Guatemala photos - Part 4...

  ... are here.

Our last days in Guatemala

After a rather sad last day with the kids of Nuevos Horizontes, we did some more excursions in the area surrounding Quetzaltenango (Xela).

We visited the sacred (for the Maya communities) volcano lake of Chicabal, and went to see the bright yellow painted church in the village of San Andrés Xecul, for which our Guatemalan friend Minor was our excellent guide. In this village we also saw the figure of San Simón a.k.a. Maximón.

We passed our last few days in Guatemala back at Lago Atitlán, where we first spent a couple of days in Panajachel, enjoying the hospitality of Fernando and Germán, two Argentinian friends which we met in Xela, and the last day in Santa Cruz La Laguna at Isla Verde. The view over the lake from the little cabaña we had there was amazing, as is the truly beautiful garden of the property, but unfortunately we didn't get much sleep as during the night a family of rather loud mice tried to eat their way through the walls and roof. The pretty large spiders invading our room via the splits in the wooden floor didn't help either. So although we spent a relaxing day at Isla Verde (siesta in the hammock included), it was not exactly the way we imagined our last night in Guatemala, for which we splashed out a little more than in the usual cheap hostels.

Thus, rather tired we passed the 9 hours in the bus to Mexico (where we are now, in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas) on the following day. Somehow, we are now really looking forward to a new country.

Guatemala photos - Part 3...

... are here.

Boiling hot water and colourful textiles

Our last weekend break consisted of two little day trips, the first of which was a visit to Fuentes Georginas, very hot hot-springs with supposedly health-giving properties in a picturesque tropical setting. We didn't spend much time in the water (it was simply too hot to stay inside for more than five minutes at a time) but nonetheless arrived back in Xela really relaxed.

The second one - Sunday - was a journey to the famous (and therefore very touristy) indigenous market town of Chichicastenango, in the Quiché area. Thursday and Sunday are market days, and the village, chaotic but full with beautiful textiles and artesanía, gets as colourful as any village could possibly get. Incense is burnt in front of the simple but beautiful 16th-century church, giving the tiny square in front of it a mystical atmosphere. It was in this mystical atmosphere that one of those "how small is the world?"-experiences happened: Tere bumped into Belen Calzadilla's (a friend from Oviedo) family: her brother Alfonso, who is living in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and Mari Carmen, their mother.

Trying to come up with entertaining activities for children

The experience with the children is being very rewarding. Although they lack basic discipline and sometimes are hyperactive, they are very cute and love to hug us. We are mostly working on afternoons and have made some fun activities with the kids.

We made playdough (plastilina) out of flour, water and salt and used pieces of wood and coloured paper to built barriletes (kites) which last wednesday were inaugurated on our excursion with the children to the nearby hill. The children only leave the shelter about once a month and are very happy to be able to run around a field with the kites.

They also love to dance which is why we organized a dancing competition which left them sweating and smiling. This week we are planning to build snow flakes using paper and scissors, and then use them to make "Guirnaldas"....

Second batch of Guatemala photos

Click here (Part 1) or here (Part 2) for Guatemala photos.

Discovering the Loma Linda community

This Saturday we went on an excursion to a community a couple of hours outside Xela, called "Loma Linda" (pretty hill). This is a collection of little farms who until recently were relying exclusively on coffee production, and are now trying to diversify their economy by attempting to attract tourism. As a promotional launch, we (together with 40 other travellers and residents) were invited to discover their community.

They gave us a tour around the local flora&fauna, and an insight into the coffee-making-process.

For the "tourism committee", it was the first time they saw a tourist bus enter their village, and you could feel a very special emotional mix of nervousness, pride, and hospitality in the air. They truly made sincere efforts of making us all feel like at home, and give a good impression of their community.

Kayaking on Lago Atitlán

Photo by Andreas

For our first weekend break from Xela, we headed to the spectacular Lake Atitlán. We met up here with Andreas and Kerstin, who we became friends with in Utila, Honduras. It was Día de los Muertos (1st of November) so a visit to the colourful cemetery, where the families were painting the graves of their relatives, children playing, and where the atmosphere struck us as being overall rather cheerful - a strong contrast to the serious, sad ambiance on European cemeteries on this day.

