After class on Friday, I left for Lake Atitlan for the weekend with two other students from my school. We took a chicken bus, old school buses painted in bright colors which are the overcrowded public buses of Guatemala, from Xela to San Pedro de Laguna. The ride was super crowded and I had the misfortune of sitting in the hump seat on the bus. With my backpack in my lap and two other adults sharing my seat there wasn´t much room, but you get what you pay for - about three dollars for a three hour trip - and the view going down to the lake was gorgeous. Lake Atitlan is a crater lake surrounded by lush volcanoes with clouds hovering around the peaks. It´s one of the most beautiful places I´ve seen!
We arrived in the lakeside town of San Pedro in the evening and went to a nearby hotel. The other two students were together, so they got a room, and I took a bed in the dormitory. It wasn´t really a dorm, though, because I ended up being the only one there. Well, except for my fellow dormer Harry the Digusting Spider. He was huge with striped legs and had little spidery antenna things sticking out of his mouth - oh and in case it wasn´t clear, he was really hairy. I was convinced he was some type of tarantula, but really I have no idea if they even have those here. He also only had seven legs, so he must have been a hardened survivor. I decided I might not fare well trying to kill him, so I went outside to read and left the door open so he could escape. He must have been plotting how he was going to kill me, so he didn´t want to leave. Sarah and Neil and I decided to go explore the city and get dinner, so I left Harry there hoping he would lose interest in me and leave. We returned a few hours later and there he was waiting for me, but this time he had moved within a few feet of my bed. I debated for a long time what to do, and finally decided that he would be a stupid spider to waste his venom on me. I moved my bed as far away from him as I could and went to sleep. In the morning he was gone, and I was still alive and spider bite free! I got some good pics of him to prove his overwhelming scariness, but finding an internet connection here that won´t take two days to upload a picture is proving tough. I´m sure I´ll figure something out, but in the mean time you´ll have to trust me that he makes the spider from The Two Towers seem adorable!
After saying goodbye to our groovy hostel, we took a boat to another town on the lake called San Marcos. It is this quiet place that´s a Guatemalan haven for alternative medicine and the like. This hotel had a little dorm with a thatched roof and bamboo walls. The place was surrounded by lush jungle and also had a communal kitchen with vegetarian cooks, a Mayan sauna, and morning yoga classes. My whole stay including super yummy meals, sauna, and yoga was $28. I wasn´t looking forward to hanging out with a bunch of strangers, but a huge rain storm forced the issue and I ended up having a blast with 5 really cool people from England and Austria.
Luckily, before the big storm hit we were able to hike a trail along the lake that we had heard about that leads to some cliffs you can jump off of into the lake. We weren´t sure if we found the right cliffs, but there was no way we were leaving without trying. It was so scary standing there getting ready to jump, but it was so worth it! We each ended up jumping three times and each time was equally exciting. I went back the next day with two of the other travellers I met and they confirmed that we had indeed chosen the right cliffs - I guess we already knew that from the lack of broken legs, but it´s nice to get validation.
We headed out to go back to Xela around noon on Sunday. We knew it could be a bit tough travelling on election day, but we couldn´t skip school! Unfortunately, a bit tough turned out to be an understatement. We waited about an hour to catch a crowded boat back to San Pedro which wasn´t a huge deal, but when we got to San Pedro we found out the buses weren´t running because of election day (people in San Marcos had assured us they would be). We thought about staying in San Pedro for the night, but realized we could take a truck to the next bigger town. We negotiated a pickup truck ride half the way then took a tuk-tuk for as far as we could. Then, we had to pay another truck to take us up to the main highway. All of this was quite an exercise in communication and patience, but it was also pretty fun (at least until we got rained on and a bit cold for the last part of the ride). When the truck dropped us off at the main highway (a term used quitel loosely here) we were lucky to quickly catch a chicken bus headed back to Xela. And, to make for a super happy ending I didn´t have to sit in the hump seat!
