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Gotta Guatemala Days 9 and 10

March 30, 2015/1 Comment/in Lent, Travel/by AJ Cattapan

Day 9 started with an hour and a half boat tour around Lake Atitlan. We left from the dock at our hotel. As I’ve said before, Lake Atilan is reminiscent of Lake Como in Italy. The beautiful blue lake is surrounded by green mountains and three volcanoes. Some people (clearly relatively wealthy) have built some beautiful homes along the lakefront. Due to the steep mountain slopes, some of these homes are only accessible via boat. No traversable road could be built through, around, and/or down the mountain to reach them.

An expensive home along the lake

Some of the more typical Guatemalan homes on Lake Atitlan

One interesting story our tour guide told us during this boat ride is that the author of the French book The Little Prince once stayed at Lake Atitlan. If you’ve read The Little Prince, you might remember that the boy kept showing people a drawing that everyone claimed was a drawing of a hat. However, someone finally told him it wasn’t a hat. It was a snake that swallowed an elephant. That shape was inspired by a hill that the author saw while visiting Lake Atitlan.

Do you see the snake that swallowed the elephant?

During our boat ride, I tried to find the cables for the zip lines, but we were unable to spot them.

I ziplined somewhere along this mountainside.

After the boat ride, we got in the bus for the three-hour ride back to Guatemala City, stopping once for a lunch break. When we arrived at our hotel, we found several workers making one of those colored sawdust “carpets” for Holy Week.

A gorgeous Holy Week “carpet” in our hotel

We had time at our hotel to rest for a while before the farewell dinner. I have to say that we had a really nice tour group. You never really know what you’re going to get when you sign up for a group tour. However, I think one of the benefits of going to a place like Guatemala is that you don’t get newbie travelers. Everyone in this group was a seasoned world traveler. We were never waiting on the bus for someone who was late. In fact, we were almost always at least five minutes early. Nobody complained. Nobody snubbed their noses at witnessing a different way of living. Everyone was appreciative of the lovely scenery and the good people we got to meet.

Day 10 was just a long travel day home with nothing too exciting to report, so I’ll just share with you a few final thoughts on my travels and what I learned on this trip.

1. Caravan is an excellent tour company. We were very well taken care of. Basically, we paid about $120 a day, and that covered hotel, transportation, museum entrances, tips for bellboys, a very knowledgeable tour guide, musical performances, and three yummy meals a day. And the hotels were top-rate (they are listed at running from $150-250 a night!).

2. Travel reminds me that experience really is the best teacher.

3. God created something large and beautiful and awe-inspiring when He made the world. I’m so blessed to have seen the few parts I’ve been to. I am even more blessed to have met the people from those places.

4. We may come from different lands with different climates, cultures, and languages, but we’re really not as different as you might think. Most of us believe we were created by a higher power. Most of us want to please that higher power. And we all just want to feed our families and enjoy good times with the ones we love.

And finally . . .

5. If you enjoy a springlike climate and want an exotic-type vacation that will make you feel a little like Indiana Jones, well then . . . you “Gotta Gautemala”!

Gotta Guatemala Days 5-6

March 25, 2015/3 Comments/in Travel/by AJ Cattapan

Day 5:

This was mostly a traveling day. We had to head all the way from Tikal in the north back south past Guatemala City to Antigua. This city used to be the old capital until it was ruined by earthquakes one too many times back in 1773, and they decided to just move the capital somewhere else. That somewhere else, of course, being Guatemala City.

Since we were basically driving on the same path we took two days ago, we didn’t have any sight seeing stops this time. We just drove all day with one lunch break and three quick bathroom breaks.

Mango tree near our lunch stop

Even without any side trips, we didn’t get to Antigua until 5:23.

Our hotel is very, very nice. It’s a spa actually. We were greeted at the door with some kind of fruity drink in a champagne glass. My traveling friend said the drink reminded her of a Bellini without the alcohol.

Towel swan that greeted us at our hotel

The two of us did a quick walk around the neighboring blocks for a half hour. We saw a lot of kids in school uniforms, so we wondered if a local Catholic high school had just gotten out. Maybe they have a long school day here.

