After six months on the move, in a new place and a new bed every few days, facing the ever-recurring challenge of making the most of limited time, we are now taking a break from the break in Guatemala.
For May we have rented a little house on Lake Atitlan. We do not want to be entirely idle, though: five days a week, four hours a day, we will be learning Spanish at the Jabel Tinamit language school.
We had almost given up hope in the meantime, though, of ever arriving in Guatemala at all.
It started with Jan being stung by a scorpion during the bus ride from Puerto Escondido to San Cristóbal de las Casas, forcing us to leave the bus in a rush and head for hospital. ‘Happily’ scorpion stings are an everyday occurrence in that area, so they had the right antiserum to hand immediately…
Travelling on the following day was simply demoralising. There would have been a bus running during the day at least as far as the vicinity of San Cristóbal. Sadly it was fully booked. Not that we had experienced a single fully booked bus in Mexico until then.
Four bus rides and 20 hours later (I will spare you the details of that miserable journey) we finally arrived in San Cristóbal. For the last 70 km we took a taxi specially, to leave nothing to chance and not miss our 6 am shuttle to Guatemala. Except that the shuttle simply never came! How unlucky can you get?!?
Above all, there are moments when all I want to do is book the next flight to Europe. Or to the USA. Or to Australia. I had an “emergency number” for the shuttle from the chap who owns the company (from Guatemala). When I wrote to him that the shuttle was not there yet, he told me in all seriousness that this was hardly surprising. Guatemala is an hour behind, after all.
Seriously?!? Did he really want to sell me the idea that they give their customers the Guatemalan time at which they will be collected in Mexico?!?
Since the shuttle still had not arrived three hours later, we gave up waiting. That exceeds even the Latin American tolerance threshold.
Our new attempt the next morning happily worked. Not on time, but hey - we would probably not have given a third attempt much of a chance…
After another twelve hours on the road we finally arrived in Panajachel, after a total of 3 days of travelling. I could have wept with joy as we stepped into our new home. It is lovelier than I ever dared dream… ❤️
Our language school confirmed at first glance all the hopes its good reviews had raised in us. Everybody has their own teacher and we sit on an open terrace, so you are not locked in a classroom for hours.
Jan’s head in particular was smoking after his first Spanish lesson, understandably. I am curious to see how it goes. Four hours a day is a lot of material! But admittedly it is probably necessary, because my Spanish barely improved on its own over the last eight weeks in Mexico…
And to make my happiness complete, at least, I go to yoga at an art academy three mornings a week.
Sadly we have had to note that Guatemala - or at least the area around Lake Atitlan - is not as cheap as every blog has been claiming. The whole time we had expected Guatemala to be even cheaper than Mexico. So far, though, we cannot confirm that!
While you can buy fruit and vegetables incredibly cheaply at the market, everything else that goes with a Western lifestyle is really expensive. Sadly that includes basics like cereal, yoghurt, milk… If you can find the things you want to buy at all…
It will be interesting to see how the rainy season develops here. So far the mornings have always been lovely, and that is supposed to be the case throughout the rainy season. Then it rains in the afternoon. Which is why we scheduled our Spanish lessons for the afternoon. But how heavily, how often and how long, we will have to wait and see…
So far it has rained every other day. Hopefully that does not change to a daily frequency. Because when it rains, the streets turn into rivers. In my photos the rain had only just started. Since Panajachel, like every village around the lake, sits on a slope and the drains take in nothing at all (if they exist?), all the rainwater flows down the streets, more than ankle deep…
