rainforest and shows what the buildings looked like when modern archaeologists first started analysing the site in 1848. But for the big event, the sunrise, we headed for the biggest of the lot, Temple IV.

As I mentioned, you can’t see a lot of Temple IV from the ground, and the climb up the staircase is shrouded in forest canopy, but when you burst out onto the summit of the temple, the view is astounding. Forest covers the land as far as you can see, and there in the distance, from left to right, you can see the tops of Temples I and II poking out into the sunlight, followed by the impressive summit of Temple III, then the tip of Temple V just visible behind a hill, and finally the flat top of the main pyramid in El Mundo Perdido. It’s impressive, to say the least, and as the view from the summit is due east, you can understand why the sunrise tour is so popular; watching rosy-fingered dawn throw its beams over this lot would be something else, if mornings are your thing.

Of course, facing east isn’t much use if you’re here to see the sunset, but unfortunately the western face of Temple IV is currently closed for maintenance, as unlike the solid steps of the eastern face, the west-facing side consists of little other than a walkway around a summit that’s made of slippery, moss-covered rocks whose steps have long since been worn away. A man with a large gun guards the wooden fence to stop visitors jumping over and risking certain death to see the sunset, but this is Guatemala, and it only takes a bribe of Q10 (about 80p) per person to sidestep the bureaucracy and get a chance to climb up the scaffolding for a wonderful view west over the treetops.

So, of course, we snuck round the side of the summit and climbed up into the scaffolding – well, I did, while Peta stuck to the walkway, from where you can still see the sunset – and it was superb. The sun slowly sank to the horizon, appearing from behind the clouds to give us a beautiful show while spider and howler monkeys swung through the treetops beneath us. True, there are no large Mayan ruins to the west of Temple IV, so the scenery was all about landscape rather than mankind, but that doesn’t matter. I’d trade a 3am start from Flores for the luscious reds of a Temple IV sunset any day.

The only drawback of watching the sunset from the top of Tikal is that you have to walk back to the entrance in the pitch black, picking your way through all the tree roots and holes in the snake-infested road with the incredible cacophony of the forest at night ringing in your ears. It’s made considerably more enjoyable by the fireflies who dance under the trees like magical fairy lanterns, and despite us not bringing a torch, this was Peta’s favourite part of the trip; the rainforest at night is really something to behold, even if you can’t see it. Luckily we were able to follow in the footsteps of a kindly American who’d come equipped with a smartphone, and we eventually got back to the van a good 45 minutes after those who’d taken the transport-only option. For that extra 45 minutes among the fireflies, and the know-how to bribe the guard at the top of the temple, the extra fee for the tour was worth every penny.

But I have to say that, if I had to choose between Tikal and Caracol, I’d choose Caracol. Its main pyramid might not be as big as Tikal’s temples, and you might not be allowed to stay for the sunrise or sunset, but it’s more atmospheric. Tikal’s a very close second, though, and it’s still not to be missed; it’s just that in the world of Mayan ruins, size isn’t everything.

Río Dulce

Written: 13 December 2013

When you’re heading south from Flores towards the highlands around Guatemala City and Antigua, you have a choice of two routes. The most popular choice is to head through the centre of the country to take in the picturesque swimming holes and caves of Semuc Champey, which is generally regarded as one of the most beautiful places in Guatemala; the other is to head down the eastern flank of the country to visit the Río Dulce, or ‘Sweet River’, where you can take a beautiful and oft-recommended boat trip out to the Caribbean coast and the Garifuna settlement of Lívingston. Here, the culture is unique in Guatemala as it doesn’t have a road connection to the rest of the country, so although it was a bit of a toss-up between the two routes, in the end we figured we’d try out Río Dulce rather than Semuc Champey, as it feels like we’ve seen enough caves and swimming holes to last a lifetime.

It turned out to be a good choice, because the area around the Río Dulce is quite beautiful. Or, at least we think it’s beautiful, because for most of our visit it was hidden behind vertical sheets of rain and low cloud, but even with the depressing weather that continues to dog our every move, the rainforest was delightful (and hey, it’s a rainforest, so what did we expect?). We also lucked out on our choice of accommodation; we stayed at the Hotel Kangaroo, which is a short boat ride from the main settlement of Fronteras (which everyone calls Río Dulce rather than Fronteras, even though Río Dulce is the name of the river – confused yet?). Tucked away in the fringes of the rainforest on a quiet tributary of the main river, it’s run by a proper Australian bloke called Gary (known to the locals as ‘Kangaroo’) who’s a brilliant source of information on what you can do in the area. His other half, Graciela, who hails from Mexico, runs a mean kitchen making Mexican food that tastes fresh and enticing – which is a lot more than can be said for the Mexican food we failed to enjoy in Mexico – and all this is in a charming wooden hotel that Gary built himself after he moved to Guatemala some seven years ago. We were happy to let him tell us what we should be seeing in the area, and he did a great job; it was a relief to hand over the planning reins to someone else for a change.

Castles and hot waterfalls

On our first day we took a kayak across the river to an old colonial fort, El Castillo de San Felipe, from where you can see the expanse of Lake Izabal stretching out to the west. I love old colonial forts, and this one, which dates from 1652, is wonderfully atmospheric, despite being rebuilt in 1956 from ruins. With turrets, dungeons, battlements, cannons, faded white walls, red tile roofs and great views, it ticks all the boxes that I’m looking for in a colonial fort, and despite being a quick trip to get us in the mood, it was, for me, the highlight of our trip to Río Dulce, probably because it was the only time that the weather held off long enough for us to actually see anything.

The next day we took a colectivo along the northern shore of the lake to Finca El Paraíso, a ranch that’s home to a hot waterfall flowing into a cool river in the rainforest. There are rock pools at the top of the waterfall containing steaming hot water, where you can relax under the canopy while rubbing volcanic mud into your pores, and there’s even a small cave at the foot of the falls that you can duck into for a quick sauna, though as the roof is only about a foot above the waterline, it’s less of a sauna and more of a steam-cleaner for your head; still, it’s an enjoyable way to clear out the sinuses, while fish nip at your extremities in the eerily yellow water. The great thing about the waterfall is that it’s even enjoyable in the rain, which is a good job because while we were there the heavens opened and the rain set in with a vengeance.

We should perhaps have taken a bit more notice, because our next colectivo stop along the road, El Boquerón, was a complete washout. This river canyon is apparently well worth exploring, so we happily paid the entrance fee and hired a man to take us upstream, but he stopped at the first set of rocks after about five minutes of paddling, pointing to a set of rapids and saying that the rain had made it impassable from this point. He pulled up to a rock and we clambered about ten feet further so we could see the rapids for ourselves, but the whole point of the boat trip is to reach a small beach a bit further on, where you can jump out of the boat and explore the canyon on foot; instead the trip was over before it started and was a total waste of time and money, and as if to rub it in, the rain suddenly switched from heavy to torrential, soaking us to the skin as we shivered in the front of the exposed canoe. The man rowed us back as the downpour continued, and although as soon as we jumped back onto the shore it lessened a bit, it still left us feeling cold, wet and fed up, which is pretty much how we felt all the way back to Fronteras on the colectivo.

Up the Río Dulce to Lívingston

That night the downpour didn’t just settle in, it started applying for residency, which was a bit annoying as we’d saved the best trip until our last day; the guidebooks rave about the boat trip up the Río Dulce to Lívingston, and we simply had to give it a go now that we were here. The boats that take you downriver are actually colectivos that stop off at a few touristy spots on the way, though most of the people on our boat turned out to be tourists rather than locals. Most notably, one of the other passengers was a classic long-haired and bearded hippy, who had wonderfully colourful trousers, a sleeveless T-shirt sporting an amazing print of a native American, and the most astonishing body odour that I’ve ever sat downwind from. There were four rows of seats in the boat, with two or three people in each row, and we’d ended up at the back; the hippy was right in front of us, and every time he raised his arms to take a picture, the smell that hit us was so intense it made us cough. It was quite mind-blowing.

As a result, there was a silver lining to the dreadful set of clouds that rolled in as soon as we started out east towards the coast. As we entered the waters of El Golfete, the wide part of the Río Dulce to the east of Fronteras town, the rain started getting serious and the boat started picking up speed, blowing the stair rods under the boat’s small tarpaulin roof and straight into our faces. This was a bit too much for the hippy, whose body was optimistically exposed to the elements, so he asked the driver if he could climb to the front of the boat to pull out a rug. As he clambered from row to row, each of the rows he passed collapsed in coughing fits until he reached the front, where he stood for ages trying to open up his pack, the scent of his armpits dousing the entire boat in noxious fumes. When he finally pulled out his rug and sat down at the front with his arms down by his sides, the whole boat gave out a collective sigh of relief. The poor girl on the front row must have wondered what had hit her.

Annoyingly, the weather continued to be appalling all the way to Lívingston, so we couldn’t see the shores of the lake, and when we entered La Cueva de la Vaca, the steep-sided gorge just short of our destination, the sides were smothered in fog and the wildlife that is normally there for all the world to see was hiding from the onslaught. It was a damp way to reach the Caribbean coast, where we sat for ten minutes, drifting in the middle of the river, while the young boy who was driving our boat starting panicking because he’d run out of petrol; a quick phone call to his boss revealed that all he had to do was pull the engine hose out of one petrol can and stick it into the one on the other side of the cabin, so sheepishly he did just that and off we set again, disaster averted.

