We decided to head to Lake Atitlan for my birthday because the lake itself looks beautiful and San Pedro, we were told, was a lively town that would be nice for a meal and drinks in the evening. We had a three hour shuttle ride from Antigua to get to the lake, the last 30 minutes of which was spent on winding roads down the volcanoes surrounding Lake Atitlan. The views were breathtaking, I felt like I was in a painting. However after a small taxi boat across the lake to San Pedro we realised it was less than picturesque.
San Pedro is the worst kind of tourist trap, it’s one step up from a shanty town except with added tattoo parlours, blaring music and people trying to sell tat, everything is crammed in and made out of any spare material and you feel like sitting down may lead to catching an STD. Our hostel felt more like a building site, although at least it was clean, other travellers seemed to agree that it was less than pleasant and some even cut their losses and paid for a second hostel in another lake town. Travellers who had swam in the beautiful lake also advised us not to do the same, apparently it contains parasites and nasty bacteria and makes you sick, also local tap-water is drawn from the lake so best not to shower while here. Happy Birthday me!
So as you can imagine I was not optimistic about my birthday, but I awoke to lots of lovely Facebook messages and cards from family that Grace had been carrying with her for the last month, which cheered me up. We decided to avoid the lake and San Pedro and check out another town on another part of the lake which we heard was nice and that had a pretty pool bar and decided to take a hike there.
The hike started in San Marcos and began as a road that slowly turned into rubble and then a dirt path, and climbed higher and higher until it finally was a tiny path cutting across the steep volcano side. I would like to complain more about how steep it was and how scared I was but there were locals planting crops up the steep sides and several carrying huge bales of sticks and some even carrying several large rocks across the thin path, making us look like wimps sweating away when all we had to carry were our backpacks containing water and swimming stuff.
The hike was actually a lot of fun and turned out to be one of the most enjoyable things we’ve done so far, the views where breathtaking and the trail switched between high and low points (although it was very annoying to spend 10 minutes puffing up a really steep uphill part only to head straight down again as soon as you got to the top) and changed between roads to tiny side of volcano paths to climbing rocky edges and river beds. We also didn’t see any other tourists and each village we passed through there were lots of young children trying to ask us questions in Spanish or shouting any English words they knew, it was very cute! The trail was supposed to take about 3 hours but we made it in 2, although we did have jelly legs by the end, whether that was all the rock climbing or just the fear of heights I don’t know! We found the pool bar alongside the water’s edge and stopped for 2 hours for lunch, cocktails and a swim. Grace even managed, with the help of Google translate, to get me a chocolate brownie with a candle in, all in all a lovely afternoon!
We decided to continue around the lake hiking to the next town after lunch but unfortunately even though it’s my birthday my body didn’t want to give me a break. As you may or may not know, I have Crohn’s disease, which is where my body attacks itself, especially the digestive system, so whenever you get stressed or ill the body goes into overdrive and in my case this means I vomit a lot. So after out lovely meal in this fancy pool bar I had to rush to the bathroom to throw up (the staff probably thought I was the fattest bulimic they had ever seen) which was annoying and made me feel super weak, but on the plus side my birthday cake and lunch was pretty much calorie free! So after that we decided to just head home on a water taxi.
Back at the hostel we met up with some friends we had made in the previous hostel who also ended up here and spent a nice evening playing cards and discussing the difference in the US and UK political systems, they had been on a cooking course all day so we decided to do that too the next day on their recommendation.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Lots of love,
Alice x