While all of the girls went for a 2-hour kayak paddle at 5:30 this morning, I took in the sunset from my casa’s porch with a cup of coffee and the on-line edition of the Sydney Morning Herald – I reckon I know who got the better deal.
At 9 bells we
were all off on in a hired water taxi to go check out the Río Dulce, locally
known as the “Sweet River”. For
our first stop we headed inland to Guatemala’s biggest lake – Lake Izabal, and the
fortified garrison of Castillo de
San Felipe which was originally constructed in 1644.
From there we
headed out across Lake
El Golfete, towards the Caribbean Sea, stopping
off at the Mayan village of Q’eqchi and the limestone caves of Aguas Termales
Rio Dulce, before arriving at Livingstone around lunchtime.
Our skipper
took us the Happy Fish restaurant to pre-order our lunches and continued on to Playa
Capitania for a view out to the Caribbean sea. A great little impromptu fun
stop was when I mentioned to Sonia that the local neighbourhood bar had Gallo
for $1.90 AUD, so with her being in touch with her Catalana/Aussie self,
decided this was the opportune time to settle a bet she had lost me.
Lunch was the
local dish – Tapado,
a seafood soup of prawns, crab, fish and plantains that is not unlike an Asian Laksa, but without the
chilli, curry or noodles. I have to say it was awesome dish to wrap ya laughing
gear around none the less.
It took us about an hour to get back to the Hacienda Tijax as the winds had picked up and was causing white caps and choppy conditions on both the lake and Río Dulce. Not that it was a major concern as upon arrival, I simply fell into the pool and called it good for the rest of the day.
Today was one of those days in which any fair dinkum fella looks forward to like a swift kick in the pterodactyls – a 7-hour bus ride through switchback mountain roads, with oncoming drivers’ hell bent on meeting their respective Gods … but only at your personal safety or demise.
Our first “yippee” for the day was when somehow our CEO “Wander Woman” Sonia managed to score yesterday’s 24 seat mini-bus and driver to transport all 6 of us “G Family” members the 320 kilometre (200 mile) drive to Hacienda Tijax on the Río Dulce.
I tell you what, I not the marrying kind … just yet, but if Sonia keeps this up, I’ll let her buy me a cerveza or 10.
A couple of hours in to the trip, we pulled up for a quick 15 minute “leak & peak” in Sanarate, before continuing on to the town of Teculután.
While the rest of the crew dined at the Hotel El Atlantico, I on the other hand had the second “yippee” moment when nothing on the hotel menu struck my fancy, I headed out on to the streets and found Cafetería Y Pupusería El Buen Gusto.
Cafetería Y
Pupusería is a local family owned enterprise that served me up Carne Asada with
some of the most wicked beans & rice I’ve ever had, plus a fresh cucumber,
carrot, lettuce & radish salad, 3 tortillas and bottle of water – all for
$4.77 AUD ….. Ab-Fab, loved it, full stop, end of story!!!
From Teculután
it was a further 152 kilometres (94 miles)
into the docks of Rio Dulce where we transferred to a water taxi for the 15 minute
ride to Hacienda Tijax.
I’m so not a big fan of being stuck in a gilded cage, but I have to say I’m loving the accommodations and environs that this place provides – it literally is a cubby house in a rain forest and a welcome change to the hard cityscapes I’ve experienced of late.
By 10 AM we
had located our 24 seat bus and all six of us were back on the road. We actually made pretty good time to be
standing in our hotel – the Hotel Posada De Los Bucaros, back in Antigua in under two
hours.
As a group, we again went our separate ways with most of them wanting to check out a macadamia plantation, while our late-comer Coco chuffed off on the Pacaya Volcano afternoon/evening hike. I amused myself with a couple of laps of the town as my broom closet hotel room was as “hot as Hades”. The room is situated in direct sunlight on 3 sides, with nothing to cool it other than a slow moving ceiling fan. You simply could not stay in the room, even with the windows open.
Speaking of hotels, the staff here have been wonderful, but they need to look the size of their clients when assigning the rooms where possible. Here’s a clue folks, I’m 6 foot 1 inches and a 110 kilograms in size and it’s not like I’m gonna run around in the shower to get wet or are any risk of slipping down the drain.
My first room’s shower was so narrow that I literally could not reach around to wash my freckle and had to step out of the shower to wash my legs. Tonight’s room is a lesson in unco-limboing when trying to navigate around the bed or use the bathroom facilities.
Tomorrow were off to the jungles of Rio Dulce, on the edge of the Caribbean Sea for a couple of days.