We had three hours to explore Lívingston before the return journey, so we plodded around town, making the most of a short break in the weather to check out the two streets that make up this small coastal town; I was surprised how touristy the main road was, because one of the appeals of Lívingston is its remote and cut-off nature, but I guess it’s on the tourist trail, and you can’t be both remote and popular. After a quick poke around, we jumped into a restaurant to avoid the next burst of rain and to sample the famous local dish tapado, which is a coconut and coriander soup with shrimps, a whole crab and a whole dried fish dropped unceremoniously into the top. It tasted all right, I suppose, but the soup was just like any other coconut curry soup I’ve tasted, and the seafood and fish elements took so much effort to dissect with our fingers and teeth that I rather failed to see the appeal. Still, this is what you’re supposed to eat when you’re in Lívingston, so eat it we did, and having ticked off the boxes while wondering what the fuss was all about, we jumped back into the boat as the clouds parted a little and some blue sky started to tentatively poke its way through the grey.

On the way back we at least got to see what we’d completely missed the first time round, and I have to say that this ‘must-see’ is probably only worth the effort in gorgeous weather, when it would indeed be a pleasant ride. The gorge has seemingly vertical walls of rainforest on either side, which is diverting for a while, and the lake has some enjoyable forested shores, but it’s not that scintillating. It’s a pleasant journey, but no more, and if you’re already wet and the weather isn’t beautiful, it can get pretty cold in the back of the boat. The lake is huge, too, and by the end we were wishing the journey away, particularly as we’d managed to pick up an eastern European woman who was travelling with her two daughters, and who started talking loudly to her kin the minute she joined the boat in Lívingston, and managed to talk continuously and without pausing for breath for the entire hour-and-a-half journey to Río Dulce. It was an astonishing feat, and the silence that enveloped us when she was finally dropped off at one of the marinas was pure bliss. I’m just thankful that I couldn’t understand a word she said; her daughters looked long-suffering and just as bored as us.

It says a lot that my main memories of the boat trip were a smelly hippy and a chatterbox mother. Never mind, the Hotel Kangaroo was a great place to relax, and in the end the choice to visit Río Dolce over Semuc Champey was the right one. Even before our visit to the swamp, we were a bit tired of swimming in rock pools and wading through half-flooded caves, but after being rained on for so long, the thought of going through that again makes us shudder. It’s clearly time to get out of the wetlands and head for dry land.

The Sun Dog

Written: 12 December 2013

Fronteras, the small town at the western end of the Río Dulce river that joins Lake Izabal to the Caribbean Sea, is well named. We found this out one rainy afternoon, after jumping off the colectivo from our failed visit to the canyon at El Boquerón.

The Sun Dog is the place to go to get a lift to the Hotel Kangaroo; you just rock up to the bar and ask them to call the hotel, and after a short wait the Kangaroo boat zooms into view to whisk you off to your hut in the swamp. We figured we’d grab something to eat before calling for our lift, so we settled down at one end of the row of bar stools that look out onto the harbour, savouring the fact that there was finally a roof over our heads so we could at least try to get dry. At the other end of the row of bar stools was a black man with a laptop, a couple of grizzled-looking white guys with well-worn baseball caps, leathery skin and four-day stubble, and a stocky American with blue eyes and cropped hair.

That’s when the old guy sauntered into the bar and sat down next to Peta, to a noisy greeting from the blue-eyed man. Straight away he fished out a bag of weed from his pocket and pulled a couple of generous pinches onto the table, where he started separating the grass from the dried stalks and breaking the buds up into smaller bits. Then out came the papers, and a few seconds later he’d sparked up and blown out a big cloud of grey smoke, instantly filling the bar with the astoundingly strong smell of powerful marijuana.

Passing the joint to his blue-eyed friend, he smiled over at us as we nursed our beers and tried to dry out. They seemed friendly enough as we wondered whether to say hello, but then a young man who’d been drinking nearby came over and asked the old guy whether there was anywhere round here that he could buy some weed, and the old guy replied, ‘Sure, you can buy some off me if you like.’

‘You picked the right guy to ask,’ said the blue-eyed man as the old guy asked, ‘How much do you want? This much?’ And he piled up a few generous pinches of grass on the bar and pushed it towards the young man, who said, ‘Yeah, that’s great – how much is that?’

‘Twenty quetzales should do’, said the old man, and the deal was done with a wink and a smile for just over £1.50. And so it turned out that we’d accidentally sat next to the local drug dealer, and his chosen medium for advertising his services was smoke signals – great, big clouds of it.

It then started getting a lot weirder. The blue-eyed man soon struck up a conversation with us and tried to get us interested in taking a trip out to see the real locals, the Mayans, out in the jungle, as apparently their friend on the laptop was working for an NGO that ran expeditions to take medicine to the locals, and they all worked for him. For a fee they were taking tourists along to see how the locals really lived, as part of educating tourists and making a few bob for the NGO; amazingly, this turned out to be a genuine offer – we checked out their website later on, and yes, that’s exactly what the NGO was all about – but at the time we just assumed it was some kind of scam, so we politely said that sounded interesting but, well, you know... and then our food arrived and they left us to eat as they turned back to their conversation.

After we’d finished eating, we met another of the Sun Dog’s locals. He hobbled in, said hello to the old guy, and started going on about how his leg was really giving him gyp and that he really could do with a little help managing the pain. He then handed the old man some money in exchange for, well, something we couldn’t see, and then he sat down next to Peta and instantly started talking straight at her like there was no time like the present. He’d apparently landed on his leg in a motorbike accident – while almost stationary, believe it or not – and he was down here recuperating because it was cheaper to live in Guatemala than in the USA. He’d just got back from Miami where he’d stocked up on his medicines, and he was just hanging out, waiting to get better.

The problem was, he wasn’t right in the head, though quite how, we couldn’t tell. He rabbited on, jumping from topic to topic, with slightly wild eyes and a strong element of fidgeting and nervousness. It seemed pretty obvious he was on something pretty strong, and he kept mentioning people stealing bags, having to watch your pockets round here, and various other things that started making us a bit paranoid. Perhaps the clouds of acrid smoke wafting across the bar were beginning to affect us, but it all started to feel a bit close for comfort, so we asked the barman to call the Hotel Kangaroo and kept an eye on our stuff.

And then, as if the characters couldn’t get any stranger, a middle-aged man pulled up to the harbour in a speedboat, looking scarily like the bastard blonde child of a moustachioed Tom Selleck from Magnum PI, all dressed up in the flowery shirts of Hawaii Five-O; hell, he looked like Keith Lemon, and this without any hint of irony. Meanwhile his wife was blonde and busty, wearing tight, bright pink and looking like she was losing the war with gravity, and it suddenly felt like we had the whole set: the government boys, the drug dealer, the drug addict and now the exotic, fly-by-wire narcotic cops. And us, sitting in the middle, wondering what was going on.

Thank god the hotel boat pulled up a couple of minutes later, and we jumped on board and headed for the safety of the swamp. When the characters you meet in the bar are so clichéd that you can’t tell what’s real and what’s wafting in on the local air, it’s hard not to get a little paranoid. This is quite literally frontier-land, after all...

Dampened Enthusiasm

Written: 15 December 2013

You only really notice something when it’s gone, and now that we’re in the highlands of Guatemala, at a pleasant 1500m above sea level, we can finally feel free of the astonishing dampness that has been hanging round our heads since we stepped off the plane in Mexico in October. For the first time in seven weeks, I don’t feel like I’m slowly dissolving.

It hasn’t just been the humidity, which is a fact of life in the tropics, but it’s the continuing rain. I’m not going to pretend that it shouldn’t be raining at all – this is a lush and tropical part of the world, so it’d be pretty churlish to complain that there’s rain in the rainforest – but it turns out we’ve been really unlucky with the weather. And when you spend most of your time outside, as you do when travelling, then when the weather refuses to play ball, it makes life that much harder. Wherever we go we hear the locals saying that the rain has been really heavy this year and that it isn’t normally this wet in December, and all the guidebooks insist that the best time to visit Central America is between November and March, so it’s just plain old bad luck that things have been wetter than we were expecting. The problem is, this bad luck is now in danger of turning this trip into a health hazard.

Green Fur

Our first inkling that things were getting serious was back in San Ignacio in Belize, when we returned to our hotel from our expedition to the remote jungle ruins of Caracol, and started packing our bags ready for an early departure the following morning. Peta tipped her stuff out onto the bed, ready for the regular challenge of trying to squash it all into her backpack, when she recoiled with an animated, ‘Urgh!’ I assumed she’d found a dead cockroach or something equally tropical, but no, she’d found her leather belt, which uncoiled to reveal a thick coating of green fur. ‘It’s mouldy,’ she said, and had to wash it off before repacking it.

More worrying – to me, anyway – was that my trusty Australian bush hat, with whom I’ve shared quite a few traumas over the years, was also covered in green fur, and he’d just been sitting on the side rather than being stuffed into the bottom of a backpack. It seemed that the tropical steam of western Belize was attacking anything animal-based, and we’re animal-based too, so we were clearly next. Unaware of the dangers lurking ahead, we packed up and cleared out, heading for what we hoped would be a rather drier Guatemala.

Flores was indeed slightly better, with only the odd passing thunderstorm to dodge, but perhaps our biggest mistake was in Río Dulce, where we booked into what was effectively a glorified garden shed in a swamp at the Hotel Kangaroo. It was here that we settled in for some of the heaviest rain of our trip so far: it rained when we went to visit the hot springs of Finca Paradíso, it rained when we visited the gorge of El Boquerón, and it rained when we took the ‘must-see’ boat trip from Río Dulce to Lívingston. We took all this wet misery in our stride, but even we were struggling to smile through the adversity when the storm hit on our penultimate night, because boy, did it hit hard.

