First we had to stop about halfway there to pick up my friend’s aunt in Chimaltenango where she was attending a Mormon retreat for the weekend. My friend’s uncle apologized for picking us up late, as he had driven early that morning (around 2 am) to the retreat site. Apparently it was very cold in the area that night, and many of the attendees were so poor they barely had clothes to cover them. Some were getting frostbite. I believe he took blankets up to the group, and I applaud him for his compassionate nature (especially at two in the morning), but I can’t help but wonder. Why was the Mormon church holding a retreat in the freezing cold of the mountain night for people with no clothes when they could have just as easily spent the money on BLANKETS. Priorities, people! You can’t pray very well when you’re freezing to death. In addition, the retreat site was locked down like Fort Knox. Only true believers could enter or leave. Needless to say, we stayed in the car while my friend’s uncle went to look for his wife. The security does beg the question: what were they doing that was so secret, no outsiders could see? Sacrificing street dogs? Then again, the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City is off limits to nonbelievers, so it’s nice to see the same paranoia has been passed down the Guatemalan branch of the religion.
At this point I should probably also admit that due to the growing bacteria population in my body, I spent most of the hours from Guatemala City to Panajachel in a state of semi-consciousness. I slept off and on, fitfully, occasionally waking to see the hairpin turns we were taking down through the mountains. The car in front of us was towing another vehicle, and the road was so steep, we could smell his brakes burning. But out to the sides, the countryside side rolled away, green and fresh, with occasional bare cliffs of white limestone. It was actually quite lovely.
About twenty minutes before we arrived at our destination, we stopped at a scenic overlook that had been paved into the mountainside. Poor indigenous families had set up makeshift stalls selling cheap knickknacks in the hopes that some tourist would buy something when they stopped. Children swarmed the car, begging us to buy little clay turtles or bottled Guatemalan sodas. Looking out past the stalls, you could see the silvery edge of the lake down below through the mist, with villages crowded against the shore. A thick cloud of fog lay over the entire lake, and the distant volcano cones were all but obscured from our view. It was a bit of a disappointment, since you could tell the view would be stunning on a clear day.
Due to our late departure and our hour layover in Chimaltenango, we didn’t arrive in Panajachel until afternoon, after two. The streets of the town were narrow and meandering, paved with cobblestones. Lots of people were on the streets, women with baskets on their heads, men unabashedly washing our Jeep drive by (a bit of a luxury in Guatemala). We originally started looking for a nice resort hotel that my friend’s godmother had stayed in, but the posada that we were directed to looked a little older and quite a bit more rundown than the pictures we had seen. We continued along a street that ran past the shore of Lake Atitlan, until we came to a little hotel called Casa Ramos. It looked a little dirty from the outside, but the rooms were clean and the tile was new, so we took the rooms.By this point even I was starving, despite my chronic nausea, so we decided to walk across the street to a restaurant overlooking the lake. We had to push past several young men trying to sell us water cruises across the lake. It was too late in the day to contemplate the journey, so we moved on. The restaurant we chose had an open wooden deck that overlooked the lake, and a nice breeze was blowing. The sun would peep out from behind the clouds every so often, throwing a ray of light down onto the water. We ordered fruity and flowery drinks and fried fish pulled from the lake. It was plain and simple and delicious.
After lunch we decided to just take a walk around the town since it was too late to take a boat tour. Apparently the currents on the lake become dangerous towards evening, so all tours end around four in the afternoon. As we walked down the cobblestone streets, we realized that we were walking into a market area that had taken over a main street for the day, and feeling full and happy, I was ready for some shopping. At one large stall, outfitted like a Persian desert tent, I bought a beautiful handmade patchwork bed comforter for almost nothing. Women barely over four foot tall plied me with small handicrafts.
As we came onto the wide main street, we could tell it must be a special kind of market day. A group of young indigenous men and women, boys and girls, were playing marimbas that had been set up near the street. They were dressed in traditional outfits, and we stopped to watch. Further down the street, a man was setting off rocket fireworks that startled the crowd and then made them clap.
We walked and shopped until it started to get dark, and then we headed back down towards our hotel. The night was getting chilly, and my friend started to look at each street vendor’s stall for atole, a thick, hot sweet corn drink. It was so popular with the crowd that several of the first stalls we visited were already sold out. We also stopped to sample some cheese pupusas hot off the griddle.
By the time we finally made it back down near our hotel, most of the businesses and stalls were closed for the evening. We still needed to eat dinner, so we asked at a restaurant right near our hotel. The proprietor told us that he was out of propane for the stove, but we could go right next door to his brother’s restaurant. I didn’t feel up to a whole dinner, so I ordered cream of mushroom soup, later to be found was made from a packet of powder, and some French fries. I know, great dinner. But I was looking for PLAIN. Queasy stomachs need PLAIN. My friend ordered a beautiful stack of pancakes that the rest of us eyed hungrily, and we all resolved to eat a stack of pancakes for breakfast in the morning.Now full of random tidbits, we pulled ourselves up the hill to our rooms. After showering, we fell into our beds and watched Spanish-language TV until we couldn’t keep our eyes open any longer.
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