Sleepwalking with Volcanos- Lake Atitlan, Guatemala

Well I find myself sitting at the hostel at 4am waiting for my shuttle to come and take me from Antigua, Guatemala to Copan, Honduras. That shuttle never showed. So hopefully I will be leaving tomorrow at that time. I have to spend another night here at the Black Cat hostel which I am now going to do a slight review of. The people are nice. I got bed bug bites all over with over 40 bites on just one arm. They have a movie room and free internet. I will not stay there again. The reason being because it is so completly infested with cigarette smoke that I spend most my nights coughing myself to sleep. I have to leave the hostel just to sit at a table and I can only hibernate in my room or in an internet cafe. For smokers I would recommend it. Its a great place to go and meet people since there are lots of other people around none really caring about the health of those around them if you want to go sit in a movie room with no vent or ventilation and smoke regardless of the others that were already there then this is place for you. Okay im off that tirade I hope I dont offend anyone to much. Its a reoccuring problem for me as I have a real low tolerance to cigarette smoke. So for the rest of the day I roam the town, I already know what it looks like by now so I spend my time visiting street venders and getting a taste of all the different foods. Yumm...

I went to Lake Atitlan which is considered by atleast the locals to be one of the most beautiful places in the world. That is often how they pass it off as well. The first night I was there I stayed in the town called Panajachel which is a nice little area with lots of tourists things to buy and a pretty shoreline. The lake itself is held in by volcanos and at an altitude of about 9000 feet. Quite beautiful indeed. Unfortunatley during the wintertime here it can get a bit chilly at night and so in the morning everyone from the villages starts a nice big fire filling the valley with smoke. There is a lot of haze in the pictures and that is why. The villages dont all have a road to them so I opted to take a boat ride to Santiago Atitlan and attempt to climb one of the volcanos in the area.


First things first I walked to the wrong dock. Doh. After walking a bit down the lake I came to the right dock and payed about $3 US for a boat ride across the lake. This is the boat I took.


The trip from Lake Peten Itza seemed a blur in my mind. The bus ride didn't allow me any sleep and I had taken another 2 and a half hour shuttle to Panajachel without any sleep. The sleep I got that night was good but still not enough to recover. I couldnt get the idea that something was not right and my motions seemed that of a clown, the purpose not for myself. Perhaps I was lonley, I had undertaken another trip on my own and it is harder to meet people to travel with here then it was in Europe. There is a lot of time that I have to think to myself and I am still in the process of deciding whether or not that is good or bad. Or maybe it was because days before i had confessed in my caring to beautiful girl who happened to be over 5,400 miles away. Whatever it was It was growing.

I travelled to the town of San Lucas where most begin the hike up Volcano Atitlan. The owner of a resteraunt in Santiago Atitlan told me that a few days ago over 20 people had been robbed in a row on the trail. It was not a great sign but I was still willing to go ahead with the trip. I had after all travelled over 15 hours to get here. I walked around the town and found myself in a market of Guatemalan natives. I realized at this market that for the last hour in the village I had not seen another tourist and I wouldnt before I left.





I spent some time in the market, it didnt appear as though I was in any hurry although I knew I would need to make good time to a camp spot since I obviously wasnt going to summit and come back down before night fell in about 5 hours. I finally found the trail and started the walk up the peak. Finally that block that had been teetering in my mind falls, it crashes on the glass that was my enthusiasm and suddenly my world has shattered. I am confused. I look at the peak and it begins to fall away, the trees in front of me appear to grow higher and I slow to a stop. It is at this point that, without remorse, I turn around and head back to Santiago Atitlan. I have the knowledge of why I turned when I was already at the trail, why I hadn't turned earlier and saved myself all the time of the travel to the peak. Why I had to look at it, let it talk, and then decide. A climb without personal meaning suddenly wasn't desirable. So I took the taxi back, rode the boat to a town called San Pedro under the San Pedro Volcano and slept the night.


I felt like taking a shower. I was staying a little hotel call Hotel San Francisco situated near the top of a hill and with a good view of the lake. After getting a nice look at the room I felt I may be cleaner to skip the shower it would be a shame to get my bed wet. The room was remeniscent to a room that my friend Sarah and I had shared in Costa Rica. Although the room there was cleaner the bathroom had a glass door between it and the beds. This glass door was the kind you could take a picture through and so we had some fun times imagining that the other person wasnt looking. Or imagining that they were and maybe they liked what they were seeing, one never knows.



The view the following morning allowed the hotel to redeem itself, some. I spent the morning watching the sun rise about the Volcano which I had failed to even get a portion of the way up the day before. My mind was numb, without the feeling of things lost that often come when I dont attempt something. I knew there was something greater missing then the peak which had been there for hundreds of years.



The peak of Volcan San Pedro above the town of San Pedro. There are places around the lake that have become mass graveyards as the whole hillside has given way and decimited the villages. One can only hope it dosent happen while sleeping comfortably in a $4 per night hotel.



I thought about a lot there ontop of that hotel most of which didnt include the large spider that lived above my bed. Him I didnt have to worry about we had made the deal of "You stay on your side and Ill stay on mine", and so far it had worked. No my mind was on other things. I love the world, it is an adventure hidden in every corner, many of which I could never see even if I lived a 1000 years but something at this time is missing. I started to travel to climb when I went to Thailand with my friend John. Even at that time there was an underlying reason which I had yet to fully grasp. It became more evident as my travelling became more frantic, more frustration induced. I suddenly realized on this rooftop that a major reason I had started travelling had vanished and instead was replaced by a calm I had not noticed in quite a long time. When we run from things we are afraid of to things which we enjoy then we run the risk of losing sight of why we are doing these things in the first place. Well I need to run now the internet shop is closing. However I hope you enjoyed a slight glimpse into momentary thought on travelling from someone who has seen so little and has much to discover.