To be fair, the Hotel Kangaroo was a great spot, and we loved our little swamp hut. The tin roof was fun, the swamp underneath the bedroom was entertaining, and going to sleep to the sound of the chirping rainforest was a delight; hell, even when Peta found a long-dead and desiccated frog in the bed, it wasn’t a problem, it was all part of the fun. But a tin-roofed hut isn’t the best place to be during an almighty, all-night tropical downpour, and the noise level was astounding; we had to shout above the cacophony of the rain smashing down on the bare metal roof, and we slept fitfully until 4am, when the first drips started to appear. The tin was still managing to keep the water out, but somehow the wooden beams holding it up had started getting sodden, and drips formed in two lines across the whole span of the bedroom. Peta had one drip directly above her head and I had another directly above mine, and unknown to us the laptop had its own drip, as did our backpacks and our towels. After a few drips woke us up from our troubled restlessness, we switched on the lights and rescued as much as we could from the onslaught – luckily nothing was damaged, and the laptop was in its neoprene cover, so that was a lucky escape – but the damage to our energy levels was already done.

By the time we woke up the next morning, it was too late. Peta had developed a bit of a cough in Flores, and coughs tend to be a bit stubborn round these parts, but after our dousing in the swamp it developed into full-blown bronchitis (and having suffered from a lot of bronchitis as a child, Peta knows when she’s got bronchitis rather than a normal cough). It turns out that staying in a swamp in an open-air tin-roofed shed with holes for windows isn’t the best thing for an asthmatic with bronchitis, so we got ourselves ready for another move, this time to Antigua, which the weather forecast insisted was sunny, dry, cool and full of healing mountain air.

So we started packing, ready for the morning departure, and guess what? Peta’s belt was again covered in green fur, and my bush hat was looking pretty green around the gills too, with nasty patches of fluffy mould making itself quite at home all around the inside rim. This time we just stuffed them in our packs and jumped onto the southbound bus, running scared for the drier heights of the Guatemalan highlands without so much as a backward glance.

Drier Times

Of course, it rained as we took the long bus ride to Antigua. I say ‘of course’ because we seem to have had pretty bad luck when it comes to travelling in the rain. The first real washout was when we travelled from Mexico to Belize and arrived in the dark in the most torrential downpour you’ve ever seen, soaked to the skin. Our next journey, from Caye Caulker to San Ignacio, was a total washout too, and of course I managed to sit just downwind from the only broken window on the bus. The man sitting next to the window tried to shut it a couple of times but it kept falling down, so he gave up, probably because he was relatively dry; instead, the rain poured straight into my face and down my front, soaking me alone amongst my neighbours. Then it rained again when we travelled from Flores to Río Dulce, and I thought we’d be safe in our hermetically sealed first-class bus, but there was a hole in the sill at the bottom of our window where the water started pooling, and it wasn’t long before it had turned into a cauldron of rainwater that spat huge drops right into my lap. I plugged it up with a screwed-up biscuit wrapper, though it wasn’t entirely successful, and I arrived at the other end with a large and rather suggestive damp patch on my trousers. I’m clearly not good at staying dry on our longer journeys.

So when it started raining as we pulled into Antigua, I just shrugged and gave up. The weather forecast had been for sun with a few clouds, and with no rain at all for the next seven days; when we arrived and I refreshed the forecast, the next few days had miraculously changed to clouds and rain. Our first meal in Antigua that night, which we took in a lovely garden out the back of a sumptuous Indian restaurant, was rained off as another torrential downpour came down on me and my chicken madras, sending the waiters out in a scurry of activity that ended with us having to finish our meal inside, wondering whether we were ever going to be able to shake off this ridiculous weather. ‘You’ll be fine in Antigua,’ the other travellers had said back in the Kangaroo. ‘There’s loads of sunshine there.’ Hmm.

But, to be fair, Antigua is still really dry compared to the swamps and rainforests, and when we arrived and unzipped our packs, the stench and funk of seven weeks of humidity flowed out into the room like a malevolent sea fog. We stuffed all our clothes into a bag, keeping just one set of our driest clothes to wear, and banished the swamp-fest to the hotel’s laundry service; and the next day the sun managed to come out for a while, so we put all our leather goods in the sunlight, so the ultraviolet would kill off the mould spores that were still trying to take over.

And now that’s all done and we have our clothes back, cleaned and dried, it feels good. The breeze here in Antigua is dry, even when it’s overcast, and when you go to bed it doesn’t feel like you’re climbing into a clubber’s discarded sock. The trench foot that I’ve been suffering from for a couple of weeks is steadily drying out, and Peta’s bronchitis is slowly improving, though that may also be down to the medicine that we just bought from the chemist, which includes as one of its ingredients a vasco-dilator that is apparently a banned Class C drug in the UK, and which athletes use as a performance-enhancing drug; Peta’s very impressed with it, anyway, and is now convinced she has the lung capacity of Mo Farah.

So we’ve escaped from the fug of the lowlands and can finally take a deep, if congested breath... and relax. Now all we need is for the clouds to disperse so we can actually see the volcanoes that Antigua is famed for, and we’ll be on top of the world, both figuratively and literally. We’ll see.

The South

Antigua

Written: 17 December 2013

To be honest, I thought it was all going to be about the volcanoes. I mean, every photo you see of Antigua – one of Guatemala’s most popular and most photographed tourist destinations – has in the background the most wonderful volcanic cone, but this weather is simply not interested in playing ball. The second after we’d pulled into town and checked into our hotel, I ran up onto the roof to see what the fuss was all about, but all I could see was low-lying cloud and the base of what may or may not have been a volcano. It felt a bit like going on the London Eye in a pea-souper; I was a bit gutted, to be honest.

But it turns out there is a lot more to Antigua than volcanoes, and I needn’t have worried. After our dousing in the rainforest we just needed a rest, and Antigua is the perfect place for sitting around and recuperating. It’s a cosmopolitan town with shops, restaurants, a very pretty central square, and all the luxuries you dream of as a middle-class tourist stuck in the rainforest, whether it’s coffee shops or organic supermarkets or decent wi-fi. And all this is wrapped up in lovely colonial architecture that’s still enjoyably faded round the edges.

The best parts of Antigua aren’t that obvious at first glance, because as with most Spanish colonial towns, there’s not a lot to see on the streets, particularly when things slow down around lunchtime. The narrow, raised pavements and cobbled road surfaces are a bit of a pain to navigate, and nothing spills out into the street, so when you first look around town it all seems a bit quiet. But as you walk along and peer into the doorways, a whole world opens up of picturesque garden courtyards, delightful open-air restaurants and sweet little shopping enclaves that you can’t resist exploring. Antigua might be a pretty town on the outside, but on the inside it’s utterly charming.

We revelled in all this luxury. We ate Indian and Western food, studiously avoiding anything Mexican or Guatemalan, because, frankly, we’re getting a bit tired of corn-based fare. We drank in bars where ex-pats roamed and English was the lingua franca. And we did precious little for a couple of days, except potter around town, enjoying the clean, dry mountain air. Sometimes you want to explore a country’s culture and sample everything that’s on offer, and sometimes you just want home comforts; in Antigua, we unselfconsciously went for the latter.

We also sat for ages in the pretty main plaza, Parque Central, watching the world go by while Mayan women in their colourful clothes tried to sell us scarves and friendship bracelets, and little boys ran around with shoe-shining kits and boxes of chewing gum. The locals are friendly and it isn’t a hard sell, and they always move on when you smile and say ‘No gracias’, which is sensible because Antigua is full of middle-class whites and Central American tourists who wouldn’t take kindly to hardcore touts. Clearly tourism is a very important part of Antigua’s modern role – being declared a World Heritage site in 1976 certainly helped with that – but this doesn’t feel like a Mayan Disneyland, it just feels like a pleasant and culturally intriguing part of the world. Antigua is famous for its schools that teach Spanish to foreigners, and I’d worried that it was going to be annoyingly western and full of irritating hipster-types, just out of ‘uni’ and seeing the world on mummy and daddy’s bank balance, but actually it was full of older, middle-class couples strolling around the colonnades and soaking up the atmosphere in the classy restaurants and enticing shops.

On our second day in town we did manage to get motivated enough to take a taxi to Cerro de la Cruz, a small park on a hill overlooking the town that sports a large concrete cross and fantastic views across town. Unfortunately Volcán de Agua, the huge volcano that sits just to the south of Antigua and which features in all the tourist brochures, was still shrouded in cloud so the views weren’t quite as dramatic as they could have been, and we could only see the bottom slopes of the other two volcanoes in the vicinity, Acetenango and Volcán de Fuego. But the walk down the hill back into town was still very enjoyable, and we passed lots of ruined churches from the old colonial days, when Antigua was the capital of Spanish-controlled Guatemala and had a whopping 38 churches dotted around the streets. It held this title from 1543 to 1776, when the region’s earthquakes finally forced the Spanish to move the capital to what is now Guatemala City. This is why Antigua has its name; before 1776, it was known by the rather ridiculous title of ‘La Muy Noble y Muy Leal Cuidad de Santiago de los Caballeros de Goathemalan’ or ‘The Very Noble and Very Loyal City of Saint James of the Knights of Guatemala’, but when the capital moved, it was renamed ‘La Antigua Guatemala’ (‘Old Guatemala’), or just Antigua for short.