San Pedro is a little village with many tiny little streets, and some steep cobblestone streets. It counts with many foreign residents, often backpackers or hippies who got stuck here, and decided to postpone their departure date to an indefinite day in the future.

We rented kayaks and went for a little paddle around the lake, which in some sense reminded us of the lakes in Switzerland - but then again, at the same time being in Guatemala is something like the very opposite of being in Switzerland...

Our new base: Quetzaltenango

We are now in Quetzaltenango, also named "Xela", and started working as volunteers in a project called Nuevos Horizontes yesterday, a shelter for women that have been victims of domestic violence. The women live there with their kids (some of them with up to 7 kids), and work during the day. We will spend time with the children, playing with them, doing exercise, excursions, activities, and maybe teach some English or French to the older ones (>10 years). On the weekends, we normally will have some free time to continue getting to know Guatemala.

It gets very cold here during the night, as Xela lies on 2333 metres, so that's some good news for those of you who have been jealous seeing us in the Carribean sun all the time. We're now freezing as much as you are back in Europe, and there isn't any heating here.

Swimming on top of a natural bridge, and through bat-filled caves

The ride was very long - more than 8 hours in a crammed minibus. The weather was very bad - it had been raining very heavily a few days earlier, and the river was still very high. So basically, for the first evening, we had regrets to have travelled so far only to find what we wanted to see covered by a dirty brown river.

So when we went to the national park Semuc Champey the following morning, we didn't have very high expectations, we thought we wouldn't see much. However, we were lucky, and the river had already dropped a metre or two overnight, and the views we got were just spectacular.



It's difficult to describe what Semuc Champey is... the river flows underground, but some of the water coming from the mountains flows overground, over a sort of natural bridge, through a series of natural swimming pools, forming little waterfalls between them. At the end, both waterflows join together again.

We also went on an adventurous cave exploration thing. We didn't really know what to expect... a Polish guy in our hostel talked us into doing this. The guide gave us a candle each, and we followed him into this cave. After a few metres, the water was already too high to walk, meaning we were swimming through cold water in a dark cave, with one hand, holding the candle with the other hand. The water became lower, and we could walk again, climbed up a few ladders, kept on swimming again, etc... The only light in these dark caves was coming from our candles (which was extinguished regularly, either because we accidentally put our right hand into the water while swimming, or because we had to cross under a waterfall), so it was a very special atmosphere, and an experience we probably won't have to repeat in the short future. Unfortunately we don't have any photos of this adventure, for obvious reasons.

Getting close to the lava

Our first stop in Guatemala was Antigua - a very beautiful colonial city - but so touristy you could be almost anywhere in the world. We felt like we saw more tourists in Antigua than in the first two months of our trip combined.

A very active volcano - Pacaya - is about one hour away from Antigua. We didn't lose the opportunity to climb it and inspect the lava from close-by. It was pretty amazing, we literally had to watch our step to make sure we don't step inside this "liquid fire".

Click here for more photos.

Video: Greetings from the jungle

During the last month, we made a few videos, but never had the chance to upload them. Here's the first one, from a jungle trek "Sendero de los Quetzales" we did back in Panama in August, between Cerro Punta and Boquete. The trail was in really bad condition, very muddy... On some places trees had fallen down on the trail, making it difficult to pass. We even had to take off our shoes to cross a river at some point.

Photos from Nicaragua and Copán Ruinas (Honduras)

Part 3 of the photos from Nicaragua:

Photos from the Maya ruins of Copán (Honduras): 

Open Water Divers

We have now spent a good week here on the small island of Utila. We did our PADI Open Water Diver certification, something like the driving license for diving, and are now allowed to go diving anywhere in the world for up to 18 metres deep. The course took 4 full days and was a lot of fun, the underwater world here is just spectacular (it's the second-biggest coral reef in the world), and it's just a really new feeling to breathe under water and move around in a 3-dimensional way.

