Lago Atitlan

Lake Atitlán has been described as one of the most beautiful lakes in the world. We arrived in town hoping to fit in some walking, taking in great views of the crater lake and surrounding volcanoes. We found a nice clean hotel for only £6 a night in the biggest town on the lake, Panajachel. The top of the town was a good place to be – it was busy with locals with a nice local produce market and an excellent bread shop, from where we bought a simply delicious banana loaf. Heading further down towards the lake, the town turned into a tourist strip with restaurants, travel agencies and lots of local craftwork. This busy road led down to the lakeside with beautiful views across to the volcano and jetties where local boat tours set off from. It was all very nice and would make a good destination on a two week holiday. It’s also possible from here to take a boat across the lake to smaller hippy and traveller hangout villages around the lake. We couldn’t quite face this for the hassle of getting there and the thought of lots of foreigners bumming around soaking up the vibes. Our enquiries into walking in the hills around the lake were met with negative mutterings about robberies and the suggested alternatives were expensive private boat tours. We couldn’t help but think back to the wonderful week we had spent around Lake Titicaca, hiking and marvelling in peace and tranquillity. A quick morning discussion when neither of us could be bothered to get out of bed very early made us both realise that we really weren’t enjoying the Guatemalan tourist experience and that it was time to cut it short and hotfoot it to Nicaragua via El Salvador, which was the quickest route. Following this we felt much more positive about things, avoided all possibilities of organised excursions and instead walking two hours along a hillside road adjacent to the lake to two nearby villages. Most of the steep hillsides were forested but around the villages some of the slopes had been terraced and villagers were busy tending to all sorts of healthy looking crops. The first village we came to was unremarkable but the second was a lovely find. The majority of the inhabitants were dressed in matching traditional woven fabric, the men in knee-length skirts and the girls and women in long, dark blue wraparound skirts with colourful belts and blouses. The sensitive tourists/neglectful bloggers that we are, we didn’t take photos. We caught a lift back to Panajachel in the back of a pick-up truck – the equivalent of the local bus service here – sat on sideways benches opposite bemused locals. The next morning we left for El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador, pleased to be leaving Guatemala with at least a snapshot of the country beyond the overdeveloped tourism trail. We would like to come back here with less luggage and take local buses to some more remote places. We found the people to be friendly, the countryside is beautiful and our accounts of it from our week here really don’t do it justice. A typical shop front with handpainted adverts and signs.

Food in Guatemala

Our first meal in Central America - a cheap plate of rice and beans. A complete change from the south of South America and probably the first of very many rice and bean-based dishes here.A tamal. Tamales have popped up on the food blog before, and now they're back with a vengeance. Made from cornflour and steamed in a banana leaf, this one had chicken and a green unidentified vegetable inside. Another we had was rippled with refried beans and a cross-section of it resembled a jam roly-poly. This is tasty, cheap, stomach-filling street food.
A lunchtime treat in Guatemala City - a tender steak kebab with roasted vegetables.
The above was accompanied by this typical sight of corn tortillas, a slug-shaped lump of refried beans, and some hot chile salsas - oh yes.
A giant, refreshing glass of natural lemonade
Local fried fish with garlic, rice, salad and veg by Lake Atitlan.
Comida tipica - an appealing plate of rice, beans, chicken, chorizo, guacamole and nachos, melon (a little oddly) and fried sweet plantain.Anabel the chef

Outside the homemade lollyshop in Panajachel. There are no photos of the strawberry yoghurt or banana ice sombrilla, or parasol-shaped lollies, but they looked like the picture and tasted delicious.

A chicken curry with naan bread in La Antigua. Not up to British standards but satisfying none the less.A lunch time 'economy meal' ofor around £1.50 of a spicy jalapeno pepper stuffed with mince and veg, accompanied by a veg soup, rice and a radish/onion salad. Also featured is a very refreshing watermelon juice.
The other 'economic meal'. Same restaurant, same soup but with steamed vegetables.