So we ended up staying in town for three nights, a little longer than we’d originally planned, and it was a delight. Sadly, the clouds didn’t budge from the tops of the volcanoes for one minute; I even got up at dawn one day and went on the hotel roof, just in case, but it was as cloudy as ever, so all we got to see of the fabled cones were the lower flanks. I had vaguely toyed with the idea of climbing Volcán de Agua, the closest peak to town, which you can do reasonably easily in a day, but it’s no fun walking for hours through freezing cloud if there’s no chance of a view at the end of it, so I parked that idea and settled for another latte instead. Oh, and one of those rather delicious banana and raisin cakes too, if you don’t mind.

Mmm, we did enjoy Antigua...

Lago de Atitlán

Written: 23 December 2013

There are three main aspects to the personality of Lago de Atitlán, the large volcanic lake that’s about three hours’ drive west of Antigua. First there’s the astounding landscape, which is truly world class; then there’s the Mayan culture, which is all around you in the colourful clothes and smiling faces of the locals; and finally there’s the tourism, which is relatively unsophisticated but which is growing all the time. These three personalities rub shoulders in what seems to me to be a slightly irritated tolerance of each other, and although I absolutely fell in love with the landscape, I’m not sure I entirely fell for the charms of the other two.

And what a landscape! Lago de Atitlán is essentially a huge flooded volcanic crater, formed by a gargantuan explosion some 85,000 years ago that threw 72 cubic miles of ash out as far as Florida and Ecuador. So much material was expelled that the volcano effectively collapsed on itself, leaving a crater some 18km across at its widest point. This hole is now full of water, forming a 300m-deep lake that’s surrounded by the steep, forested slopes of the crater rim, and towering above the lake are three distinct and classically shaped volcanic cones: Volcán Atitlán forms part of the southern crater rim, while Volcán San Pedro and Volcán Tolimán stick out into the lake, on the western and southern shores respectively. San Pedro is dormant and Tolimán hasn’t erupted in modern times, but Atitlán last erupted in 1853 and remains active. It all adds to the thrill of being inside a volcano, and every now and then you can hear deep rumbles through the earth from volcanoes further along the chain (notably Volcán Fuego, which is between Antigua and Lago de Atitlán and which spews out smoke and ash relatively often).

The drive from the Antigua road down into the crater is impressive, to say the least. Steep switchback roads plummet down the crater rim, giving you amazing views across the grey-blue waters of the lake and towards the volcanic cones in the distance. To add to the thrill, some of the lonelier roads around the lake have been (and, every now and then, still are) home to bandits who hold up buses and rob walkers, so the advice is to check on the situation before venturing out alone, and to walk with a guide unless you’re absolutely certain it’s safe. It’s all part of the fun, I guess.

San Pedro La Laguna

It’s no surprise to find that one of the major appeals of Lago de Atitlán is to sit there gawping at the scenery, so we chose a hotel that let us do exactly that. There are quite a few villages dotted around the lake shore, each of them with a different atmosphere, and we followed the traveller herd and chose to stay in San Pedro La Laguna on the western shore. Peta – who is now in charge of finding our accommodation after I realised it was stressing me out too much – picked the Hotel Mikaso because it sounded like one of the better hotels in town, and she chose well, for the Mikaso has what must be one of the best views of the lake in the whole of San Pedro. Stuck out on a little peninsula at the eastern edge of town, its terrace has a 270-degree view of the lake looking east, with the three volcano cones to the south and the huge expanse of the lake just laid out in front of you. It enjoys a stunning sunset vista, and we spent many a long hour on the terrace, soaking up the views in the rather luxurious hot tub that sits right on the edge of the action.

It also helped that when we arrived, we were practically the only people in the hotel. It’s weird, but even though Christmas is only a few days away, Guatemala has been really quiet throughout our visit (if you ignore the constant barrage of thermonuclear firework explosions that have punctuated every single day since we first experienced them in Flores). For the first few days we saw just one other couple in the hotel, and we had the whole place to ourselves (though it did start to fill up towards the end of our stay, so there is life out there somewhere).

This may have been down to the weather, which was pretty ropey when we arrived. Lago de Atitlán is an exposed part of the world, and when the wind blows, it really goes for it; as soon as we arrived at the hotel, we dropped our bags and went up to the top floor for a quick beer in the in the hotel’s dimly lit conservatory restaurant, where the very friendly boy behind the counter sprang into life and lit us a log fire, while the winds rattled the window panes like something out of The Shining. That night, and the night after, the noise of the lake waters crashing against the hotel was bordering on the scary, especially as our room had a lake view on two sides, and the waves were crashing straight into our balcony and, at times, splashing the windows with foam. I idly wondered whether everyone else knew something that we didn’t, and the view from our balcony really didn’t help set my mind at ease.

You see, the problem with Lago de Atitlán is that the lake shore is somewhat fickle, and in recent years the water level has risen considerably, consuming a number of lakeside properties. These lonely buildings still stand just off the side of the lake, with waves crashing through their shattered downstairs windows and black tide marks rising up their whitewashed walls. There is much debate as the exact cause of the lake’s changeable nature; some say that soil wash-off from deforestation has clogged up the lake’s natural overflow fissures, while others blame a massive bloom of cyanobacteria in 2009 which covered the lake in a nasty brown goo, up to a metre deep in parts.

Whatever the real reason, the Mayans already knew about the lake’s temperamental nature, as they chose to build their settlements high up on the lake’s shores; with hindsight, the owners of the now submerged properties around the lake shore should probably have taken more notice of the locals when they spoke of the lake levels rising and falling on a 50- or 70-year cycle. But it’s not really that surprising that nobody listened, because the scale of the rise is astounding: it’s risen some 5m since 2009 and it’s still clawing away at the waterfront real estate. A sobering thought is the recent archaeological discovery of a site called Samabaj, a Mayan ceremonial site dating from more than 2000 years ago that contains various stone pots, sculptures, stelae and, tellingly, five stone docks. It’s now 35m underwater, which just shows how much the lake level has changed since then.

So as we lay there in bed, with the wind rattling the windows and the waves smashing against our veranda, I tried not to think of the submerged buildings right next door to our hotel. I didn’t entirely succeed.

Man and Lake

The landscape is, therefore, one of the biggest draw cards around here, and it’s easy to see why. Luckily the winds calmed down after a couple of days and the sky turned a pure blue, and we took this opportunity to rush up to the top of the crater rim for sunrise, a trip that completely blew us away. But another big attraction of the lake is the collection of different towns and villages dotted around the shoreline, all of which are connected by boat, and this is perhaps where I fell out of love with Atitlán a little.

Because of the Mayan’s sensible approach to building their settlements, all the villages are bipolar in nature: the Mayans have their part up the hill, and the tourists have their part down on the shoreline. This manages to separate the two cultures pretty effectively, so although you get to see lots of beautifully dressed Mayans wandering around town and on the launches that ply their trade between the settlements, the only ones you tend to meet are those involved in the tourist trade somehow. Those working in the hotels and restaurants are friendly but no longer terribly Mayan, so the only traditional Mayans you meet are those who pop down the hill to tourist-ville to try to sell you something, mostly (it seems) banana bread, which women carry on their heads throughout the day, ready to interrupt you at every opportunity to see if you want to buy any.

The problem is, they don’t seem to apply any intelligence to the process, and if you stand somewhere busy, such as the main road leading up from the dock in San Pedro, then within five minutes the same woman will ask you five times whether you want to buy any banana bread. It would help if it was an animated process, but you can hear the defeat in their voices; it’s almost deadpan, the way they recite their endless litany of ‘¿Pan de banano?’ while looking up at you with slightly hurt eyes, as you try to remain polite with your worn-out responses of ‘No gracias’ and ‘Mas tarde’. At first it’s all a bit cute, smiling at the locals as they understandably try to make a living, but it really starts to wear thin, and you can see some visitors really struggling – and sometimes failing – to keep their cool.

Add in the young boys selling popcorn, the men selling cashew nuts and the inevitable crowds of shoe-shine boys, and it all gets to be a bit of a drag... but when you find out that they let the sellers into the bars and restaurants, so your evening soiree is constantly interrupted by requests to buy banana bread – when I’m eating, for pity’s sake! – then the divide between the Mayan communities up the slope and the westerners at the bottom is only made greater.

The problem is only compounded by the annoying nature of the tourists here, at least those in San Pedro and its neighbour across the water, San Marcos La Laguna. The pervading vibe is one of earth-loving, tofu-eating flower children trying to align their chakras and purge their energy centres, but to me it felt ever so slightly self-indulgent, especially as so many of the participants seem to be just out of ‘uni’ and seem to have magically come across enough money to buy a nice long holiday in a yoga retreat by the shores of the lake, without having had to work for it first. Sure, there’s a quite entertaining collection of older hippies who seem more genuine and a bit more frazzled by the darker side of the counterculture, but the talk in the vegetarian-friendly cafés is all about healing crystals and aura enhancement and – I kid you not – how important it is to make sure your pillows are organic, seeing how you spend so much time right next to them.

Now I’m a bit of a hippy at heart – I often have long hair and I like the idealism of the whole sixties thing – but I’m a modern, post-punk hippy who thinks Never Mind the Bollocks is a masterpiece, and I can’t be doing with the rather spoilt side of the younger tune-in, drop-out crowd. Spending time outside of normal society is fine once you’ve put enough into society to be able to opt out of it in the first place, but opting out before you’ve even tried to make a contribution because you think you’re ‘just too creative to do the rat race’ is a bit irritating to those of us who’ve held down a job for longer than a summer holiday. The villages round Lago de Atitlán reek of this slightly indulgent version of the hippy ideal, and I really didn’t like it much; when you find yourself wanting to grab most of the other tourists by the shoulders and shake some responsibility into them, it’s probably not a good sign.