Back at the hotel, we had a lovely dinner with lots of yummy dessert choices.

Thank goodness the desserts are small so we can try them all!

Day 6:

Oh my gosh! What a lovely day in Antigua today. The weather was perfect, in the 70s and mostly sunny. We started at 9:00 a.m. with a three-hour walking tour of the city led by our very own Veronica, who continues to be filled with valuable knowledge and entertaining stories. For example, did you know that they built corner windows in their houses here in Antigua during the Spanish colonial times because the higher class women were not supposed to move around outside their homes by themselves. They spent most of their days indoors doing embroidery or staring out the windows–hence, the corner windows to give them more to look at!

Also, the carpenters that they had were used to building ships instead of houses, so when they had to make a roof they basically built a ship’s hull and then turned it upside down.

Notice that the roof looks like an upside-down ship’s hull.

On our walk, we visited the main cathedral near the town square. It is much smaller than it used to be because most of it was ruined during earthquakes.

The cathedral

Inside the cathedral

Holy Week is a big deal down here, and preparations have already begun, including this beautiful “carpet” made of colored sand.*

Can you believe this is colored sand?

Our group stopped near the Central Park, but Veronica instructed my friend and I to make a little detour.

Central Park

The night before she had told us about a chocolate museum (you know the cacao bean is big here) where we could take a class. Since I had told her we were interested, she instructed us to go right away and make our reservation for the class and then meet up with everyone else at the next stop on the walking tour. The chocolate museum (named Choco Museo) was only a couple blocks away. Unfortunately, it didn’t open until 10:00, and it was 9:57. So we waited. And waited. Finally, at 10:10 it opend. We quickly made our reservation for a 1:30 class and headed toward the “Las Capuchinas,” the convent for the Capuchin nuns. It was damaged in an earthquake in 1773, but has become basically a museum now.

Standing in the circular set of dormitories in the convent

Courtyard in the Capuchin Convent

After our walking tour, we had a nice (but somewhat salty) lunch with an onion and leek soup and then our choice of entrees. I had the tilapia, but there were also steak, chicken, and vegetarian options.

Lunch ended just in time for our chocolate class, which was awesome. Our instructor took us through the whole process from the cacao pod to the beans fermenting to drying the beans to roasting the beans to the separation of the shell from the bean to the crushing and pulverizing of the bean. We actually got to roast the beans and shell them. The shells are used to make cacao tea, which we got to drink. Then we grounded some of the beans to make two other drinks, the traditional Mayan drink (with chili, paprika, and honey) and then the Spanish version (with cardomon, anise, sugar, milk, and black pepper). It tasted a lot like a chocolate chai tea.

Time to grind the cacao beans!

Then we finally got to the business of making chocolate candy! We had our choice of dark or milk chocolate. I chose milk, and my friend chose dark. We picked out molds, filled them with the chocolate, and then added things like sprinkles, coconut, macadamia nuts, orange peel, mango, ginger, almonds, and Oreo bits.

Filling my mold with chocolate!

The chocolate needed one and a half hours to set, so we headed out to a jewelry store to do some shopping for jade.

Then we headed to the church of mercy (Iglesias de Nuestra Señora de la Mercidad). This is a very pretty church with intricate white scrollwork outside which makes it look a little like a wedding cake. We took a few minutes for prayer inside.

La Mercidad

We also visited the museum at Santo Domingo before heading back to our hotel for another lovely dinner in our open-air restaurant.

Church inside Santo Domingo

One other cool thing we got to see while walking the streets today was a procession of Catholic school kids getting ready for Holy Week.

*I was corrected later. They actually make those “carpets” with colored sawdust instead of sand. Either way, I’m totally impressed.

Gotta Guatemala Day 4

March 23, 2015/1 Comment/in Travel/by AJ Cattapan

Today we visited the Mayan ruins of Tikal, a place that will make you feel like Indiana Jones. But before we talk about Tikal, let’s talk about our hotel. This is, by far, the most exotic hotel I’ve ever stayed at. Everything is open air: the reception desk, the restaurant, the pool, the bar. I feel a little like I’m in the Bali scenes from Eat, Pray, Love.

