"Guatemala" Guatemala by m_spirello

Our first stop in Guatemala was Flores – the administrative centre of the recently volatile Petén region in the north of the country. It is situated on an island in the middle of Lake Petén Itza, and connected to its sprawling neighbour, Santa Elena, by a long causeway. Flores’ cobbled streets are lined with ramshackle hotels, hostels and restaurants, catering for tourists bound for the nearby ruins of Tikal.

At the time of the Spanish conquest, Flores was “discovered” by Cortes himself, who left his sick horse with the people of Flores and promised to return. The indigenous Maya had never seen horses before, and took great interest in the animal, but try as they might; it succumbed to its illness and died. Some 80 years later, the Spanish came back, to find the islanders worshipping a white horse-shaped idol. The smashing of this idol by Catholic missionaries ignited a series of tit-for-tat raids and sacrifices which continued until Flores was finally defeated and pacified in 1697.

Summit of Pacaya Volcano - Guatmala 2002

Our stay in Flores was only brief, and soon we found ourselves aboard a night bus heading for Antigua, the former capital of Guatemala, located in the volcanic highlands of the south. The town is peppered with ruins of glorious colonial buildings destroyed in a catastrophic earthquake which decimated the city in 1773, which forced the abandonment of the city and the relocation of the capital to nearby Guatemala City. Many foreign students were staying in Antigua, taking advantage of the cheapest rates for Spanish lessons in Central America.

The town is intimidatingly flanked by three large, active volcanoes. We were given the opportunity to climb Pacaya, a 2250 metre high, currently active volcano. As if the molten rock and ash was not enough to worry about, we had heard reports of a foreign tourist dying on the volcano a few weeks previously when he was struck by lightning during the descent. We had learned from the best part of a month in Central America, that thunderstorms were a reliable feature of almost every afternoon, and so elected to arise at 6am and scale the volcano in the morning, to be down in time for the afternoon storms. We were followed up the two kilometre high volcano by a rag-tag band of dogs, obviously accustomed to tourists handing out scraps on their way up the slope.

The journey up was relatively swift and easy, until we emerged from the clouds and saw the cone of Pacaya belching sulphurous gases some way ahead of us. The walk became more strenuous as solid ground gave way to thick volcanic ash. The vegetation ceased and we were surrounded by nothing but bizarre shaped rocks that were warm to the touch. The summit was incredible – we stood right on the edge of the crater rim, our faces covered in cloth in a vain attempt to filter out the noxious sulphur that was spewing out of the volcano only feet before us. The dogs had accompanied us all this way, and duly we fed them some left over banana bread before making our way down the cone before the rains came.

Lake Atitlan - Guatemala 2002

We left Antigua a few days later and spent a week relaxing in hammocks, kayaking and making new friends in a tiny village called San Pedro on the banks of the idyllic Lake Atitlan, one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. We stayed there for almost a week, able to set our watches by the four o’clock cloudburst. It was time to move on if we were to make our way north through Mexico once more to the land of the “free.”

The border crossing into Mexico was a classic Central American affair. I was required to bribe a customs official to the tune of 50p to tell me my papers were in order before we could get into the doorless, clapped out taxi and driven the 5km through no-mans-land to another shack, this time flying Mexican colours, to wait several hours for the bus to civilisation.