Around the Lake

Knowing that San Pedro isn’t the be all and end all of lake culture, we spent a couple of days exploring the various towns and villages round the lake, and they’re an interesting bunch. San Pedro, where we stayed, is apparently the party town around the lake, but all we could find were a couple of small bars where people tended to hang out without a great deal of enthusiasm, and two music venues in the main drag that made us glad we hadn’t stayed at that end of town. The eastern end of town is laid out along lots of small, winding pathways that are just wide enough to fit a tuk-tuk down, and off these pathways are some cute restaurants, some with pretty gardens but most with slightly drab and weatherbeaten courtyards with plastic tables and dubious music. It’s fun and laid back, but it’s easy to wear out the best venues within a couple of days.

Nearby San Marcos is the most extreme hippy hangout, but it keeps most of its treasures behind closed doors; we wandered along the two thin tracks that join the lake to the Mayan village centre, but everything seemed to be shut. This is the home of the quietest retreats, so perhaps the tranquillity should have come as no surprise, but while we thought it would make a pleasant day trip, we gave up looking for the pulse after an hour or so of wandering.

Across the lake is the main tourist centre of Panajachel, which I rather liked, perhaps because it’s the only settlement that unashamedly makes the most of the shoreline. It’s pretty tourist-oriented, with lots of large restaurants overlooking the lake shore, and a whole fleet of tacky party boats pulled up in the harbour, blasting out music at full volume, whether the town wants to hear it or not. You wouldn’t necessarily want to stay here, as it’s a bit tacky, but at least it’s unpretentious and you know where you stand. Walking through the restaurants is an exercise in batting away all the over-keen waiters in their white shirts and black trousers, each of whom seems to have the best restaurant and, despite the evidence, the finest menu, but there are some great little barbecue shacks in the middle of the mayhem selling street food, and they have the same great view over the harbour and towards the volcanoes, and the food is wonderful.

Panajachel might be the most hectic of the lake’s towns, but the biggest is Santiago Atitlán. Probably the most Mayan of the towns, the nerve centre is a good walk up the hill, past lots of shops selling tourist trinkets and colourful Mayan textiles, where the main market clogs up the backstreets around the 16th-century church, which dominates the hill. It’s a pleasant place for stroll, if you ignore the kids setting off firecrackers in the church square, though compared to the other villages it’s a bit of a pig to get to and from, and we had to wait for a fair amount of time for the launch to fill up, both going to and from Santiago.

So that’s Lago de Atitlán, the lake that Aldous Huxley wrote is like Lake Como but ‘with additional embellishments of several immense volcanoes. It really is too much of a good thing.’ Geographically speaking, Huxley was spot on: Atitlán is so beautiful that you can spend days just sitting there, reading a book or poking a laptop, looking up every now and then to drink in the vista. The weather might be a bit ropey at times – we experienced two days of severe winds, two days of perfect blue skies, and two days of fog, which obscured a lot of the beauty of the crater rim – but in all of these climates the lake still shone through as a stunning place to be.

But when it comes to mankind, I feel a little let down. The towns are not beautiful in any sense of the word – the Mayan parts are all breeze block and dust, while the tourist parts are cramped and a bit faded – and astonishingly the settlements seem to ignore the lake itself, choosing instead to wind along thin footpaths between claustrophobic buildings, almost hiding away from the lake shore. It’s possible that this is because the lake has consumed all attempts at promenades or lakeside verandas, but it does mean that the only way to enjoy the star attraction is by picking the right hotel, or by spending your time on the boat taxis.

To be honest, a small and hidden part of me hopes that the water levels will keep rising slowly, quietly washing away the irritating tourist towns while leaving the Mayans to their own devices, so nature can reclaim the slopes and Lake Atitlán can escape its seemingly inevitable future of unsympathetic tourist development. If, in the process, we lose a few crystal healers, I can probably live with that.

Up the Indian’s Nose

Written: 20 December 2013

From San Pedro La Laguna on the western shores of Lake Atitlán, there are two popular day trips that every self-respecting walker should consider if they’re in the area. The first, and most popular, is a jaunt up to the crater rim, to a spot called the Indian’s Nose, so-called because the shape of the crater from San Pedro looks like the profile of an Indian lying on his back, and the highest point is the Indian’s nose. The second is a four-hour climb up Volcán San Pedro, which looms over the town of the same name.

I quite fancied doing both, but we thought we’d start with the easier of the two, the Indian’s Nose, as there’s no way I’m ever going to persuade Peta to stomp uphill for four hours straight. The only catch is that the trip up the Nose is a sunrise trip, and that means getting up at 3am to leave the hotel at 3.30am; it wasn’t a pretty sight as we stumbled out of bed and into the hotel foyer, to discover that the couple in the next door room – a blonde girl and a Rasta from Austin, Texas – were also coming along.

Our guide bounced into the hotel on time and full of beans, and we set off on foot to catch the bus to the foot of the Nose. It was dark and totally silent, apart from the odd dog bark and the gentle lapping of the lake, but as we walked up the steep hill into central San Pedro, we heard an almighty rumble from the direction of Antigua.

‘That’s a volcano somewhere,’ said our guide. ‘Nothing to worry about. It’s outside the lake.’

‘Ah, OK,’ we said.

‘It happens a lot,’ he said. ‘An eruption somewhere. No big problem, tranquilo, tranquilo.’

And so we plodded on up the hill, getting ready to climb to the top of the rim of a massive volcanic crater, while the spine of Guatemala rumbled in the distance.

The Chicken Bus

The first leg of our journey was by chicken bus. The chicken bus is a Central American staple, and although a lot of travellers use the much more comfortable and more efficient tourist shuttles to get between the main attractions, sometimes you have no choice but to hop on the chicken bus. Depending on who you talk to, they are either called chicken buses because everyone uses them, even the local livestock, or because they cram passengers in like chickens in a factory; both versions are accurate. The buses are mostly old American school buses, painted in garish colours and rebuilt to last forever; quite how much of the original bus remains is up for debate, but as with most developing nations the world over, nothing ever gets thrown away, and the chicken bus is a perfect example. Hailing from an era when being environmentally friendly simply meant smiling at everyone around you, the chicken bus is a reminder of how the other half live, and travel.

The seats on a chicken bus are probably the right size for the local Mayans, but for westerners they’re a tight squeeze; you have to jam your knees into the back of the seat in front if you’re going to have a chance of fitting, and both Peta and I are pretty small, so goodness only knows how six-footers cope. Originally the seat rows were designed for, ooh, two adults or three kids, but when the bus fills up, as it inevitably does, you can squeeze a good three or four people onto one row, particularly when the central aisle gets rammed and physically pushes each row into a smaller space.

We joined the bus as it started off, so there were only a handful of people on it, but within 20 minutes it was astonishingly full. According to our guide, it was fuller than normal because everyone was heading off to the market in Xela to do their Christmas shopping, and this meant that Peta and I shared our row with another woman and a little girl, who were being crushed into us by a man with a large backpack and an older man who seemed intent on squeezing his body into every single gap that appeared, no matter how small. I had the window seat, which I’d thought would be fun, but as the bus started on the switchbacks heading up to Santa Clara La Laguna, I realised I was on the outside of the bends, so every single turn of the road meant Peta and I had to put up with the combined weight of our row of four, the two men wedged into the aisle, and the other row of four on the other side. Thankfully it was still dark so I couldn’t actually see over the edge of the road, but as brick dust from the road blew clouds through the holes in the bus’s chassis, I could just about make out the lights down below... a long way below.

I managed to stave off the claustrophobia for most of the journey, but when we lurched to one side in a particularly violent turn, crushing the wind out of Peta and squeezing my entire body so that I could no longer move my limbs, I lost it and the panic swirled in. I tried calm breathing and thinking happy thoughts, but it was only because I was completely jammed into my seat that I didn’t leap up and rush for the exit. The last 15 minutes were utter hell, as Peta and I both tried to push back the weight of the bus while trying to smile at the locals who seemed fairly used to the whole thing.

Finally we arrived at the bend in the road where the path to the top of the Indian’s Nose starts, and our guide stood up, looked back at us and nodded. Then all hell broke loose, as the old man realised that we were getting off and decided that he was going to have our seats, come hell or high water. Unfortunately there was a woman with a couple of children across the aisle who had exactly the same idea, so as we forced ourselves to stand up in the crush, thereby giving a little ground at our end of the seat, the man and the women both jammed into the end of the seat, plugging up the way out and creating total gridlock. Neither of them was giving an inch, and while I lost the plot and started screaming, ‘I need to get out of here now!’ and Peta said to the old man and the woman, ‘I can’t move, you’ve got to move back!’, the old man and the woman decided to start yelling at each other while the poor woman and child in our row cowered under the crushing force of six people jammed into a row of seats designed for two.

Luckily the couple from Texas were on the row in front of us, so as they slid out, I took my chance and dived headfirst over the back of the seats in front, landing face first in the row in front while other locals slid towards me, keen to fill up the gaps. I think I screamed at them until they backed off – it’s all a little hazy at this point, to be honest – and luckily they pulled away to let me through, giving Peta the chance to do her own salmon leap out of the increasingly dangerous mush of old man, woman and child that had once been our row. I swear as we stumbled out of the bus and into the dirt road, the bus gave a popping sound before rattling off into the dust clouds of the moonlit switchbacks.