Bar area of hotel

Hotel room with view of lake

Lake at hotel

Our hotel is located in the middle of a nature preserve. There are howler monkeys, wild birds, and perhaps even a crocodile and a jaguar up in the jungle around us. The bad part is that we totally have to load up on mosquito repellent.

Wild birds in our nature preserve

After breakfast this morning in our open-air restaurant, we headed out on the bus. An hour and a half later, we arrived at the national park that holds the Tikal ruins, where we were given several rules:

1. Don’t leave the group. The last person who got last in the jungle was gone for 11 days.

2. Don’t feed the animals!

3. Don’t fall.

Our whole group walked to the area of Temples I and II. Well, actually most of us walked it. A few people got on the back of a pickup truck. You can no longer walk up Temple I, but there are wooden stairs at the back of Temple II and you can climb those 103 steps.

Me at the top of Temple II, with Temple I in the background

Only a couple of us climbed the giant stone steps up the necropolis. I really felt like Indiana Jones then. Those stone steps were a lot harder to crawl up than the wooden steps to the Temple.

Standing on top of the necropolis – Just call me Indiana Jane

A view of the necropolis from Temple II

Then our group split in two. The less hardy took a pickup truck back to the entrance and then the bus back to the hotel for lunch. The rest of us adventurers hiked deeper into the jungle. We saw the Plaza of the Seven Temples, which was just excavated from 2004-2011, so they haven’t been letting people in for that long. Then we saw the Lost World and then we finally got to Temple IV. You climb Temple IV by a series of 196 wooden steps up the back. Amazingly, George Lucas shot a brief scene from the original Star Wars movie from the top of this temple–and I don’t think there were stairs then, which means they had to bring their camera equipment up by climbing the crumbling and very steep ancient stairs in the front.

Recognize this rebel base from Star Wars?

After our arduous trek, we were rewarded with a yummy lunch with fresh gaucemole in an open-air restaurant within the park.

Back at the hotel, we had a quick dip in the pool before dinner. After dinner, we were treated to some traditional Guatemalan dances performed by some local teens and preteens. I even got asked to dance at the end by one of the boy dancers. You’ll have to wait for a photo of that because my friend took photos with her digital camera, and we don’t have a way to transfer those photos to my iPad.

Some of the older dancers

A couple of the younger dancers. Isn’t this girl cute?

Not sure when my next blog post will be, depends on where we can get wifi!

Gotta Guatemala Days 1-3

March 22, 2015/1 Comment/in Travel/by AJ Cattapan

When the first cold finger of winter began pushing its way into Chicago last December, I said to my friend, “I’m sick of winter already. Do you want to go some place for spring break. I don’t care where as long as it’s warm.”

She said, “How about Guatemala?”

I said, “Sounds warm to me!”

And that is how it came to be that on the first day of spring, my friend and I headed to the “Land of Eternal Spring,” Guatemala.

Day 1:

Our first day was really just a travel day. We flew from Chicago to Dallas, and then from Dallas to Guatemala City. We had some time to kill between our two flights and my friend had day-long passes to the first-class lounge for American Airlines, so we ended up being able to enjoy a relaxing atmosphere (with free drinks!) in both ORD and DFW.

A little mid-morning snack at ORD

Unfortunately, our flight out of DFW to Guatemala was delayed due to rain, so we didn’t end up getting into Guatemala until about 8:00 their time, which would be 9:00 p.m. Chicago time. We’re all in the Central Time zone, but apparently they don’t do daylight savings here.

Getting to the hotel was very easy as our tour group had a driver waiting for us at the airport. It’s not a very big airport, so compared to O’Hare, it was nothing. Still, the dark night sky punctuated by city lights, the honking of passing cars, and the line-up of people waiting for loved ones was enough to wake me temporarily from the sleep that was threatening to overcome me.

Before long, we and our luggage were on a van with about eight other tour members. The ride to the hotel was no more than ten minutes. It’s a very nice hotel, I’m sure one of the best in the city. By American standards, we might say a few things like the hairdryer might not be the latest and greatest, yet my friend and I have both traveled enough to understand that this is a very, very nice hotel.

Our tour guide met us at the entrance and gave us a quick tour of the hotel, along with instructions for where to get our late dinner at the hotel and where to meet in the morning.