Volcan Pacaya

It is rainy season now in Central America and every day has brought significant downpours. We thought we had established the pattern – the rains come in the afternoons, usually around 4pm. With this in mind, we chose to take one of the popular tours up an active volcano near to La Antigua which left at 6am in the morning. We chose the wrong day, this being the only morning that experienced non-stop torrential rain. We were not alone in our morning tour choice, there must have been well over a hundred other miserable looking people trudging up or down the mountainside. We weren’t badly equipped in full shower/waterproofs but we still ended up drenched by the end of it all. Not as badly as many travellers though who had set off in a trainers-hotpant-vest combo.

The views, we were told, were breathtaking, on the hour and a half walk or so to the crater, but for us they were submerged in cloud. We set off at a steady pace behind some lardy Americans. It turned out our group was coach-sized rather than mini-bus sized like all the others which held things up further as our guide tried in vain to set a pace for the group. We walked up through beautiful cloud forest before emerging on a fairly steep slope of volcanic scree. Unfortunately, it was too wet to get the camera out to take photos. After an amusing charge downhill in it, just to see if any tourists would break their legs, we had a steep uphill rocky climb for around half an hour in driving wind and rain to reach the volcanic crater. As we approached it we felt the heat and could see steam rising from the rocks. It got steadily hotter, to the point where part of Simon’s trainers melted off, as we neared the crater. We scrambled over torrents of set lava which had cracked in places to reveal glowing lava beneath - like looking into the brightest part of a fire. As usual and to generalise, the Latin American disregard for safety made the whole experience more fun. We had long since lost our guide and were left to our own devices to jump around on unsteady rocks/solid lava with molten lava beneath. We reached our high point- a section where there was a large flow of molten lava slowing slugging its way downhill. Simon threw a small rock at it and it was solid on top. It was quite incredible to see and definitely made the whole sodden experience completely worth it even if it is dry on every other morning.

Government building, Guatemala City

This is typical of state and local government buildings throughout Latin America. In towns and cities where people live in poverty and houses are crumbling, public money is spent is used on projects like this very glitzy tax office.

Spot the difference

Is it a tree? No, it's a better disguised mobile phone mast than the one on the right. Overlooking Lake Atitlan in Guatemala.

A fruity fountain

Busoms ahoy on the fountain in La Antigua's central square

La Antigua Guatemala

In the main square in the attractive, colonial tourist town of La Antigua, with the cathedral in the background.

We read a ranting article in a local English language paper that stated that the ‘La’ should not be excluded from the name of the city, as so often happens, and to do so would be to offend Guatemalans.’ La Antigua’ it is then. We set off in a shuttle minibus from Guatemala City. Travel agencies seem to have wrapped up tourism travel in these door-to-door services, which are comfortable enough but lack any price transparency, all charging different prices for the same service. Hmm. It’s a bit draining if you want to avoid paying too much and the circuit of shuttle bus destinations feels like a tourism conveyer belt that agencies really don’t want you to get off. Anyhow, our minibus climbed a steep hill on a dual-carriageway out of the bowl where Guatemala City sprawls, past incredible numbers of poor housing, followed by private, gated and gun-guarded, rich housing estates and into the next valley, where the Old Guatemala City, La Antigua Guatemala lies. This was the original capital city founded by the Spanish; the current Guatemala City was founded after an earthquake virtually destroyed La Antigua. It is a very picturesque place, with a volcano looming to the east, hills all around, cobbled streets, and houses painted in assorted colours. The buildings in the centre largely house restaurants, hotels, hostels, travel agencies, bars and wi-fi cafes. There are a couple of impressive plazas and a couple of beautiful, recently restored churches. The other churches, of which there are many, lie in ruins following the earthquake of 1775 (there have been several big ones since, the last one in 1986). It’s great that they haven’t knocked them down but have cleaned them up, made them safe and left them as a testament to the past, leaving an impression of both the grand history of the town and the destructive power of earthquakes. On the edge of town there is also a noisy, bustling market selling everything imaginable but drawing us in for its bargain fruit – bananas and mangoes being notable favourites. La Antigua was certainly a very easy place to be as we sipped coffee and ate bagels whilst watching Slumdog Millionaire on a big screen in an American style café, but this wasn’t what we were hoping for in Central America and, for the first time, it felt like travel fatigue was beginning to set in.