The original plan was to leave Panjanchel around 3:30PM to cross Lake Atitlán by boat and land in San Juan La Laguna for a local family home-stay for the night. Those plans changed when Sonia suggested a stop along the way, which facilitated a 9:30AM departure.
Carved
directly from the soaring cliff face, La
Casa del Mundo in the adjacent Jaibalito
municipality is a 58 kilometre (36 mile)
and a 2+ hour drive along winding mountain roads, but for 20 GTQ ($3.80 AUD) each we rode for 15 minutes
in one of the local lanchas (regular ferry boats).
The stop ended up being 6 hours long, the views out over the
lake made for a stunning lunchtime dining experience and allowed me to complete
my Cuba blog entries and get a start on my new David Baldacci book.
Around 3:30PM were met at the dock by another lancha and
ferried over to San Juan La Laguna, a town of around 11,200 that would be our stop
for the night. This leg would have been 19 kilometres (12 miles) and a 1+ hour drive, but took the lancha only 20 minutes.
We would be down to a group of 5 as Lila took such a shine to La Casa del Mundo that she decided to spend the night and we’ll collect her on the way back to Panjanchel tomorrow.
We were met at the San Juan La Laguna dock
by a representative of the local Mayan tourism concern, met our respective home
stay family members, then dropped our gear of at the homes and met up at the
local park to go on a walk of the town.
It was just on sundown as we headed back to our respective home-stays, I dropped my camera off and headed out to do a bit of exploring before dinner. As I was starting to feel like a long-haired friend of Jesus in a chartreuse microbus, I decided to resolve that via 20 minutes with a cutthroat razor in a local barbershop and I feel like a new man – do you know any???
On my meanderings, I ended up way out along the shoreline when I got WhatsApp messages from both Coco and Sonia that dinner was ready. I’d completely forgotten about it and said for them to continue without me, as I was literally miles away. I ended up grabbing a pizza at Restaurante Rostro Maya, which to be honest, was a pretty decent offering. Upon arrival at the house, we got to chatting with Raul and his wife Maria and got to hang out with their 5 year old grandson Francis, who’s taken a shining to me.
No shower for me tonight as when I was heading off to bed, Raul informs me that the city turns the water off between 8:30 PM and 5 AM to conserve water from un-repaired plumbing and water systems. There’s a big lake at the doorstep – skinny dipping anyone???
With the remnants of yesterday evenings hike still burning in our legs, I reckon quite a few of us were more than happy to have a 9:30 AM departure this morning for Panjanchel.
The town of approximately 11,100 is located on the shores of Lake Atitlán, a 3 hour and 110 kilometre (68 mile) minibus trip northwest of Antigua, in the Sololá Department.
Just in case you’re curious, At an area of 130 square kilometers (50.2 sq miles) and 340 metres (1,120 feet) deep, Lake Atitlán is also the deepest lake in Central America.
After checking into our accommodations at Hotel Posada K’amol B’ey we took a bit of an orientation walk through the town before settling on Deli Llama de Fuego for a pretty decent lunch.
While all 5 girls “sardined” themselves into a Tuk-Tuk to go check out an adjacent national park, I spent the afternoon just exploring the town at my leisure.
Just after
7PM we walked down to the Mayan owned and operated Restaurante
Jose Pingüinos for dinner. As part of the meal, the owner – Jose, demonstrated
the xylophone-type Mayan percussion instrument – the Marimba, is constructed and
then had his two daughters and a male employee play for us during the meal. With
the utmost of respect, the traditional music sounded a lot like that which
accompanied silent movies or Vaudeville acts of the time.
Jose also had
his daughter Michelle demonstrate how a traditional 25 millimetre wide by up to
24 metre long cotton belt is worn as a wide brimmed hat, which was quite
interesting.
Our evening walk home was punctuated by an evening downpour, which didn’t do anything to dampen my spirits in the least.
The exhibition entails 144 two metre (6½ foot) tall fiberglass bears painting in representations of every country in the world, by one of their own renowned and respected local artists. The bears are meant to reflect the world coming together as one with the same ideals, goals and understanding, while promoting living together in peace and harmony on their global tour.
Breakfast was pretty decent bagel and coffee at The Bagel Barn, before I headed back to the hotel to catch up with the G crew. At 9AM all five of us strolled over to the La Tortilla Cooking School to peruse the local markets and gather the ingredients to make lunch for ourselves.
The menu consisted of the local Chicken Pepián main dish and a Rellenitos de Platano dessert made of mashed plantains surrounding cocoa & bean paste filling and then shallow fried. This was accompanied with a couple of glasses of a really good white wine, that I didn’t the name of – pity.
