Out of Contact

Hi kids,

I'll be out of contact (both phone and email) for a number of days, but should be back to civilization on Monday the 3rd. See you all then! I'll be in Nevada if you must know.

Breaking News!

The Wall Street Journal is always on the cutting edge of tech news. I'm sure you don't know this yet, but the kids these days are using an alternate slang vocabulary fueled by habits formed in chat rooms and online gaming. Even appropriating misspellings of words and using numbers in place of letters. Crazy kids! What will they think of next?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118679550023894850.html?mod=fpa_editors_picks

In other news, the Wall Street Journal is breaking the story of an alleged affair by president Clinton. Impeachment proceedings to follow? Stay up to date with The WSJ.

I've tried to hold my blog to at least some standard of maturity. I have now failed at that. This made absolutely no sense to me, but I could not stop watching it.

There is The Confusion!

Not really, but I wanted to let you kids (who read my blog) know a couple of things.

1. I am back safe and sound from Guatemala. It was a fantastic trip.

2. The last post was actually written before I left, but the reason you are not seeing it until now is that I didn't get a chance to edit and proof it and add pictures... er... picture. Because...

3. As soon as I got home, I got hit hard with some sort of head cold which has really taken me out of commission. Those who know me well, know I don't really get sick that often, and this took me by surprise. The only thing that makes sense is that my body was nice enough to know that getting sick while traveling was not in it's best interest, and just waiting until I got home to pounce.

4. I am currently uploading everything from my trip. Here you can find pictures (on Picasa Web Albums), and here are the videos (on YouTube). Yes I'm a Google whore.

5. When I get a chance and have the interest, I'm planning on going back to the posts and rewriting them, and swapping out the pictures for ones I actually took myself. Maybe even some interpost video as well. You're lucky I didn't bring my GPS unit, or you would have to suffer some KML based travel narratives on Google Earth. OOOO lucky you...

6. Honestly, I've been a little bummed that I haven't gotten any comments on my blog in a while. What, you guys don't care? Or even more surprising, you guys don't have any snarky comments to make?

Last Post From Guatemala

So, tomorrow is my last day down here, so this will likely be my last post. I intend to go back and edit all of my old posts and add actual pictures I took, maybe add more detail as well considering I wrote the posts rather quickly and it's a lot of "then I did this, then I did this, Oh!, then we did this thing". Kinda boring and list-y. Speaking of boring and list-y:

We left San Marcos on Thursday and took a boat across the lake to the city of Santiago Atitlan. It's the biggest of the cities around the lake, but doesn't get nearly the tourist interest as Panajachel or San Pedro. Even so, it's still full of tourist, which would bother me if I wasn't, well, one of them.

We only went through Santiago to catch a bus (finally I got to ride one of the famed Guatemalan Chicken Busses) towards San Lucas, but got of early. We were headed to a small farm run by a guy Nikki met years ago while in the Peace Corps. He came to her school in Belize to talk about the work he was doing on his permaculture farm, called IMAP, and told Nikki that if she was ever in the area, we should come visit it. We didn't give him much warning, I think Nikki emailed him a day or so before, but he still extended the offer again, and even said we should stay at his house.

After we got off the bus in what seemed the middle of nowhere, we walked down a dirt path for about 20 minutes until we saw signs for IMAP, which stands for Institute of MesoAmerican Permaculture (not Internet Message Access Protocol. Geeks.) I can't say I know much about it, it's deffinately more Nikki's balywick, but it's a type of sustainable aggraculture. We took a tour of the farm, and the primary goal seems to be education. Everything they do on the farm, they try to do in a way that is replicable. Follow the links above if you want to find out more about it.

Friday morning we took a boat to Panajachel, where we did some shopping. Pana, the tourist and travel hub of the lake, is nice, but not much to talk about. We stayed one night and left early in the morning headed to Coban, known for it's coffee production and eco-adventure-tourism. So of course we had to check out both.

The first day there we took a shuttle 2 hours to a site called Semuc Champey, which is basically a nature reserve surounding a series of pools and waterfalls above an underground river, and is possible the most beautiful place I have seen in my life. The travel pakage we bought included a guide to take us first up a long hike to a view point where you can see all the pools, then you walk back down, and swim from pool to pool, evetuall taking a rope ladder down below one of the waterfalls into the cave where the river cames back out of the ground. Yeah, totally boring sounding, I know. I'm going to wait until I can get my own pictures up before I go into more detail, but if you ever go to Guatemala, this is something you cannot miss.