Up the Nose

The walk up to the top of the high Indian’s Nose is fairly steep, but it’s not too difficult. Peta did really well, considering that she’s just come out of a batch of bronchitis, has asthma, gets triggered by cold, damp air (like the cold, damp air of the Guatemalan mountains), is afraid of heights, and (I have permission to say) is no longer a spring chicken. She stoically soldiered on to the top, stopping only for a few rests, and it wasn’t long before we’d passed the first lookout post, and had scaled to the very top of the mountain.

At about 2230m above sea level and some 620m above San Pedro, the views over the lake are absolutely breathtaking (to put this in context, the Nose is about the same height above the lake surface as the top of the world’s second-tallest building, the Shanghai Tower, is above Shanghai). It’s dark when you arrive, but the moon lights up the lake and you can see the lights of all the settlements around the shoreline, and the stars are exceptionally clear. As the glow from the approaching sun slowly brightens, you can start to see east along the line of volcanoes that runs from Lago de Atitlán towards El Salvador. There are the peaks around the lake (San Pedro, Atitlán and Tolimán) and just past them are the peaks around Antigua (Actenango, Fuego and Agua), followed by Pacaya in the far distance. I was delighted to finally be able to see all the Antiguan peaks; I’d spotted Agua and Actenango from the lake the day before when the winds had died down and the skies cleared, but you can’t see Fuego from San Pedro, as it’s hidden behind Atitlán.

Most amazingly, Fuego decided to put on a bit of a show for us, and every 15 minutes or so it sent out a cloud of ash that spurted from the side of the summit and formed eerie smoke rings in the dawn sky. The sunlight spread slowly up the sky, forming haloes around the triangular peaks and lighting up the night sky behind us, turning the deep blue into turquoise and tangerine before finally bursting through into the most glorious sunrise. Almost instantly the cool humid air started to warm up, and our guide pulled out a flask of coffee and we celebrated the new day in style.

I don’t think we quite managed to celebrate it in as much style as our walking companions, who had climbed to the top of the rickety wooden structure on top of the Nose, which Peta had sensibly declined to scale. Up on top they fished out some kind of screw-top container and took a couple of big sniffs, offering one to the guide as the Rasta nattered away with him in Spanish. A few more sniffs later, and suddenly it was all giggles and guffaws as the rays of sunlight flooded the landscape below. I’m not sure what was they were sniffing, but they certainly seemed more than a small wooden staircase higher than us.

This was a bit of a shame, as the two-hour walk back down to the hill was spectacular, and it would have been more enjoyable if the rest of the crew hadn’t been mashed and collapsing in giggling fits. Drugs are pretty common on the travelling circuit, so it’s not exactly a surprise when people you meet turn out to be a little bit augmented, but when you’re not on them and they are, it can’t help putting up a bit of a barrier. So although we smiled at each other lots and we nodded sagely so they would know everything was fine, we weren’t in the same head space, and that was a bit of a drag; we would much rather have had someone to share the walk with, rather than leaving them to have their own trip.

No matter, though, because the views soon took over from any social unease. The route back down from the Nose follows the outside of the crater rim through fields of dried-up corn, before eventually reaching the rim itself to more spectacular views across to the volcanoes. It then dips down into the forested slopes, following a thin path that’s at times only a foot wide, with vertical drops down one side and slippery soil underfoot. I’m a bit of a mountain goat so I was in my element, but Peta was having to dig deep and not look down, though she coped admirably while the Rasta and his girlfriend hooted and hollered their way down the slopes, stopping every now and then for more sniffs and seemingly unhampered by whatever it was that was floating their boat.

We dropped down through coffee plantations and past farmers hacking at the dry undergrowth with machetes, and every now and then the forest canopy would clear to perfectly picturesque views of the lake. It was a long two hours that was hard on the knees, but eventually we dropped down into the village of San Juan La Laguna, from where it was a quick tuk-tuk ride back to base.

Not surprisingly, at 43 I’m not as physically strong as I used to be, and as we soaked our bones in the Mikaso’s veranda hot tub, with the Indian’s Nose looking down on us from the distant rim, I figured that perhaps I’d leave the four-hour ascent up San Pedro for another lifetime. I might not have been on the same level as our Rasta companion and his girlfriend, but one trip up the Nose was plenty high enough for me. Goodness only knows how lousy they felt afterwards...

Monterrico

Written: 27 December 2013

This should be a quick one, because this part of our trip has absolutely nothing to do with travelling. For Christmas this year, we’ve unashamedly jumped off the traveller bandwagon and booked into a life of five-star luxury in Monterrico, where we’re spending five blissful days in a traveller-free bubble on the Pacific coast of Guatemala. As a result we’ve done precious little, and it’s been wonderful, because sometimes even the most world-weary, road-hardened travellers have to hang up their boots for a while and take it easy, particularly when those travellers are starting to get on a bit.

Even being kind, Guatemala’s idea of a decent bed is pushing the boundaries of sanity (and exactly the same can be said of Belize and Mexico). We’ve been staying in mid-range places for the most part – a considerable step up from my days of budget travel – and even though mid-range hotel rooms tend to boast private bathrooms, often come with supplies of shampoo, soap and toilet paper, and normally have in-room televisions showing completely dreadful Latin American cable TV, they still tend to fail in the most important aspect of all: the bed. The mattresses are often lumpy and too hard, and some of them are so saggy that they make it seem as if you’re sleeping on a hillside. And as for the pillows... well, if you imagine trying to sleep on a pile of foam chunks that feels like it’s having a fight with itself, then you’ve a vague idea of what your typical Guatemalan pillow is like. None of this adds up to a particularly restful slumber, and I haven’t even mentioned the cockerels at dawn, the dogs barking out their territories in the middle of the night, the endless firecrackers, the nightclubs, and that new favourite of the developing world, the early morning circular saw.

So for the entire festive period we’ve thrown the budget out of the window and gone upmarket, first by spending Christmas in the sumptuous Dos Mundos Resort in Monterrico, and then by spending New Year in the Westin Camino Real Hotel in Guatemala City. Bed-wise the excitement appears to peak in the latter, as the Camino Real proudly provides guests with what it calls the ‘Heavenly® Bed’, but the luxury has started right here in Monterrico: despite being on concrete, the beds are comfortable, level, lump-free and, most amazingly, equipped with what we in the West would call pillows, rather than sacks of angrily ripped-up cast-off foam chunks. It’s bliss, and it’s all wrapped up in a lovely little chalet with a veranda overlooking luscious lawns and a friendly bat who lives in the thatch and who chirps us to sleep at night. I keep having to shake my head to see if it’s real rather than a mirage in the distant heat haze.

The food, too, is wonderful. The only way we could get a room at the Dos Mundos was to go half board, and it was a bit of a risk, as the hotel has an Italian chef and most of the Italian restaurants we’ve been to in Central America have been fairly liberal with their interpretation of one of the world’s best cuisines. We needn’t have worried, though, as the pasta is perfectly cooked and the sauces are sumptuous; hell, even the wine is good, and it’s all served up in the restaurant right by the beach, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

Talking of the beach, it’s all black sand round here, as this is a volcanic region (you can also find black sand beaches in volcanic regions like Tenerife, Hawaii and Iceland). Black sand beaches can be a bit tortuous to sunbathe on, as the sand gets incredibly hot in the tropical sun, radiating heat back up at you like an oven. If you forget to wear sandals as you run down the beach towards the midday sea, you’re at serious risk of leaving the soles of your feet behind on the sand; black sand is dangerous stuff. The Pacific round here is also pretty feisty, with a mean rip-tide that claims lives each year; the sound of the surf crashing into the beach is impressively deep, and I keep having to remind myself it’s the ocean, rather than a distant volcanic eruption.

Luckily, being five-star, we don’t have to worry about black sand or the rip tides, because the Dos Mundos has a beautiful infinity pool overlooking the beach, which catches the sun setting over the ocean without minor irritations like burning soles or the danger of drowning. It also has a second pool just outside our chalet, which doubles as a fountain at night with playful jets of water splashing about under the clear starry sky. Oh, and I should also mention that at this time of the year, the weather in Monterrico is blue-sky perfect, with hardly a wisp of cloud and temperatures in the early 30s all day, every day; apart from a bit of a breeze on the first couple of days, it’s been tranquil, hot and luxurious. It really is a little slice of paradise, and despite it being Christmas, it hasn’t been busy (though it seems to be filling up a bit more for New Year). Monterrico is, perhaps, one of Guatemala’s best-kept secrets... for now, at least.

Turtles and Mangroves

It hasn’t all been lazing about, though. To our credit, we did manage to get off our sun loungers long enough to walk into Monterrico village, which is about 15 minutes’ walk along the beach from Dos Mundos (or a much easier ten minutes’ walk along the main road if you opt for the less scenic route). Monterrico itself is functional rather than beautiful, with a few shops and restaurants and a rabid collection of licensed tour guides who jump on new arrivals and try to sell them tours of the nearby mangroves, or get them to sponsor a turtle in the nearby turtle sanctuary. Instead, Monterrico is all about the beach, and the hotels look out over the black sand, some of them basic, some of them slightly nicer, but none quite as luxurious as Dos Mundos.

We ignored the touts when we visited Monterrico, but we did end up sponsoring five turtles from the nearby sanctuary, as it gave us a chance to handle real live baby turtles, and that’s got to be worth a few bob. For Q10 per turtle (about 80p), the sanctuary will let you release their babies into the sea. They bring a bucket of baby turtles to the hotel just before sunset, line you up on the beach, hand out the number of turtles that you’ve sponsored, and you get to let them go and watch them crawl down the beach to the sea. They’re completely black, from head to toe, they feel as if they’re made of rubber, and they’re as cute as can be as they blindly wander downhill to the sea before being caught by a wave and swept off to their new life in the ocean.

