BootsnAll Travel Network



Swimming With Divine

The drive to the coast really was something else. Yet again, we put the Yoda Van to the test and he got us where we needed to go. As soon as we had descended from the highlands it became hot and humid again. After all our complaining about the humidity in Mexico, some warmth was a welcome change after the cool nights in Xela. This country feels so different with the warm humid air blowing in through the windows of the car. And sitting along side the ocean side under a palapa drinking sodas out of thick glass bottles is an amazing experience. Those are the moments when I know this trip was worthwhile.

The beach in Champarico was a black sand beach made from volcanoes. The waves were really amazing and we had such a good time swimming in them. Paul and Matthias discovered that you could wade out really far to just where the big waves where breaking and body surf. It was really fun and I could have stayed out there for hours. I was surprised that Bonnie came out. She’s weighs about 350 pounds and I just didn’t take her for much of a swimmer. Unfortunately she didn’t last too long. I think she was hit by a wave kind of hard and I looked up and saw her standing in the water wiping the salt water off her face. But I could also see the next wave about to break right in back of her and this one totally took her down. I still have this image of the cross-dressing actor Divine in a plus size bathing suit body surfing and being smacked down hard on the sand. When she came up she had lost the upper half of her swimsuit and decided she had had enough swimming for the day. It was still cool because she sat on the beach with William and Julian while Matthias and I went in the water.

That evening we walked through town and then had a nice seafood dinner. The next day we left Champarico. Paul, Bonnie and Mary drove with us to Reu, got off at the junction towards Xela and flagged a chicken bus home. We continued on to Lago de Atitlan and the drive there was spectacular. We drove high up into the mountains again, alongside coffee plantations and other crops up to over 9000 feet. The western highlands of Guatemala is one of the most amazing places I’ve seen so far. So much of this land has been cultivated for agriculture. Not once have I seen a motorized piece of equipment for any of this work such as a tractor or a plow. The plowing, planting and harvesting is all done by hand as far as I can tell, on the side of extremely steep cliffs. We’ve seen so many men walking with a garden hoe slung over his shoulder, or women in traditional clothing (possibly with a child slung on their back) up in the fields tending to the crops, weeding, harvesting, carrying crops down into the towns. It is absolutely amazing what these people achieve.

The clothing continues to amaze me as well. The area around Lago de Atitlan is one of the few in Guatemala where the men also wear traditional clothing. We’ve seen many men in this area wearing brightly colored, embroidered outfits as well. We drove to the nearby town of Sololá on market day and we came to the central plaza which was covered in coleus plants. The whole market and plaza was filled with people wearing deep purple clothes just like the coleus plants. Xela is such a big city that there were people from all over, so you really didn’t get a sense of one particular clothing. But in smaller towns it is obvious that the women are all wearing clothing of a similar color and pattern. In San Antonio on Lake Atitlan the clothing was navy and turquoise, in another town on the lake it was light purple with animals embroidered on their tops. Today we saw another town where all the women were wearing deep maroon tops with stripes.

Lake Atitlan is beautiful. The first day we were there it was overcast, but the second day we had great weather and we went on a boat tour on the lake. There are three volcanoes along the shore and the water is green. It is often called the most beautiful lake in the world, and rightly so. We’ll be leaving on Thursday for Cobán, which is close to the jungle in Guatemala.

Lake Atitlan



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