We originally planned on hiking and camping on Pacaya last month, but it decided to blow its top sending enough ash raining down to force the closure of the airport in Guatemala City. We hoped the two big eruptions would release enough pressure that things would calm down and we could still camp on the volcano before we head back home. Things worked out well and we were able to make our trip to Pacaya and see lava last night and this morning. ...
Sometime around 1450, the Chajoma Maya moved their capital to Jilotepeque Viejo in order to make it inaccessible to their hostile neighbors. The city itself had been built a few hundred years earlier and they hoped moving their capital here would help them keep their warring neighbors out. It didn’t work. They were captured and ruled by the Kaqchikel Maya and eventually removed from the site shortly after the Spanish conquest of 1524. The site was never used again. ...
Before leaving Chichi, we took a short hike up to Pascual Ab’aj, which is a Maya sacred site that survived the arrival of the Spanish. There used to be a carved idol at the site, but some Catholic Action members defaced it in the 1950s. It’s still an active site, though. You can see real Mayans conducting rituals there every day. Lost and Found Even the cows knew we were lost ...
Twice a week the main square and surrounding streets of Chichicastenango are transformed into the largest open air market in Central America. People come from miles around to buy and sell goods. Some are grown, some are reared, and many are hand-made. When we have visited in years past, there have been hundreds to thousands of tourists combing the market for bargains, but this year was very different. We have always wanted to stay at Hotel Santo Tomas, but it was always completely full, forcing us to stay in some of the other hotels in town. This year we had no trouble booking 2 large rooms. And when we checked in, we found out we were the only guests in the entire hotel. They told us if we wanted to use hot water to call them and they would turn on the boiler for us. They were not running it because the hotel was empty. That probably meant the other hotels in town were also empty. And that probably meant there were no tourists in town for the market. ...
I needed a haircut before we came to Guatemala. I didn’t get one because of various factors and the way I prioritized my time. After another five weeks of uncontrolled growth down here, I was in bad shape. Brett and his boys were also looking shaggy, so we found the barber shop with the highest reviews in Antigua and set up some appointments to get haircuts. The major hair style down here is the fade, which is a cut where they use a shorter set of clippers on the sides and back to taper and blend it all the way down to your skin at the bottom. It gives the look of your hair fading away into your skin. It’s especially popular among teen-agers and college kids. Brett’s younger boys were very excited to get fade cuts and they turned out great. Brett and I didn’t go quite as extreme, although Brett did get the hot-towel straight-razor shave. Goodbye beard. ...
One of my favorite things to do is jump off of stuff into water. A few years ago we visited Lake Atitlan and did the usual thing of hiring a boat to take us around the lake. One of the places we stopped that day was at a little platform someone had built where you could jump off into the lake and take photos with the volcanos behind you, and then easily climb back up and do it again and again. ...
We don’t see this very often in Antigua, but when we travel to smaller cities in rural areas it’s common to see complicated connections on many of the power distribution poles. This weekend we took a boat to several of the cities on the shores of Lago de Atitlan. Each of the cities we visited had power poles with more connections than you can imagine. I only snapped a few photos, but I think you can see what I mean. Imagine how much work it is to add/remove/change a connection on one of those. You have to not only know what you’re doing, but you have to be able to move carefully so you don’t get crispy. ...
We went to the ChocoMuseo in Antigua today. We signed up for the “bean to bar” workshop. This wasn’t our first chocolate factory tour, but this was so much better than any of the others. They didn’t include picking cocoa pods or fermenting or drying the beans, but we did get to roast them, grind them into paste using a mortar and pestle, make various chocolate drinks, and finally make our own chocolate bars. We also learned a lot along the way. I really enjoyed the whole experience. If you’re ever in Antigua and you like chocolate, this is a workshop for you. And it’s only $25 per person. Very worth it. ...
One of the big reasons we chose to visit Guatemala this time of year was to be in Antigua for Semana Santa. They do some amazing things for Holy Week here. Some of the festivities were cancelled by the Catholic Church because of covid, but some of the traditions lived on. One of the most famous is the tradition of creating beautiful “carpets” out of colored sawdust. The artists work through the night to create these works of art that don’t even last through the day. ...
If you want to take a warm shower south of the border, you’ll probably run into what a lot of gringos call a “suicide shower.” You walk into the shower area and look up at the showerhead. It has electrical wires running into and out of it. Yikes. This is because they don’t waste a lot of gas and/or electricity down here doing things like keeping a huge tank of water hot. Instead, they only heat the water right when and where you need it. ...