Oh, and we took a tour through the mangroves too, which was a pleasant way to spend an hour, being punted gently through the maze of waterways that thread through the region’s mangrove swamps. The best time to go is dawn, as that’s when the wildlife is most active, but one dawn start a year is enough for us, so instead we settled for a 3pm punt, and very enjoyable it was too, if you ignore the rabid clouds of mosquitoes that wanted to make friends with us.

But mostly we’ve been doing nothing, which is the point of relaxing in a hotel. In fact, the biggest problem by far is that it’s going to be difficult to go back to mid-range hotels once the festive season is over; we could really get a taste for this...

Living in the Eighties

Written: 28 December 2013

Dear Guatemala,

Look, I know we’ve been together for a while now, and yeah, it’s been good, but we’ve really got to talk.

You see, it’s the music. I don’t know how to break it to you, but Phil Collins just isn’t cool. And nor is Bonnie Tyler. Hell, none of the stuff you play in your bars is cool, and it’s so not-cool that I don’t think we can stay together any more. We’re not living in the eighties any more, you know, and you just don’t have the same excuse as Cuba.

It’s not you, it’s me. Everyone else seems OK with the fact that your taste in music is in arrested development, but I just can’t see the funny side. Hell, even the ex-pats are into it; back in the Hotel Kangaroo, Gary played endless DVDs of 1980s big-hair soft-rock bands in his bar, and when we asked him about it, he said that the boys in town sold these DVDs for a pittance... and he presumably thought that made it all right to inflict the likes of Foreigner (‘I Want to Know What Love Is’) and Van Halen (‘Jump’) on his bemused guests, night after night. And then we were in what seemed like a really cool American blues bar in Antigua, and suddenly on comes Cyndi Lauper (‘Time After Time’), swiftly followed by Kenny Loggins (‘Dangerzone’), and nobody bats an eyelid, even though the bar was full of tattooed biker-types whom I thought would know better. Thankfully they switched to Exile-era Rolling Stones before I had to leave, but don’t think I wasn’t listening, because I was.

And on the bus into Antigua, on comes the radio, and it’s all about the greatest hits of the eighties, with the likes of Toto (‘Africa’), Roxette (‘It Must Have Been Love’) and even 1980s Abba (‘The Winner Takes It All’). Or how about the American-style pizza joint in Guatemala City who serenaded us with Eurythmics (‘Here Comes the Rain Again’), Roxy Music (‘More Than This’), Irene Cara (‘Flashdance’), Julian Lennon (‘Much Too Late for Goodbyes’) and Talk Talk (‘It’s My Life’). And not to mention the Irish restaurant in San Pedro, which not only insisted on playing Phil Collins’s Greatest Hits throughout lunch (‘Easy Lover’ anyone?), but followed it up with a medley of more eighties dross, including Jennifer Rush (‘The Power of Love’), which I last heard just a few weeks ago on a bus in Belize. You don’t forget that kind of thing in a hurry.

But the line was well and truly crossed when we were relaxing round the pool in five-star luxury in Monterrico, and one of the guests got out his Android phone and started playing some music (because listening to other people’s music pumped through the tinny speakers of a smartphone is what we all love to do when relaxing round the pool, naturally). And what did he play? Something from this millennium, perhaps, or even something from the last quarter of a century? Not quite. He only played Lionel Ritchie’s gut-wrenchingly awful ‘Say You, Say Me’, loud and proud, and then to make matters worse, he had the nerve to sing along, half-heartedly and out of tune. And this guy wasn’t single, he was there with his other half, who seemed OK with all of this!

So I’m sorry, Guatemala, but we’re through. Or, to put it in terms you might understand, ‘Once upon a time I was falling in love, but now I’m only falling apart.’ I’m sure you understand...

Guatemala City

Written: 2 January 2014

It seemed like a good idea on paper, to spend New Year’s Eve in the capital city of Guatemala, a country that’s known for its party spirit and firework-fuelled celebrations. After all, as the new year creeps round the globe, capital cities everywhere party until dawn, from Sydney to Beijing to London to Rio de Janeiro. It surely wasn’t much of a leap to expect Guatemala City to follow suit, at least a little bit.

So we asked the man at the hotel reception desk where would be the best place to celebrate the start of 2014, and he looked at us with a completely straight face and said, ‘Antigua.’

‘No, we meant here, in Guatemala City’, we said.

‘Antigua has great new year celebrations,’ he repeated as if reading the answer from a cue card. ‘You should go there.’

‘But we’re not in Antigua,’ we pointed out. ‘What happens here?’

‘Everything pretty much shuts down,’ he said in an unnecessarily robotic voice. ‘They close for the afternoon of 31 December, and reopen on 2 January. But there’s a big party in Antigua.’

‘OK, well, perhaps we could book a nice restaurant instead?’ we asked.

‘No problem, you can ask the concierge,’ he replied, so we went over to the concierge’s desk.

‘Hello,’ we said. ‘Could you help us book a nice restaurant for New Year’s Eve? Something romantic and classy, maybe a bit of fine dining? Just as long as it’s not Mexican.’

‘Yes, I can help with that,’ said the immaculately coiffured woman behind the desk. ‘How about our Italian restaurant here in the hotel? It is one of the best in Guatemala City.’

‘That sounds good,’ we replied, as we’d heard the hotel restaurant was great. ‘Could you book us a table for, say, 8pm?’

‘Certainly,’ she said, picking up a phone and dialling the restaurant.

It was when her face dropped that we suspected there might be a bit of a problem.

‘Um, our restaurant is shut tonight,’ she said, sounding genuinely surprised. ‘We do have a special meal in the café on 1 January; is that any good? We’ve got turkey.’

‘No, not really, we’re looking for something on New Year’s Eve,’ we said. ‘Can you suggest anything else?’

‘Let me ring round and find out,’ she said, and we left it with her.

It wasn’t much of a surprise when she rang later to say that the only open restaurant that she’d been able to find closed at 6pm, and was that any good? No, we said, it wasn’t, and we put down the phone, faced with the realisation that Guatemala City is clearly not the place to be for New Year’s Eve. Perhaps 2014 wasn’t going to start with a bang after all.

Zone Wars

You see, the problem is that Guatemala City is split into zones, and those zones might as well be separate cities. The capital city of Guatemala is famous for its criminal gangs, drug violence and regular appearances in those top ten lists of the most dangerous cities in the world, and this is indeed true: some zones of Guatemala City, particularly Zones 3, 6, 18, and 21, are seriously criminal, and if you venture in there toting a fancy camera, white skin and a vacuous expression, you will almost certainly be mugged, and probably a lot worse. Guatemala City is, for a lot of people, synonymous with violent gang crime, but there are places you can stay that are relatively safe.

One such area is Zone 10, where the fancy hotels are. We managed to book a room at one of Zone 10’s top hotels, the Westin Camino Real, for six nights, completely free, because we had a stack of loyalty points from a previous holiday that we discovered we could use there (and if we didn’t use them in the next couple of months, they would expire, so we figured we had nothing to lose). It sounded perfect: a classy hotel, a capital city, and New Year’s Eve in the tropics; what could possibly go wrong?

After all, Zone 10 is the place to be if you’re a tourist. You can walk around this part of town in the daytime without worrying too much about pickpockets or knife-wielding robbers, and even at night it’s not too dangerous (though it isn’t completely safe, like any capital city after dark). The problem is that while violent crime may have been removed from Zone 10, it has been replaced by a different type of crime, that of being incredibly dull. Zone 10 is pleasant enough, with wide boulevards and lots of trees, but it doesn’t win any prizes for excitement, with its quiet restaurants and relatively empty streets, and soon after booking in we’d explored enough of Zone 10 to know that it was fairly devoid of life.

Zone 1 is better, as we discovered when we headed up there in the daytime on New Year’s Eve. This is the historical centre of Guatemala City, and there are some interesting buildings around the main plaza, Parque Central, as well as the hectic and extremely packed shopping street of 6th Avenue, which leads south from Parque Central to the claustrophobic market stalls around Plaza Barrios. It was rammed and looked quite lively, and we didn’t see any other tourists in four hours of exploring, which was fairly intimidating; no doubt New Year’s Eve kicks off round here nicely, but the advice is not to go there after dark as it’s full of pickpockets and muggers, so we rolled back down south to Zone 10, which by this stage had practically gone to bed.

That afternoon, we figured we might as well pop out to do a quick round of the area, just in case anything was still open. We’d resigned ourself to an evening of sitting in the hotel, ordering room service and drinking in front of the TV, but as we wandered, we spotted one sign that was still lit, in a little basement opposite the moribund Holiday Inn. As we wandered over, we saw it said ‘Shakespeare’s Pub’ in red neon, which sounded intriguing. ‘What the hell,’ we thought, and slipped down the steps into the twilight of a dark room, where a solitary couple sat propping up the bar, and a young barman fiddled with a computer behind the counter. It was 4.30pm, and it looked like the end of the world.