Guatemala City

The cathedral of Guatemala City

And so on to Central America for us to the next part of our adventure. After a half hour stop over in Panama City, only enough time to queue for the loo and brush our teeth, we were back on another plane to Guatemala City.

Most tourists bypass Guatemala City, preferring to only land there and go straight to the nearby colonial city of La Antigua Guatemala. We like exploring capital cities, they always seem to encapsulate so much varied life and drama of the living and dead that you don’t get elsewhere, so we decided to stay for a couple of days.The gated community where we stayed.

We stayed in a family-run hostel in a leafy suburb as we had heard the centre is pretty dodgy, particularly at night. In fact we had read that most of the city is dangerous but, while we did stick to the safer areas, we found everyone we met to be friendly and helpful; such as the man at the airport who lent us his mobile phone to call the hostel or the bar owner who invited us in to shelter from the heavy rain. When we were wandering around the centre, it was striking and a little alarming just how many shops, cafes and bars have private security guards with double-barrelled shotguns. The bars that don’t, bolt an iron gate and open it to invite in potential punters. In the main square, the Parque Central, in front of the government building. A pigeon is fleeing from the gunlike pigeon disperser which went off regularly, and there is a union protest against workers unfair dismissals from a big water company for joining a union.

Guate, as the locals call it, is the largest city in Central America (that’s not including Mexico of course) and is at about 1500m above sea-level, surrounded by tree covered volcanoes. In a swanky, American-style mall in the richer part of town. A department store with a fine name (Si-man) in the background.

The city itself is not so pretty with little greenery to break up the concrete sprawl. In the richer areas American fast food chains are dotted about amongst apartments and hotels and most people travel in cars or on the colourful buses which make their way here after they are deemed unsuitable to continue their previous life, ferrying children to school in the States. The bus routes are confusing to say the least (but at 1 quetzal, or 7p, a ride they were certainly a bargain) so we ended up in taxis several times. Apparently there were some nice museums in the city and the one we went to (Modern Art) was in a nice building with a few interesting pieces of work but really not worth the £4 each entry fee. Some bright spark in the city had decided that foreigners should pay at least this for all the museums instead of the 30p locals pay, which on a travelling budget meant just the one for us. The centre had a lively market and some nice historic buildings spreading out from a large square. We found a nice little gallery opposite a cultural centre with an exhibition of work by people with psychiatric disorders. Overall however, there didn’t seem to be too much going on culturally for a city of its size, possibly due to the clear split of the population into the American influenced rich and those more concerned with where their next meal is coming from. Journeying out of the city is when you get an idea of the scale of the poverty in Guatemala, as the ramshackle shantytowns stretch for miles, clinging hopefully to steep-sided hills.

To sum it up, we’re glad we spent a bit of time here but can understand why it isn’t a top tourist destination.Guatemala's underwhelming version of the Eiffel Tower, the Torre de Reformador.

Adiós América del Sur

It was upon us before we knew it: the end of our journey around South America. It's quite hard to reflect on when every day has been a different adventure and every few days have taken us to a different part of the world. Our time has flown by and yet arrival in Venezuela seems an age ago. We're looking back with one picture of ourselves from each country, that's a total of 10 different countries.

Venezuela

Colombia

Ecuador

Peru

Bolivia

Chile

Argentina

Uruguay

Brazil

Paraguay

Travelling from place to place and seeing the continent has only been a part of our trip. What has made it all so special is the opportunity to meet inspiring people through work, share some of our time with our families and catch up with some some fabulous friends, old and new.