Here is what I had for dinner.

Day 2:

We had breakfast at 7:30 and then met our tour director for an orientation. A few words about our tour guide, whom we’ll call Veronica for the purposes of this blog. She is fabulous! She’s originally from Algeria and speaks at least four languages. She studied in France, was in the military for the Gulf War (but got injured during training and never fought), and then came to Guatemala about 25 years ago on a cultural mission. She loved the people so much that she never left! She is extremely animated and a great storyteller. Veronica has studied history and anthropology so she is very knowledgeable.

After our orientation meeting, she took us to Popul Vuh, one of the key museums in Guatemala City. If I had walked through Popul Vuh on my own, I don’t think I would have gotten half of what I got out of it with Veronica’s guidance. She told stories and gave explanations worthy of an anthropology class. I learned a lot about the Maya culture and how it developed over time. I’m sure she’ll be sharing much more of this in the coming days.

Right next door to Popol Vuh is a museum called Museo Ixchel, which displays the handmade textiles native to this land.

Museo Ixchel on the left, Popol Vuh on the right

After the two museums, it was time to head back to the hotel for lunch. I ate a number of things, including rice, a little roasted chicken, some steak, grilled vegetables, and roasted potato. For dessert, I tried a cookie, a profiterole (filled with a yummy cream center), a baked apple, and then a piece of traditional Guatemalan candy. This last one would be the red ball you see in the photo. When I picked it up, I thought it would be some kind of jellied, fruit-based candy, but while it may have been fruit-based, it really just tasted like giant granules of sugar. I left most of it on the plate.

After lunch, we had a bus tour of Guatemala City. Unfortunately, there was a marathon scheduled for the afternoon, so the traffic was terrible and we didn’t get to see the Catedral Metropolitana or the Palacio Nacional de la Cultuura. If you’ve been with me since last year’s Speak, Pray, Cook tour of Rome, you know I like visiting churches so I was disappointed not to see the cathedral.

What is the city of Guatemala like? By American standards, it’s a dirty, mid-size kind of town with more than its fair share of slummy areas. However, it has several redeeming qualities. It has some of the coolest graffiti I’ve ever seen.

The streets are far more tree-lined than we usually see in urban areas in the States.

And they have some of the most amazing piñata makers you’ll ever see. If there is a Disney character out there, they’ve made it into a piñata.

Also of interest was the fact that St. John Paul II visited Guatemala three times, so they built a statue of him.

JP II statue in Guatemala City

After our bus tour of the city, we headed back to the hotel where we had some time to visit the pool and jacuzzi before dinner.

Picture of the pool from the dining area after we had dinner

Day 3:

An early start this morning since we had to travel most of the distance across Guatemala to reach the northern region of Peten, where the ruins of Tikal are. The ride involved a number of hairpin turns up and down the mountains so our tour guide Veronica drugged us all with dramamine. Well okay, it was offered, and she talked so often about how horrible it is to get sick on the bus that I took her up on her offer. While I found the mountains quite pretty, I also found all the trash along the highway quite surprising. Let’s just say Guatemala is in desperate need of an Adopt-a-Highway program.

Anyone want to adopt this highway?

On the way to Tikal, we stopped in Quirigua, our first visit to a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Quirigua is the site of Mayan ruins, including many stelae and statues depicting animal-human hybrids.

Zoomorphic statue (part jaguar, part crocodile, part turtle)

Me in front of one of the tallest stelae in the world. It was built to honor an ancient Mayan king.

Me in front of one of the tallest stelae in the world. It was built to honor an ancient Maya king.

Then we headed to Rio Dulce for lunch. Now I was really feeling like I was on a tropical vacation. Check out this thatch-roofed restaurant along the river!

During the afternoon drive, we watched a documentary film on digs being down in the Maya ruins. After all theses archaeological talk, I’m beginning to feel like I’m in an Indiana Jones movie.

Tomorrow we visit the ancient ruins of Tikal. It is sure to be a packed day!

And for all you Star Wars fans, be prepared to be very jealous! If all goes well, I’ll be stopping by a spot made famous in the original Star Wars movie!

Tag Archive for: Guatemala

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