vicarage (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} vicarage) wrote,@ 2008-02-25 17:22:00 |
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Guatamala 2
Rio Dulce is an ugly, noisy town where huge Lake Izabel starts towards the sea. The Hacienda Tijax where we stayed was a posh but gouging eco lodge across a small bay with cabins build over the swamp in what looked like mosquito heaven, but having sweltered under a net for one night, abandoning it the second gave no bites. I strode through the afternoon heat to my first fort for months, San Felipe, built to control pirate incursions onto the lake. Great location on a promontory where you could watch jet-skis paired with dugout canoes, it was fully restored in the 50's to a bijou charm, complete with cannon and dark magazines best explored with the red-eye reducing light on my camera. I was so glad to leap into the pool on my return, hiding under their mini waterfall and calculating Archimedes principle as 3 fat Germans climbed out of a side pool and the cascade stopped for minutes.
The next day's boat trip skirted the fort, then charged downstream past islands heaving with cormorants and herons, through backwaters replete with water lilies with bird stalking across the pads. A possible sighting of a manatee, and passage through a gorge led to the ocean at Livingston, with a few sad crocodiles in a tank, and tapado, a great seafood soup made with whole fish, half crabs and prawns in a coconut sauce. A hot spring entering the river where eddies alternately cooked and cooled you finished the day.
The 8 hours to Antigua involved a idiotic bus crew who's peregrinations round a small town advanced us precisely nowhere in an hour, 2 snake oil salesmen who belaboured our captive audience with their wonder cures,and 2 travelling preachers who I failed to dissuade with heckling and funny faces. I wished a plague of boils on the latter, hoping they'd have to rely on the patent medicines of the former. The chicken bus on the final leg dawdled out of Guatamala City as a lad touted for trade to squeeze ever more passengers into a crowded bus.
We set off with only small backs on a triple chicken bus ride through the mountains to Chichicastenango, seated 6 abreast (middle 2 with half a buttock on the seat). The conductor climbed up the back of the moving bus to deposit a bag, and rather than fight through the bus as a moving block puzzle game, must have run along the roof, as he swung into the front door Indiana Jones style a few minutes later. Our driver spurned a delay because of roadworks in favour of a dirt track winding through the hills, and our faithful ex-ex-school bus, doubly loaded, roared round hairpin bends and 1 in 8 hills that I'd only have down with a 4WD. Urgle!!
Chichi's famous for its market, though all I bought was a knock off penknife. The Catholic church has been appropriated for a Mayan religion, and I arrived at the church steps to see worshippers rotating a small altar to pray to the cardinal points of the compass before a chap clutching a figure of a man on horseback starting whirling a ball of firecrackers before a lad set off some monsters from mortars nearby. A lovely banana and red berry lolly made in a plastic cup cost me 1 quetzal (7p).
A rather safer minibus took us to Panajachel, an ugly town on the delightful volcano ringed Lake Atitlan, misty and cool. Blue skies greeted us for the boat tour next day, first to the magical La Casa del Mundo hotel set into the cliff face for breakfast and communing with the gardens. Then to Santiago with its market, Guatemalan crafts focus on weaving and masks, bright reds and blues, but the town's speciality were paintings of fruit sellers seen from above, rather abstract patterns of fruit and hats with the occasional brown face looking up, truly charming. The locals worship Maximon, a bizarre combination of Mayan gods, a Spanish conquistador and Judas Iscariot, and we were taken to see the little wooden idol, installed in someone's house, surrounded with incense and chanting, and a fag removed briefly so rum could be poured down his throat.
With the wind rising the return trip was choppy, and the promised thermal spring that turned out to be a boiling outflow under a retaining wall of slimy rocks buffeted by the waves did not tempt me into the water.
Rio Dulce is an ugly, noisy town where huge Lake Izabel starts towards the sea. The Hacienda Tijax where we stayed was a posh but gouging eco lodge across a small bay with cabins build over the swamp in what looked like mosquito heaven, but having sweltered under a net for one night, abandoning it the second gave no bites. I strode through the afternoon heat to my first fort for months, San Felipe, built to control pirate incursions onto the lake. Great location on a promontory where you could watch jet-skis paired with dugout canoes, it was fully restored in the 50's to a bijou charm, complete with cannon and dark magazines best explored with the red-eye reducing light on my camera. I was so glad to leap into the pool on my return, hiding under their mini waterfall and calculating Archimedes principle as 3 fat Germans climbed out of a side pool and the cascade stopped for minutes.
The next day's boat trip skirted the fort, then charged downstream past islands heaving with cormorants and herons, through backwaters replete with water lilies with bird stalking across the pads. A possible sighting of a manatee, and passage through a gorge led to the ocean at Livingston, with a few sad crocodiles in a tank, and tapado, a great seafood soup made with whole fish, half crabs and prawns in a coconut sauce. A hot spring entering the river where eddies alternately cooked and cooled you finished the day.
The 8 hours to Antigua involved a idiotic bus crew who's peregrinations round a small town advanced us precisely nowhere in an hour, 2 snake oil salesmen who belaboured our captive audience with their wonder cures,and 2 travelling preachers who I failed to dissuade with heckling and funny faces. I wished a plague of boils on the latter, hoping they'd have to rely on the patent medicines of the former. The chicken bus on the final leg dawdled out of Guatamala City as a lad touted for trade to squeeze ever more passengers into a crowded bus.
We set off with only small backs on a triple chicken bus ride through the mountains to Chichicastenango, seated 6 abreast (middle 2 with half a buttock on the seat). The conductor climbed up the back of the moving bus to deposit a bag, and rather than fight through the bus as a moving block puzzle game, must have run along the roof, as he swung into the front door Indiana Jones style a few minutes later. Our driver spurned a delay because of roadworks in favour of a dirt track winding through the hills, and our faithful ex-ex-school bus, doubly loaded, roared round hairpin bends and 1 in 8 hills that I'd only have down with a 4WD. Urgle!!
Chichi's famous for its market, though all I bought was a knock off penknife. The Catholic church has been appropriated for a Mayan religion, and I arrived at the church steps to see worshippers rotating a small altar to pray to the cardinal points of the compass before a chap clutching a figure of a man on horseback starting whirling a ball of firecrackers before a lad set off some monsters from mortars nearby. A lovely banana and red berry lolly made in a plastic cup cost me 1 quetzal (7p).
A rather safer minibus took us to Panajachel, an ugly town on the delightful volcano ringed Lake Atitlan, misty and cool. Blue skies greeted us for the boat tour next day, first to the magical La Casa del Mundo hotel set into the cliff face for breakfast and communing with the gardens. Then to Santiago with its market, Guatemalan crafts focus on weaving and masks, bright reds and blues, but the town's speciality were paintings of fruit sellers seen from above, rather abstract patterns of fruit and hats with the occasional brown face looking up, truly charming. The locals worship Maximon, a bizarre combination of Mayan gods, a Spanish conquistador and Judas Iscariot, and we were taken to see the little wooden idol, installed in someone's house, surrounded with incense and chanting, and a fag removed briefly so rum could be poured down his throat.
With the wind rising the return trip was choppy, and the promised thermal spring that turned out to be a boiling outflow under a retaining wall of slimy rocks buffeted by the waves did not tempt me into the water.