That same day, on the way back to Coban, we stopped at the Lanquin Caves for a short hike in and out of some of the larger caverns. As we were leaving, we happend to be there at exactly the right time of day, when all the bats start flying out. I'm talking thousands of bats, thick as a swarm of flys. Some of the parts of the cave are so narrow, that the bats had to fly at and around us to get out. So close that a couple of them actually hit me.

The next day was a pretty lazy one in Coban. We visited the Dieseldorff family coffee plantation on the southern end of the town. The tour itself was short but informative, and the best part was the coffee tasting at the end.

After that, one day back in Antigua to rest, and then fly back in the morning.

On the Lake

It´s officially half way through my trip here, and I´ve been putting off writing another entry because... well, I´ve just been lazy.

We made it safely to Xela on Thursday, although the traffic was pretty bad. 7 hours on a shuttle instead of the 4-5 it should have taken. But it was worth it. We stayed at the same house that Nikki had been staying at before I came, so she knew the family and most all the other students staying there. Almost all the meals we ate were family style our hosts kitchen. She made some great strawberry pancakes.

One night we went to a local theater which I was surprised to find out was just a large tv screen with couches set up around it. Although we were the only ones there, so we got to pick from a list of about 150 movies they had, and start it whenever we want. It made me think that would be a great business idea in the states, to get a building with a bunch of smallish rooms that could hold about 15 people max, and have movies they could pick from and serve them food. It possible illegal though, considering the laws about public showing of movies may be interpreted pretty strickly. Regardless, it was a great place to hang out. Only downside? They didn´t have The Big Lebowski.

Another side trip was to Fuentes Georginas, a natural hot spring about an hours drive away. 2 of Nikki´s house mates, Jamesh and Wendy joined us, and we ended up staying in the water for hours.

On Sunday we took a shuttle to Panajachel, which is known as a touristy place with lots of shopping, but we only stopped for a quick bite before jumping on a boat to San Marcos La Laguna, where we have spent most the last 3 days. The boat trip was pretty harsh. Although it was only 40 minutes or so to cross Lago de Atitlan, it was incredibly crowded and we were lucky to get the seats that we did. Others were forced to sit up on (or just hug) the walls of the small boat. If we had hit any serious turbulence, I´m sure a couple of them would have ended up in the water.

San Marcos is beautiful. My guide book describes it as ¨Guatemala´s premier New Age Centre¨ but I´m not really sure I see that. It´s tiny, hardly anyone here. There is a small native village up the hill which gives the area it´s name, but we´ve stayed mainly down by the water where the hotels, restaurants, and ok... yoga and meditation centers are. We got a great room at the Aaculaax, which is a hotel made almost entirely from recycled materials. It´s a little more pricey then most hotels in the area, 250 Quetzals a night (a little over $30, 1Q = 7.5$ ish) but the view is amazing, especially from our room. I´ve never regretted more that I am unable to upload the pictures I have taken, but it will just have to wait.

I´ve haven´t been this lazy in years. That´s saying a lot considering I´ve been unemployed the last 7 months. The town is so small there are no banks, real stores or anything like that, so as we were running out of money (and things to do), we had to jump on a boat across the lake to San Pedro La Laguna where we found an ATM, after a 5Q taxi ride up the hill. It was one of those auto rickshaws I saw all over the place in India. It reminded me how much I wanted one in the States, it´s perfect for around town travel. Anyway, we bought some playing cards, and dice in San Pedro, and after lunch, jumped on a boat back to San Marcos. I wasn´t so lucky this time, and was a wall huger all the way back. I was pretty soaked by the time we got off.

This morning we ate at the hotel restaurant which we have eaten at every morning we´ve been here. When Nikki stayed here before, one of her favorite things was their crepes. You could get almost anything on it, but their specialty was nutela and bananas. The first morning when we tried to order them, they told us the blender was broken, so no crepes, pancakes, liquados or anything like that. Devastated, we went ahead and ordered other things, and I have to say, the best thing I have eaten this entire trip was the bacon, egg, cheese sandwich I got. We went back every morning only to be told the same thing, the blender was broken, but it would be fixed tomorrow. Finally, today they had borrowed a blender from a neighbor and we were able to have our crepes. Worth the wait, but I have to say the sandwich was better.

I can´t say enough how peaceful it is here. It reminds me of the tea plantations I visited in Kerala, India a few summers ago. Much different climate, but the same solitude and comfort. Just like there, this is the type of place I would imagine going if I wanted to escape from the world to write a book or play or something like that. If you need a retreat from life, seriously consider coming here.

Thats all we´ve done so far. Next on the list is Coban. The internet (and power) here is a little sketchy, so I haven´t had a chance to proof this because the computer keeps crashing, so I´m just going to post as is. I´ll clean it up and add pictures later.