Atitlan Adventures

This weekend our group finally went to Lake Atitlan - the trip I was most excited about and the one that seemed the longest away was this weekend. That means our semester is getting closer and closer to being done. Bittersweet.

I've neglected to write about the organic macadamia nut farm we went to (and the corresponding desire to grow a few macadamia trees!)

Our trip to the US Embassy in Guatemala City (where I saw this funny bus - I hope you catch the irony - and considered trying to work in a US embassy somewhere, because every job with travel sounds like fun!)

Watched the sun dip behind the mountains and volcanoes of Antigua - when the earth isn't so flat it's harder to see sunsets. In fact I missed the moon-set last night while talking to a traveling musician from Cancun at Sunset Cafe -- because it disappears so rapidly with a mountain to hide behind!

I'm also getting frustrated with the power lines that intrude into every photogenic landscape - whether that's in the city or so far up in the highland mountains you'd think there wouldn't be any power lines.

Spending just a few days in Panajanchel (the tourist town on Lake Atitlan) and San Juan(a tiny little indigenous, rural town on the other side of the lake)made me want to change the "Antigua Semester" to the "Atitlan Semester". At Uxlabil, our eco-hotel in San Juan, I picked a lime and several juicy oranges, canoed to watch the sun set, and kayaked in the early morning light, found floating volcanic rocks along with a cluster of boulders where I lodged my kayak and jumped into the crystalline (supposedly polluted) water for a swim among the local fishermen and large bass in the water. Wouldn't you want to move here too?