Guatemala the first time around

Our first stop in Guatemala this time around is the lovely town of Antigua. Antigua is one of the prettiest colonial towns we have seen and set in a valley of some mountains and a couple of volcanos made it really beautiful.

This time round in Antigua we just got a feel for the country, wandered around the massive market and did the short hike to the view point (much harder than it should have been due to the altitude!).  

The weekend we where there the town had a flower fair going on and most of the central city all put on flower displays in front of their shops and the town square. 

After Antigua we headed to Lake Atitlan, one of the most beautiful places we have been to on this trip. Lake Atitlan is also where we choose to do some Spanish classes. Traveling through Central America with no Spanish can be done but it is damn difficult and you feel like an idiot most of the time. Every little classroom in our school (Orbita Spanish school) had the stunning view over the lake. Kind of distracting actually!  

We were very lucky with the other students at the school every one was great, we had a good group of people to explore the other towns on the lake and do the hikes of the area.  

We woke up at 3:30am to get a hour long bus at 4 to the top on the mountains so that we could do the short hike of the 'Indian nose' to watch the sunrise over the lake and the volcanos in the distance.  

The road up was terrible an they closed it to do road works in the day time, we spent to long admiring the view and needed to hike down the other side which was a longer hike.  

This just gave us more views and the chance to wander through the town San Juan before we hopped on boat back to San Pedro. 

Of the other towns (we stayed in San Pedro) we visited San Marcos, a cute little hippy town that had a Great Lake front spot to jump in and swim. 

One afternoon we hired kayaks with the intention of kayaking to San Marcos to swim there again. When everyone got in their kayaks we chickened out deciding it was too far. We settled for a 'beach' across the lake that wasn't that great so we went passed San Juan and back to San Pedro before the sun set. Panahachel the biggest town on the lake also had the best and cheapest market we had seen so far. Wish I had bought more things here! The bars in San Pedro close at 12 with music stopping at 11 so although there wasn't much of a party scene we still had a couple of nights out. On Fridays Bar Fe has a pub quiz and it is the messiest pub quiz I have been to with free tequila shots for everyone within 5 minutes of it starting. So far on this trip I have good luck with pub quizzes (or good team mates) while we didn't win overall we won 1 mini game thanks to Alicia that was shots for the table and we won best name more shots for the table. 

They like to give you shots here. We actually played again the Friday after, teams changed up abit. Free shots at the beginning, Rad won us a mini game more shots and somehow we won the overall quiz winning the team $100! We each took a little bit of money and bought beers for our team and friends in another team. No one expected that we would win! 

Our best night out here was probably a Saturday as lots of locals come down from the capital at the weekend. After a few games of pool, some drinks and some dancing we got chatting with some locals who invited us to after party at the hotel. We then spent the next three hours have random drunk conversations in very broken shitty Spanish of their hotel roof top. They just kept supplying us with beers. After two weeks of intensive 1 on 1classes for 4hours a day our brains where ready to give up. However I learnt more than I thought I would! (I have forgotten at least half though 😂). 

Our last activity on the lake was to hike San Pedro volcano that I had been looking at everyday. At 3020meters this would be the highest volcano so far. 

The guys in our group who were all super fit and experienced hikers all kindly let me set the pace. Means I wasn't completely dead at the top!  

The views where definitely worth it! We planned to break up our journey to Mexico with a stop over night but last minute decided to try and make the 13 hour journey in one day on chicken busses. Surprising we made it in better time than we thought, we really thought we just have to stop in some random place overnight. 1 boat, 5 chicken busses, 1 taxi and 2 mini vans later we arrive in San Cristobal Mexico!