Lago de Atitlán

(View of Lago de Atitlán from our hotel)

Some of the touristspots you visit when following a guide like Lonely Planet turns out to be overhyped. They are not really that fantastic. But Lago de Atitlán is a exception. Sure, there's a lot of tourist here, but it really doesn't matter. The lake here is amazing!

First a little history. The lake (lago means lake) was created in a vulcano eruption 85000 years ago. The eruption was so powerful that vulcanic ashes was shot as far as Florida in north and Panama in south. In this eruption the lake itself was created. The surrounding vulcanos was created from then one, one 70000 years ago, one 55000 years ago and the last 45000 and 35000 years ago.

Many of the Maya tribes have roots here. Mayan language is still spoken by most people here. When the Spanish invaded Guatemala they set up there first fort here. In the beginning they joined forces with one Mayan tribe to fight their rivals, but as all European conquers they wanted it all and eventually got it. Most cities around the lake are now have names with christians originality; San Pedro (where we live), San Marcos, Santa Clara, and so on.

In the 60's and 70's Lago de Atitlán was a mecca for hippies wanting to enjoy the beautiful surroundings here. When the civil war broke out in Guatemala this part of the country was hit especially hard, but now everything is back to normal and locals as well as foreign tourists enjoy the place once again.

And that brings us up to now.

We left Antigua yesterday, where we had spent the night (d. 1/10 .. chinese national day, by the way). We took a fast bus directly to the main city of Lago de Atitlán, Panajachel, but left it again to go to San Pedro. Here living - hotel, food, etc - is much cheaper and, well, it's the same lake and the same beautiful scenery.

In San Pedro we got a room at San Francisco hotel. The weather was perfect yesterday - sun, sun and sun! - so we spent the whole day just enjoying that. We went kayaking, which was really fun. Besides that we just walked around a bit, sat on our balcony and enjoyed the view, rested in the hammock on the roof of our hotel and ate a good rice dinner at a local Indian hippie place (we could not find a Chinese place to celebrate the day, but at least we got rice :-) ).

The unofficially major income in San Pedro is their Marihuana. They grow it in the mountains somewhere .. unofficially, of course! After being shown our room at the hotel and asked if we wanted to get a kayak-, house or bycicleride, the final question was: do you need some grass? Huh? First we thought we heard it wrong. It happend basically everywhere else: when we rented the kayaks and when we rented the bikes. Maybe that explains the large number of hippies here.

Today we wanted a bit more action, so we rented two bikes and where about to drive to San Marcos. That was until we saw all the notes from several previous customers in bike rental shop: "We got robbed on the way to San Marcos", "Don't go to San Marcos carring to much money; we got robbed going there", "Watch out on the road. Robbers with big Machetes robbed us". We got the point: the roads to San Marcos were not save. Then we wanted to go to Santa Clara, but that's 10% climbs going up! In the end we decided on taking the bus to Santa Clara and driving down. This was great. We first went back to the hotel and left anything of value, just in case. Then we got the bikes to the bus, up on the roof and then took the 30 min drive up the mountain. Up there we got on the bikes and started to go down. In the beginning it was great, but then we arrived at the real hill. For the next 20 min there wasn't really a lot of bycicling, only breaking: we had to press the break all the way down. Of course we hadn't checked the breaks on the bikes before we left and Shiu-Jene's bike almost didn't have any. Yikes!

But the drive was beautiful! We could see the lake and the lakeside city. It looked like something from a Greek tourist brochure!

It started to rain on the way down. That made it a bit more difficult to do the 160 degree turns, but it was nice to be cooled down a bit. We were so tired when we got back, though, that we had to just rest for a while. We ate a quick lunch - tacos and frijoles! - and went to rest a bit.

By now the rain stopped and we are enjoying the quiet evening. There aren't many sounds here. Only few cars and often you can hear birds. It's really nice. Once we are done uploading pictures, we will go and eat fresh pescado .. fish, that is!

Take a look at the pictures we got pictures from:

Parramos and Shiu-Jene making Tortillas,
Antigua and Rasmus' day trip to the San Francisco church and Hill de la Cruz,
And, of course, Lago de Atitlán.

Take care ya'all! :-)