Lago de Atitlan

Ryan, Luke, Aileen, Amy, and I were picked up by a tour van just as it was beginning to pour in Antigua for our trip to Lago de Atitlan, a lake that we’d heard to be one of the most beautiful in the world. The lake is located in the Guatemalan highlands (at a higher altitude than Antigua, which is itself high enough for the altitude to impact one’s breathing skills at first), and is surrounded by 12 pueblos (villages) with apostolic pretensions (i.e. one for each) and some larger towns. Our tour package included a night in a relatively alright hotel and, more significantly, a private boat tour of the lake with visits to three pueblos. We were very excited.

Our hotel was located in Panajachel, the largest town on the lake, which was kind of reminiscent of a third-world Jersey Shore in some ways. Our ride took forever because of the rain (and the terrifying hairpin turns with cliffs on both sides and school buses hurtling around corners) and the sun had already set when we arrived at the lake. Nevertheless, we could tell as we descended that it was a beautiful place; the shadows of the mountains and volcanos surrounding the lake promised for breathtaking scenery. (Aside: some American in the Internet café where I’m writing this is reading about the train blasts in India and, in enlightening some girl next to him about the latest news, referred to Mumbai as ‘Mum-be-a.’ Sweet.)

That night, we grabbed dinner at this meat shack that was open to the street. Stray dogs wandered among the tables (I threw them scraps…I couldn’t help it) while we ate. The food was good. Aileen and I split an enormous plate of meat including: two steaks, two pork chops, two chicken breasts, two beef sausages, and two pork chops. It was not kosher, but it was tasty. I gotta say, for a tiny little girl, Aileen can eat like few people I’ve met. It’s really impressive. We theorize that she has a parasite and is thus eating for two. In any case, post-binge we went to a pretty alright bar with good drink specials (a quality we’ve learned to seek out above most others) and had a very fun time. We had noticed (by we, I mean Ryan, Luke, and I) some cute local ladies giving our table the eye and, since Ryan and I have made it our mission all summer to pick up women for Luke, the only single guy in our group, we resolved to meet them. Before we could make our (inevitably money and irresistible) entrance, however, Aileen smoothly rolled up to their table and started talking to them. Before we knew it, we were all hanging out with these two girls (Karla and something) and this guy (Carlos) who were from Guatemala City and extremely entertaining. Karla also happened to be quite hot. We thought Luke was in.


When the bar closed at 1, we proposed continuing the party at our hotel (Luke had brought a handle of rum). Back at the hotel, we played some vocab-based drinking game in Spanish and just hung around. We soon had to switch from the boy’s room to the girl’s room because someone next door had (reasonably) complained two times about how loud we were being. While Ryan tried to calm him down in near-fluent Spanish, I helpfully informed the hotel guy who came to scold us that I had powerful testicles (huevos poderosos). He ignored me, but I think I made my point. Anyway, we hung out in the girl’s room for a while before Luke and Karla “went for a walk” shortly before Carlos and the other girl (his girlfriend) decided to turn in for the night. I should say that Carlos was really hilarious and spoke very good English. I especially enjoyed some of his dirty jokes. Thinking we’d finally succeeded in pulling some for Luke, we all resolved to sleep in the boy’s room and leave the girl’s room vacant in case they tired of their walk. There were two normal beds and a double bed so the girls shared the big one while Ryan and I had our own. We had all finished preparing for sleep and gotten into our beds when Luke returned unvictorious (in his defense, I think this girl was a tease).

