6 Week Recap Part I

Alright, time for a recap of the highlights of the past six weeks. Figured it might be time for a post.  I won't be doing too much description of places, but I will link to more information.

Antigua (1st time)

I flew into Guatemala City, immediatly caught a shuttle to Antigua, about an hour away .  An old Spanish Colonial city.  Here I stayed for a few days and hiked an active volcano.  Cool half of a day, roasted marshmallows on some heat vents.  Rumors had it there was actually lava you could see on this volcano which got me quite excited but alas, there was none and hadn't been for years. Slightly dissappointing, but still cool.

From Antigua I hopped a shuttle bus to Lago Atitlan.

Lago Atitlan

Lago Atitlan is a big lake about 3 hours north of Antigua.  Probably one of the most picturesque places I have ever come across.  The common way of getting around this large lake is by boat.  These boats (lanchas) are common and hold about 15 people each safely (this will be important later).  It took about a 45 minute lancha ride to get across the lake to the place where I would park myself for about the next week, San Pedro La Laguna, a small village on the base of a volcano, populated by backpackers.

This village was a party, and that was about it.  There wasn't much else to do other than a few possible hikes and exploring the other villages along the lake.  Luckily enough I happened to be here during the full moon, and what do backpackers do during a full moon? Why throw a Full Moon Party of course.

This full moon party was a few villages down the lake and boats were going there all night.  The party itself was held on this small piece of land and had a DJ and bar and all the perks.  It was alright, and in the end was broken up by the police at about 3am.  We were all told to leave immediatly, but there was a problem, we all had arrived by boat... and there were no boats there to take us home.  The police couldn't understand why we weren't leaving and were getting quite angry.  Angering police in foreign countries is always fun.

Anyway, there were about 50 of us waiting for a boat, one boat comes, takes 20 of us away, and using basic math, that leaves 30 of us left waiting.  And waiting.  And waiting. Around 5am another boat finally shows up.  Now remember, these boats are meant to hold 15 people.  All 30 of us pack onto this boat, doubling its safe capacity.  The boat was so overloaded that you placed your hand on top of the edge of the boat pointing down, your hand was in the water.  Only about 6 inches between the top of the boat and the water, WAY overloaded with 30 drunk people.  We could scarcely move lest the boat capsize.

So the boat starts moving towards the village where we all came from and about a 100 yards into the water the engine dies.  So there we are, 30 gringos, 5 in the morning sitting in an overloaded boat that is dead in the water.  Needless to say with only 4 life jackets on the entire boat, people weren't feeling too safe.  Luckily one of these jackets was right above me and if something happened, it was mine, because screw everyone else, I ain't going to drown.

So we sat there, floating in the middle of the lake for a good 45 minutes having a Bob Marley sing-a-long ("every little thing is going to be alright") until the motor got going.  And all was good until they stopped the boat in the middle of the lake because two drunk assholes decided they didn't want to pay the price of the ride and started arguing about it.  They were arguing over a 30 cent difference.  Another 20 minutes went by with the driver arguing with these two while we were still periously close to capsizing.  Fools.  Anyway, that ended up getting settled with other people (read: me) paying for the assholes just so we could get moving, and you know, spend as little time as possible on this death trap of a boat.

Safely home at about 630, bed called.

Stayed in this village for a few more days and then headed back to... Antigua... no wait... before that a kite festival in Sumpongo.  I ended up staying in an Animal Shelter, in a metal shack surrounded by about a 100 dogs who were fed at 5am.  Needless to say, it wasn't exactly quiet.  How did we end up there? A friend of one of the people I was traveling with was volunteering there.

From the kite festival we headed back to...

Antigua (2nd time)

On the bus ride back to Antigua, tragedy struck.  My phone, my lovely, lovely Droid RAZR was stolen/lost. Devastating.

Oddly enough losing my phone hasn't been the worst thing in the world, in fact quite the opposite. I now have nothing expensive with me, so I don't need to worry about anything, quite liberating.  Also it gets me off the internet all the time, and experiencing everything around me.  Plus it was insured and data was backed up (except the pictures... DAMN), so I get a new one when I get back, no worries.

But yes, Antigua... second time...

Quite boring as I hate retracing steps, but we were preparing for the next part of the adventure, which would entail camping.  So tents, sleeping bags and machetes were purchased.

Camping was about 7 hours away on a bus near a place called Coban.  We were to camping with a bunch of other people in the middle of a rainforest for a (hippie) gathering called a Rainbow Gathering.

...Continued in Part 2...