Lago de Atitlan, Guatemala

I'm playing catch up now.  I visited Lago de Atitlan two weeks back, but haven't had the opportunity to write about it until now. 

The lake was my next stop after visiting Antigua.  It's a relatively remote place, but with smallish towns at each corner linked primarily by speedboat.  There is San Marcos, dominated by hippies; Panajachel, it's main street lined with restaurants and souvenir stands; Santiago, right between the two volcanos on the southern shore; and then there is San Pedro La Laguna, an odd little mix of tourist and indigenous Mayan culture.  I spent my time on the lake in San Pedro.  It's such a quiet, low key place that for the first afternoon there I wondered what I was going to do with myself.  There are some good hikes to do in the area, but my guidebook recommends that for security reasons, you take along a machete.  No thanks.  No Guatemalan gang members on hand here to act as tour guide, so I found other ways to fill the days. 

Crossing the Lake by Boat

I signed up for a Mayan painting class and painted myself my own little souvenir.  My instructor was a Mayan guy who has lived on the lake his whole life.  He was educated through the eighth grade (standard here) and then took up painting as his trade and has done that ever since.  I'm not sure how painting classes are supposed to work, but I imagine that generally the teacher sits back and tells the student what to do.  In my case, the teacher tried to do that, but I apparently was making such a mess of my painting that every time I added the color to the canvas, he would let me play with it for a minute and then take the canvas and shape my puddle of color into what it was supposed to be.  Every time I look at my canvas I think of him literally giggling at my efforts and telling me it's good, just before taking it out my hands to fix it.

I Don't Have a Picture of My Painting, but This is More Interesting Anyway

I ate my breakfast most mornings at a little restaurant right next to the water.  There were never more than one or two other people there, so I pretty much had the place to myself.  The lake fills the valley that would otherwise exist at the base of the mountains that surround it.  It's picturesque at any time of the day, but the mornings were best.  The mountains were a hazy blue high above the shoreline, and the water was a calm glassy, gray-blue.  There were patches of tall, green reeds along the shoreline.  Each morning, local fishermen would be out on the water in their rowboats fishing.  There was an old dock that went out from the shore near where I sat.  The only thing left of it were the support beams that came up out of the water.  Birds had adopted the posts as perches and would fully occupy them at all hours of the day, always facing in the direction of the sun.

Birds on the Old Dock Greet the Morning

Fisherman Hard at Work

My second day on the lake a friend from Antigua came out to join me.  We ate dinner at a restaurant overlooking the water whose menu boasted a big plate of crab legs and shrimp (that's really what the picture showed).  That sounded to us like too much unexpected luxury to pass up, so we both ordered that.  We were very surprised when the food arrived and instead of a big plate of food, it was a big bowl of watery broth with a whole fish, a whole crab, and a bunch of leggy, eyes-in-tact shrimp all floating in the broth.  I cried laughing (you all know how I can be that way) as we fished around - pun intended - in our broth to discover what else might be floating there.  It definitely wasn't the Alaskan crab legs and peeled, de-eyed and de-legged jumbo shrimp I know I had imagined when I ordered.  Even after weeks of traveling, I can be deluded by my expectations.  We ate what we could of the soup, but were unable to get meat out of the crab, and the fish was too bony to bother with.  So, on the way back from the restaurant we stopped at a hamburger shop owned by a proper ex-pat American who made us a big juicy hamburger while explaining to us what we had just experienced.  Apparently, we had ordered a traditional Maya dish, only we made the mistake of actually trying to eat the seafood, which was only meant to flavor the broth. 

And as a last little adventure on Lake Atitlan, I smoked one of the Honduran cigars that I got on my cigar factory tour a few weeks back.  For those of you who have told me that you want one, you have a good cigar coming your way.