Since Luke was back and would no longer require the girl’s room for international diplomatic purposes, I asserted my right to the good (big) bed, which had been earned earlier in the day in a brutal game of odd-man-out. We were re-organizing our locations in the room and being pretty loud I guess because the lady next door complained again (it was 4:00 a.m. at this point). What happened at this point was classic. Ryan was in his bed and, as I was getting into my own, I think that Amy and Aileen kind of tackled Luke and they fell on Ryan’s bed. So all four of them were in this big pile in pajamas (G-rated, I promise). It was funny so I got out of bed to get my camera. I had finally found it and gotten out of its case when there was a knock on our door and it was swung open by the hotel guy. He shined his light in my face and said something harsh in Spanish that included the word “policia.” I could see his face in the light as he looked me up and down. I was wearing an undershirt and a pretty tacky pair of striped boxer briefs and holding a digital camera. As he moved the light off of me onto the pile of people on the corner bed his face contorted in shock hilariously and I kind of lost it laughing. In a hysterical panic, I did the only rational thing and ran and hid on the other side of the room door like one foot from the guy. He was alternating between shining his flashlight on the dogpile and trying to see me through the crack in the door while I was losing my shit laughing. The others, also rationally, were just kind of pretending to be asleep while this guy’s talking about the police. Eventually, I hissed “Ryan, say something in Spanish! He’s talking about cops!” At this point, Ryan ceased his otherwise-very-convincing show of being asleep under three other people, got up, and convinced this guy that we were just taking care of our sick friend through the careful application of body heat or something (this was kind of true as Aileen had vomited our meat plate out in a profuse manner earlier in the evening). The guy basically said “fuck you” and that if there was another complaint, the cops would be called. At this point, we deemed it prudent to go to sleep. I only wish I’d had a chance to snap that photo.

The next morning, after sleeping for a few hours, we woke up for our free breakfast and boat tour. Walking down to the lake, we saw it in the daylight for the first time and took a few photos and videos. It is absolutely spectacular. Definitely one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.




We met our guide (Antonio), clammered onto our boat, and commenced our tour.





We first went to two little pueblos (Santa Catarina and San Antonio) that were extremely impoverished and somewhat depressing. We met some local women and men working on textiles and also had some unsettling encounters with extremely persistently panhandling/vending children. It was, to be honest, pretty heavy, but a very interesting experience nonetheless.










Getting back on the lake, we admired it some more and Aileen and Amy went swimming an area that had volcanic vents beneath it so it was really warm. As we crossed the lake, the clouds rolled in lending it a particularly eerie quality.







The last town we visited, Santiago de Atitlan, was far larger than the other two and significant for a mayan/Santerian holy site therein called Maximo (“x’ pronounced like “ch”). A 9 year old kid named Peter offered to guide us to Maximo for 20 quetzales and, since I really wanted to see it, we accepted. He brought us to this really shady and non-special seeming house where there were a few statues and a guy who made us pay 2 quetzales each for the privilege of seeing it. It kind of sucked and I caught shit from the others. On the way back, we bumped into those sixteen year olds that Aileen had befriended in her first week. Ryan slyly asked them if they’d been fortunate enough to see Maximo and, when they said yes, he asked where it was. Not so shockingly, it turned out that Peter had fucked us. He probably took us to his dad’s house. We found out where the real deal was (sort of) and started making our way towards it, though we had to stop and ask locals for directions about five times. It was a pretty interesting little adventure climbing high up in this mountainside, third-world city. When we were deep in there, I think it was one of the more impoverished places we’d been all summer...very raw



Anyway, we finally found Maximo and it was a lot cooler than the fake one though not overwhelming. There were a couple of Santeria priests in there, however, who took a liking to me and we joked a little, me in Spanish and them in some other language or really weird Spanish. I wasn't permitted to photograph the shrine unfortunately. Suffice it to say, I gained great power through sacrifices to dark gods and it would behoove you all to tread carefully in my presence henceforth. We made our way back down to the shore, met up with our guide, and boated back over to Panajachel for lunch. At 4, we caught our bus home. The ride was totally terrifying. What took 3.5 hours on the way there took 1.5 on the way back. The driver was psychotic and rude, but I just figured that I didn’t really have much control of the situation so better to just kind of get into it than freak out about it. After that it was more fun and I just kind of assumed we wouldn’t be killed when we were passing buses on those cliff-side hairpin turns at 50 mph without knowing what was around the corner. We lived so it’s cool.



We got back to Antigua at around 6 and met up with Maggie, Dave, and Sarah, three other kids from school who are living in a different part of Guatemala but were visiting Antigua for the weekend. We ate dinner but Ryan and I turned in shortly afterwards because we had to wake up at 5:30 to tackle Volcan de Pacaya, the active volcano near Antigua. The lake was really one of the most beautiful places I’ve been and somewhere to which I’d love to return. It was an epic night and day.