The day started early. We had to drive back to Athens in time to catch a flight to Santorini, and that meant leaving the hotel before 7:00. Breakfast doesn’t start until 7, but we hoped to sneak in and get a doggie bag for ourselves anyway. No. The lady setting up the buffet wasn’t going to fall for our tricks and excuses. We did finally talk her in to letting us grab “a role” before walking out to the car. ...
We went to bed a little later than usual last night. We enjoyed a sunset session from one of the viewpoints above Meteora, then drove down into Kastraki and had a late dinner at a local pub. The Gyros continue to be pork or chicken only, no sign of lamb anywhere. Despite the late-ish night, we still wanted to be up for sunrise at one of the overlooks. We got up around 6:00 and headed up into the hills/rocks. It was nice, but it wasn’t magical like the previous night had been. Part of that is probably because the newness of the view was starting to wear off, but the real difference was the lack of clouds. People underestimate the value of clouds when taking landscape photos. ...
We went to bed a bit early last night. For some reason staying up through the night on a flight will do that to you. So we went to sleep around eight and woke up around five. That’s a bit earlier than we were hoping, but the traffic noise was starting to build and it didn’t seem like we would be able to fall back to sleep. Today is Sunday. A lot of things seem to be closed on Sunday, even in Athens. We walked around the hotel in search of an ATM, an electronics store (hoping to buy a plug adapter), and to find some breakfast. We found an ATM at a bank across the street from the hotel. Across another street from there is a bakery called Bread Factory. We had no choice but to buy some pastries. The pastries were good, especially the mini Pain au Chocolat. ...
We picked up Brett and Jess then picked up Steve and headed to airport. Steve took our car back to his house and will get it to Dave when he comes into town. The plan is to have Dave use the car while he is in town and we are gone. Dave will park the car at the airport when he flies back home, which is just a few hours before are supposed to arrive. So it will only need to be parked at the airport for a couple hours. We brought an extra key fob with us, so Dave can lock his key in the car when he parks it. I think it’s a great plan. I guess we’ll see how well it works over the next little while. ...
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. ...