Of course, we ended up staying there until 1.30am, drinking far too much strong, dark beer and meeting the most glorious collection of ex-pats, who were seemingly as confused as we were by the complete lack of life on New Year’s Eve. There were Violeta and Earl, she a middle-aged Guatemalan and he an 80-year-old American, both now hailing from Miami; she could talk the hind legs off a horse and kept the conversation flowing all evening, while Earl threw in pithy comments from a lifetime of experience. There was the couple who had come in to drown their sorrows, because they’d just buried the husband’s father that morning. There was a moody German called Baron, who looked exactly like the old man from the film Up, and who stared into his beer with a determination that would have been unnerving if we hadn’t had it pointed out to us that he was like that all the time. And behind the bar was James, a witty 20-something from America who’d lived in Guatemala City for years, had studied classical music and now played in a punk band while working in bars to pay the rent; and the American owner, Val, a Doctor Who fan whose stories of the gritty end of life in Guatemala City made my neck hair stand on end.

Later on, a couple of Koreans came into the bar, and one of them came over for a chat. I’m not sure how it happened, as the details are hazy, but he started singing opera at the bar before trying to chat up Peta in halting English, while Violeta waved at me from behind his back, pointing to Peta and mouthing, ‘Look at what he’s doing!’

‘It’s OK, Peta can handle herself,’ I mouthed back, and sat back to watch as the disparate cultures of America, Korea, England, Germany and Guatemala bounced off each other in a muddle of alcohol.

It all ended with group hugs at midnight, more beers, more tall stories and, eventually, a drunken stagger one block south to the hotel. We didn’t plan it, but New Year’s Eve in Guatemala City was indeed legendary, just not in the way we’d been expecting.

Heavenly Bed

We didn’t do much else in Guatemala City. We’d tried to visit some of the tourist attractions the previous Sunday, but even though there’s a special Sunday bus for tourists that takes you round the main attractions, such as the zoo and the museums, we failed to find that bus, and besides, most of the attractions are closed on Sundays, so it all seemed a bit pointless.

And Guatemala City isn’t suitable for just wandering around, or even taking the bus. There are three safe bus routes, operated by the TransMetro company with their distinctive green buses; these are safe because the stations are guarded by men with big guns, and the buses run in their own lanes and only pick up passengers from the stations, so it’s much harder for dodgy characters to jump on board. These green buses connect Zone 1 and Zone 10, Zone 1 and the main bus terminal, and southern Zone 1 with northern Zone 1, but that’s it. To explore any other part of the city you either have to take a taxi or a red bus, and the red buses are asking for trouble. Since 2007, over 900 bus drivers have been killed by the drug gangs, who extort the bus companies by threatening to kill their drivers if the companies don’t make regular payments. Although the gangs don’t specifically target passengers, they do sometimes get caught in the crossfire, and as the gangs have recently resorted to blowing buses up to make their point, the red buses are effectively no-go areas for those looking for safety... and that’s without even mentioning the standard pickpocketing and thievery that goes on, quite apart from the gang violence.

So we decided to spend most of our time relaxing in Zone 10, which is a world away from the realities of the city. It’s perhaps best summed up by the Westin company’s signature Heavenly Bed, which our room proudly boasted. The Heavenly Bed includes what the blurb calls ‘Ten Layers of Pure Comfort’, which includes:

- 13” pillow top mattress with 8 3/4” box spring

- Two feather and down pillows

- Two hypo-allergenic pillows

- Boudoir pillow and cover

- Duvet cover with an overstuffed polyester insert

- Down blanket

- Bed skirt

- Top sheet

- Decorative sheet

- Bottom sheet

- Pillow cases

After all the rock-hard beds that we’ve failed to enjoy in Guatemala’s cheaper hotels, it was a bit like sleeping in a cloud, and we were so impressed that I followed the web link in the blurb to discover that they sell the Heavenly Bed online. The Kingsize bed we were luxuriating in – the cheapest of the three levels of Heavenly Bed that the company sells – will set you back a princely US$3788, and we could well believe it.

Meanwhile, the bus drivers out in Guatemala City take home an average of $38 a day. It doesn’t take a maths genius to work out that our bed was worth just under five months’ pay for the average red bus driver, who risks being murdered every time he takes to the road, and that’s ignoring the crazy driving, the safety issues of maintaining ancient buses that are crammed to the rafters with passengers, and the heavy pollution that the buses belch.

After reading that, we perhaps didn’t sleep quite as soundly as before. Welcome to Guatemala City...

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 2 January 2014

Guatemala has some great sights, there’s no doubt about it. It has some of the best Mayan ruins in the world, one of the most beautiful lakes in the world, amazing volcanoes, atmospheric colonial architecture, glorious beaches, wild rainforest... the list goes on. It also has a comprehensive system of tourist shuttles to shuffle you between the main sights, as well as the crazy chicken bus system for other destinations. On paper, Guatemala is a great place to visit.

That’s probably why there’s such a large number of 20-somethings plying the well-worn route between Tikal and Antigua, and west towards Lago de Atitlán and the highlands. Generally this tourist route – part of the popular Gringo Trail – is safe, and although you have to be careful not to head out on hikes in certain areas without guides, it’s easy travelling. However, the advice from governments and locals alike is not to stray off this well-beaten track, because there are still bandits out there in the countryside, and you do risk being robbed or worse. Sure, some travellers ignore this advice and head off there anyway, and they post to the Internet to say that they have no idea what all the fuss is about, but the advice still stands, and it serves to constrain the majority of travellers to this standard route.

The result is that travelling through Guatemala is a bit like being back at university. I have a friend who calls these people the ‘gap-yahs’, and he’s right; the road here is full of children who are just out of ‘uni’ and spending mummy and daddy’s money on their trip of a lifetime, and although there’s nothing wrong with that, it can get a bit wearing when you’re not the same age. It’s a rare 21-year-old who has an opinion that’s worth listening to, because at that age we think we know everything but haven’t yet discovered that we in fact know nothing; as a result the other travellers in this part of the world make me feel old, and not a little grumpy, though as a bonus, they also make me appreciate what’s good about being old.

So perhaps I warmed to the locals? To be honest, I found them a bit too aloof, and despite me smiling at them as much as I could, that didn’t seem to work as well as I’d hoped. Perhaps the locals are a bit jaded by the tourist trail and are starting to see tourists as walking wallets; perhaps they’re busy dealing with the massive issues their country faces, and having lots of rich kiddies wandering around is hard to take; or perhaps I’ve been spoilt by the likes of Ghana and India, where the locals are so warm and friendly that everywhere else is bound to appear slightly grumpy in comparison. But whatever the reason, I didn’t particularly fall for the Guatemalans, and they didn’t particularly fall for me. Indeed, it reminded me of Indonesia, where I also failed to connect with the locals, despite learning their language and trying really hard to be friendly; on top of this, physically Indonesia bears a striking resemblance to Guatemala, with its lakes and volcanoes and utterly forgettable breeze-block architecture surrounded by lush rainforest, and everywhere I turned, I could kid myself that I was back in Indonesia. The upshot is that if you love Indonesia, you’ll love Guatemala... and the opposite also applies.

So Guatemala was OK, but not as life-changing as the stream of travellers coming the other way implied would be the case. There are some great sights and it’s easy travelling, but I suspect I’m looking for something different, something a bit more engaging. Hopefully El Salvador and Nicaragua will be slightly further from the tourist trail and a little less like Hampstead or Putney; we’ll see.

Further Reading

This story is continued in another of my books, Love at First Sight: Travels in El Salvador (also available for free from www.moxon.net/ebooks). If you enjoyed this book, you might like to know that there’s a whole series of free books like this available from the same source, covering 25 countries and six continents:

- The Back of Beyond: Travels in Australia

- Into the Deep Blue Sea: Travels in Belize

- A Town Full of Nothing to Do: Travels in Burkina Faso

- In Search of the Lost City: Travels in Colombia

- Tainted by Tourism: Travels in Costa Rica

- A Funny Sort of Socialism: Travels in Cuba

- Snow on the Sun Loungers: Travels in Cyprus

- Love at First Sight: Travels in El Salvador

- Paradise Has Teeth: Travels in French Polynesia

- A Million Mosquitoes Can’t Be Wrong: Travels in the Gambia

- The Road to Jesus: Travels in Ghana

- Stuck on the Gringo Trail: Travels in Guatemala

- Many Ways to Change Your Mind: Travels in India

- Hello Paul, What’s Your Name? Travels in Indonesia

- The Muddy Confluence: Travels in Malaysia

- The Lapping of the Dunes: Travels in Mali

- A World-Class Dive: Travels in Mexico

- Snaking Patterns of Sand: Travels in Morocco

- Roof of the World: Travels in Nepal

- God’s Own Country: Travels in New Zealand

- Poverty and Paradise: Travels in Nicaragua

- Alone on Two-Palm Island: Travels in Panama

- The Head and the Heart: Travels in Senegal

- Serious Fun: Travels in Singapore

- Melted Meccano: Travels in Thailand

If you know someone who might like any of my books, please pass them on; I make no money from this, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading my books and recommending them to their friends. If you’ve enjoyed reading my writing (or even if you haven’t) I’d be delighted if you could sign my Guestbook at www.moxon.net/guestbook – after all, it’s the feedback that makes it all worthwhile. Happy travels!

THE END

Table of Contents

Preface

Flores

Tikal

Río Dulce

The Sun Dog

Dampened Enthusiasm

Antigua

Lago de Atitlán

Up the Indian’s Nose

Monterrico

Living in the Eighties

Guatemala City

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading

Table of Contents

Preface

Flores

Tikal

Río Dulce

The Sun Dog

Dampened Enthusiasm

Antigua

Lago de Atitlán

Up the Indian’s Nose

Monterrico

Living in the Eighties

Guatemala City

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading