Spiders, Spanish & School buses

Find photos here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=169471&id=510568119&l=7fc8ba3e31

And so we arrived in Guatemala, first stop on our journey through Central America. Getting in was interesting - most borders I've crossed in the past were (as you'd expect) fairly regimented and had checkpoints, barriers and that sort of thing. Cross overland from Mexico to Guatemala at La Mesilla and you'll find yourself traversing a bustling street market with a large "Welcome to Mexico" sign at one end and a "Welcome to Guatemala" version at the other. In between there's a small office partially obscured by stalls selling Bob Esponga beach towels where you're supposed to go to get your passport stamped, but from the activity going on outside it was clear that most people were skipping merrily between the countries as and when they fancied a Mexican tamale or a Guatemalan cup of coffee.

After leaving the mayhem behind we arrived at one of Guatemala's gems - Lago de Atitlan, a huge lake ringed by volcanoes, beaches and jungle villages only accessible by boat. We spent a night with our new friend Mike in the tourist mecca of Panajachel sampling our first Guatemalan beer and trying the excellent street food (sausages, chicken & chorizo cooked over a charcoal grill and served up with fresh guacamole and endless tortillas). Next morning we squeezed in between the locals and luggage already crammed onto one of the lanchas that zoom around the lake and set sail for San Marcos la Laguna.

San Marcos is an odd place. On one hand it's a beautiful tropical paradise, filled with banana, avocado and coconut trees, coffee plants, exotic flowers and hummingbirds, but on the other it's a perfect example of tourism gone wrong. The town itself is small, unremarkable and totally removed from the strange pseudo-village that's grown up along the lake shore. In the latter, backpackers rub shoulders with wealthy new age practitioners who come to find themselves and study astral projection at expensive meditation centers. Unfortunately, the only contact we had with those of the new age persuasion was being woken up by drunken primal screaming at 3am and later learning from the locals that said screaming and general drunken nuisance is common behaviour from their new neighbours. I'm sure this is in no way reflective of the new age movement generally, but what it does seem to typify is a disturbing trend we saw repeated across Central America - wealthy "gringos" who decide to buy a slice of cut-price paradise, set up home there, set up all the things they miss from their old home (places to buy cappuccino, etc) without giving any thought to the impact this will have on the places they've decided to colonise or the people who were living there first. We certainly enjoyed sipping fresh mint lemonade surrounded by orchids and butterflies, but we felt less comfortable about it once we'd explored beyond our (beautiful) eco-hostel's cafe garden.

Before we left, San Marcos gave us our first taste of tropical wildlife - a scorpion in our bedroom. In fact, this turned out to be less of a health hazard than the pesky hummingbirds that insisted on flying very fast very close to our heads whenever we were foolish enough to sit next to anything with flowers. After several near death experiences while trying to photograph the little buggers they'd definitely lost a lot of their charm.

Next stop was the old colonial city of Antigua where we'd decided to base ourselves for a few weeks and attempt to learn some more Spanish at one of the highly recommended and highly cheap language schools there. This was to involve one-on-one tuition from 8am - 1pm 5 days a week, with optional afternoon activities conducted entirely in Spanish. Things started off well - after a few days the Spanish I picked up years ago in Mexico started to come back and suddenly I was able to hold mini conversations where previously I'd thrown a few words at people and hoped they got the gist. However, after 4 hours a day of talking to the same person you start to run out of topics of conversation, even in your own language. To try and keep things interesting my teacher steered the conversations into more and more complicated areas, which resulted in me having to explain the British electoral system and my thoughts on the UK's involvement in Iraq to her. In Spanish. It wasn't pretty. Also, many of the conversations my teacher instigated ended in a comparison between Guatemala and the UK and when you're talking about crime, unemployment, war and politics Guatemala invariably comes off worst. Unfortunately, after one week of Spanish lessons my vocabulary was only developed enough to offer the less than profound opinion in each case that the situation "is bad" and "a problem."

The afternoon activities were a bit less of a brain-fry, as despite best intentions most of the other students were happy to lapse into English in order to actually communicate with each other. On our first day we took one of Guatemala's famous chicken buses to a macadamia farm where we were given a guided tour. For those unfamiliar with Central American transport, a chicken bus is so named because it will carry anything from people to large sacks of potatoes to, well, chickens. The buses themselves are former US schoolbuses that get driven south when they're past their prime, overhauled, painted in a variety of bright colours and handed over to, in some cases, anyone who'd like a go at driving them. (Technically the drivers should have licenses, but according to locals whenever there's an accident - which there frequently are on the overloaded, badly driven buses and terrible roads - drivers often run away rather than hanging around to answer questions about paperwork). Saying that it's not easy being a Guatemalan bus driver - 170 drivers were murdered in Guatemala City last year for failing to pay gangs protection money.

We also paid a visit to a second division Guatemalan football match (I know very little about football, but I know this was not a good game) and the local insect house and reptilarium where I held a snake and Rich got up close and personal with a tarantula. The most unsettling moment of that excursion came later, however, when during a tour of the snake house we came face to face with a glass case containing a large boa constrictor and a fluffy, hoppy bunny rabbit. It took quite a while for us to accept that yes, we were understanding our guide's Spanish properly and yes, the rabbit was the snake's lunch...

Speaking of food, Rich and I had been looking forward to treating ourselves to a nice dinner on Valentine's Day. Sadly, several days beforehand we both came down with a stomach bug that was doing the rounds at school and when the big day came the only restaurant with food familiar enough to be trusted in our digestive systems was good ole' Maccie D's. Who says romance is dead?