We got collected at 1:30 by OX Expeditions to check out the 2,522 metre (8,370 foot) and growing – Pacaya Volcano that is actually active. The plan was to hike 3.2 kilometres (2 miles), roast some marshmallows, watch the sunset and then drive home through the other three volcanos in the area – de Agua, de Fuego and de Acatenango.
We’d barely got going on the 50 kilometres (31 mile) 1¾ hour drive to San Vicente Pacaya when both myself and an Spanish speaking passenger spoke to the driver (for want of a better word) as to why he was driving like he’d stolen the bus with us in it and was fleeing a bank robbery, while us passengers felt like laundry on agitate cycle in the washer. At one point he was taking the twisty/winding posted 40 KPH mountain roads at 60-70KPH and the tires were howling in protest while he was visibly pedalling hard to keep it on the road. When questioned, his response was ‘New Tires’.
After another
gobful from us, he slowed down to a pedestrian pace that was ½ the pace of
traffic flow. It was at this point he decided to go full on fuktard by “brake
checking” i.e. bouncing his foot on and off the brake pedal, lurching all of us
backwards and forwards with monotonous routine. I’d had enough and simply said “Pull
over and I’ll drive or keep going and I’m going to bitch slap you in the left ear”,
which I believe the Colombian woman translated correctly as after he looked at
me somewhat wide-eyed, his driving improved immediately.
It’d be fair
to say that it was a bit of hard yakka legging it the 2 hours to the base of Pacaya.
Our first glimpse was a ribbon of red lava snaking its way down face of the
ever changing volcanic mountain. It’s a barren, eerie and unique wasteland
environment that the only sounds were the winds and molten car-size boulders
coming done the various slopes. There were no real odours that I’ve encountered
at other natural geo-thermic sites, i.e. New Zealand and Hawaii.
We got close enough
to toast marshmallows on one of the small flow lines, but your clacker valve
would pucker up when hearing something coming from above.
When the sun went down, the ambient temperature went with it, plummeting to the point of having to rug up. That small inconvenience was overshadowed by being able to see all of the lava flow, all of the rolling balls of molten mass and the eruptions spewing out of the peak of the volcano – Mother Nature put on one spectacular show. Absolutely incredible. One of those “You Have To Be There” moments.
As with any adventure
in getting there – you have to get back. Armed with little more than headlamps
of various luminescence, we headed back the National Park entrance in pitch
black darkness in which I had only one slip that the Russian judges scored at
8.2 for entertainment, but lacking grace.’
Our guides efforts in blowing up on of the OX Expeditions managers phone had resulted in a new bus and we were all pleased to say – a professional driver. The 63 kilometre (40 mile) 1½ hour trip home on an alternate route via Antigua’s back door was one in which the silence was only broken by the sounds of soft snoring. We got home around 9:30PM and as I could eat the arse feathers off a low flying duck, I snuck out for a quick feed and a cerveza or three.
It appears that people have come from miles around to spend some time in Antigua today. The streets are full of parked cars, the main squares a packed full of people dressed on the best clobber. As far as I can tell, it seems to be that people have chosen this day to celebrate their respective family members Quinceañera.
Not that I’d be celebrating with them as I decided to have a full on “slack attack” and try and get the Blog to date the blog, as well as downloading some Kindle books for my iPad to make the road trips a little less boring.
While banging
away on the laptop keyboard, I noticed the unmistakeable sound of
indiscriminate gunfire from seemingly the same heavy calibre weapon like a
shotgun. The thing that was puzzling me was that it was coming from all
different directions, making me think that it may be some kind of bird scaring
program.
At around 6:30PM I meandered down the G Adventures Meet & Greet for the Volcano Discovery tour where I met our Barcelona born CEO – Sonia. Also attending were 3 of the 4 other travellers, with the final member arriving later tomorrow evening.
It looks like I’ll be the only testosterone proponent of the trip as the rest are firmly entrenched in the pheromones field, while hailing from Colombia (now a USA citizen), Switzerland and two from Germany.
The trip briefing went well enough, but for me there were more questions than answers, but through no fault of the CEO. I’ll give you a bit of background – I booked and paid for this trip over a year ago and it has changed considerably over that period with regards to inclusions and deletions.
I come to find out that even though this trip is sold as the “Volcano Discovery” product, G Adventures doesn’t actually take you to visit any volcanoes over the 3 week period. They encourage you to use one of their preferred vendors, at an extra cost to yourself. It also raised an eyebrow in the group when we were advised we have a 16 hour public bus trip that we could “upgrade” to a private vehicle, again as long as we put our hand in our own pockets. It’s a similar story to included meals, most of the breakfasts look now to be at our own cost.