Even though we've had pretty bad weather - a tropical storm got in yesterday, and brought us a lot of rain over the last few days - the past week has maybe been the one we have enjoyed most so far. The island is very tranquilo (everybody lives in the same town, and the town basically has only 2 streets), and safe. It's very pleasant to be able to go out even after dark, without worrying about being robbed.

The only little problem here are the mosquitoes and sand flies, which literally are just eating us - we tried everything: OFF (Insect repellent), OFF Cream, Baby oil, baby oil with camphor - we still have hundreds of bites.

Tomorrow we'll leave back for the mainland, and then we'll continue on to Guatemala... we're still figuring out bus connections etc...

More photos of our dives are here

Honduras Map

The internet connection is too slow here in Copán to upload any photos (the third batch of Nicaragua photos will come later), so here's a little map of Honduras instead.

Tomorrow we're heading to the Bay Islands in the Carribean, probably to Utila.

The Paris of Maya cities

After 15 hours and 7 bus changes we arrived to Copán Ruinas exhausted. The reason why we travelled so far is that we wanted to avoid having to spend the night in Tegucigalpa or San Pedro Sula, which are two huge ugly scary cities.

On the following day, we visited the archaeological park, an impressive settlement of the Maya civilization, and a museum created to preserve some of the very elaborated Maya sculptures, facades and altars found in the area. There are two archaeological sites: the main one, where the rulers lived and public ceremonies used to take place (a site of pyramid-like structures, temples, and public areas), and the other one, where the middle class lived, called “Las Sepulturas”. The working-class Mayas, and slaves, lived in the surrounding mountains, and little is left of their constructions, as they didn’t live in stone houses.

Esteli and Ocotal

The last destination in Nicaragua was Estelí, in the mountainous northern part of the country, a region of tobacco and coffee plantations. We visited the Cathedral, the “Martyrs and Heroes” museum, run by mothers of the fallen revolutionaries, and a small cigar factory. We spent our last night in this wonderful country in a little town called Ocotal, close to the border with Honduras.

We are really sad to say good-bye to Nicaragua.

León and the Pacific coast

León is (besides Granada) the other beautiful colonial city in Nicaragua, politically very progressive, with a rich history, especially regarding the Sandinista Revolution. The entire city fought against Somoza’s dictature when the revolution took off in 1979.

Ruben Darío, the famed national poet, is buried in its Cathedral, which is the biggest in Central America. León counts with many churches to visit, and with revolutionary murals.

On the 30th of September, a colourful procession took place, which carried the statue of San Jerónimo from Sutiaba back to the cathedral.

We also visited Las Peñitas, a beach nearby León, on the Pacific coast. We spent two days reading and playing cards as it was raining almost all the time :-)

Masaya and Managua

We spent two nights in Masaya, the town between Granada and Managua, mostly known for its artesanía market, the ideal place for buying souvenirs. On Thursday night, we saw a performance of folk dances from all over Nicaragua. The spectacle was colourful, with live music and good local ambiance.


Masaya is also the name of a nearby volcano, still active. The National Park Volcán Masaya has another volcano, Nindirí. Both volcanoes together comprise 5 craters.
After a one-hour hike uphill, you arrive at Plaza de Oviedo, from where you have an excellent view over the active crater of Nindirí.

On Saturday, Michele Lombardini, a friend from Brussels who has been living in Managua for a while, came to pick up us in Masaya and we visited the capital with him. Managua was destroyed in 1972 by a devastating earthquake, which very few buildings survived. It has never really been rebuilt properly, and looks like a disorganised suburb. So the few places worth seeing can be visited by car in a couple of hours. We had an excellent dinner with Michele and his friends, and went to an open-air bar with very good live music afterwards.

Michele: Thanks for this pleasant weekend and for your hospitality, including the hot shower, which was the first one in a long time for us!!!

Photos from Nicaragua - part 2

The photos from Nicaragua are accessible here (part 1) and here (part 2).