In the end, it looks to be that G Adventures is supplying transportation, accommodation and a CEO to make sure we get around hassle free.
You may ask why I did not decide to change the trip or get my money back. With the amount of changes, it was hard to keep up with them, as it was more a matter of waiting until something was finalised. G Adventures do not give refunds to the best of my knowledge and simply issue a credit if deemed relevant.
Hopefully at the end of this trip my feelings to the whole deal will have changed from one of feeling fingered and then nickel & dimed, as that’s not what I signed on for.
After the meeting all 5 of us wandered down to La Casa de las Sopas, a local soup restaurant, for dinner which was a first for me. I had their meatball soup and a couple of cold Gallo cervezas for $15 AUD.
My Copa Airlines flight CM321 departed Havana on time at 8:45 AM and landed (with spontaneous passenger applause too I might add) at Panama City’s Aeropuerto Internacional de Tocumen at 10:30 AM, which is precisely the time when they are boarding flight CM544 to Guatemala City.
As luck would
have it, my incoming flight gate is at the opposite end of the airport, so I
have to hustle the entire length of the joint …. and all travelators are not
operational – go figure. I get to my gate and slip straight on to the ½ full
flight to find a little kid sitting in my seat. I show what looks to be the accompanying
mother of the child my ticket and seat number 10D, but she just shakes her head
and ignores me. I get the attention of a trolley dolly who tries to seat me in
the “shit house” seats i.e. the very
last ones that rest up against the cattle class toilets and rear galley. I
decline the offer.
It wasn’t
until a Spanish speaking woman comes up and wants her 10F window seat in the same
row that I have the disputed aisle seat, that the hostess asks the woman for
her boarding pass. The woman rolls her eyes, huffs & puffs and makes a big
show of not being able to find her boarding passes, meanwhile my new row-mate
and I are performing the airline seat-swapping dance trying to not block the
remaining passengers from getting to their seats.
I come to
find out during the flight that it wasn’t until the Cabin Manager came up and
threatened to offload the mother and her two kids, as they are required to have
their boarding passes available upon request, that they were produced. You
wouldn’t read about it – I watched the hostess walk the trio to the very last
low of seats on the plane.
We arrive just on 1PM at Guatemala City’s Aeropuerto Internacional La Aurora, spend over an hour clearing Immigration and then play the Guatemalan Customs “Ring A Bell And Win A Prize” game in which I declared I had prescription medications, a pocket knife, scissors and a piece of artwork. The attending officer takes a disinterested glance at my Customs Declaration, then asked me to push the button on her workstation, that would illuminate a large red or green light, thus randomly selecting you for further investigation. I went “Green means Go” and was outta there like an Ethiopian after a chicken before anyone had second thoughts. The American Airlines pilot behind me wasn’t so lucky, he not only got the big red light, but also copped the loud obnoxious fail buzzer sound as well.
My final destination for the day would be Hotel Posada De Los Bucaros, located in the adjoining town of Antigua, that according to my transfer driver, on a good day would take under an hour. Today wasn’t my day it seems, as it took just over 2 hours in bumper to bumper traffic to cover the 41 kilometre (26 mile) journey. Not that I had a care, I just took it all in from the co-pilots seat.
I got my accommodations sorted and hit the streets with the intention of securing some of the local Guatemalan Quetzales (GTQ) currency, which currently runs 5.35 to the AUD or 7.645 to the USD. This turned into a bit of a mission as either the ATM’s would only allow 200 GTQ – if they had currency available, that’s if the ATM was working at all. The bank was a no-go as it had a queue for Africa at 15 minutes to closing and I didn’t have my passport to proceed with any transaction. In the end I settled on taking what was available – 200 QTC’s, and will sort it out on Monday.
My hotel supplied walking map which listed the Hotel Posada de Don Rodrigo as a local dining option. Its non-descript unassuming hole-in-the-wall façade gave no hint as to the how large, intricate, ornate and old the actual building is.
I found my way to the dining facilities, that are literally hidden away in the rear corner of site, was seated with an ice cold Gallo cerveza and took in the available surroudings with the varied menu.
Alas, I could
not make my mind up with so many good looking options. Time to enable my back
up plan. I resorted to my usual fall-back position and
simply asked for the Chef to choose for me, and hand on heart, I was not
disappointed in the slightest.
A starter consisting of made-from-scratch asparagus soup with a fresh tomato & chilli salsa picante got the meal going. A stuffed pork Chile Relleno with homemade chicken chorizo sausage, guacamole, rice, bean paste and the best tortillas I’ve had in a long while. It was an awesome way to top off a long day.
