From GC to Panajachel

There were clowns and a British woman and two minivans and parts of the mountain were falling off...

Strange dreams last night which included a show my students were performing without me and a co-worker who was extremely upset because his mother's eye was bloodshot, but I realized in the light of day that I had not dreamed the barbed wire that completely surrounded our hotel in Guatemala City. In fact, as we drove through the neighborhood this morning, we saw it atop all of the walls that bordered people's yards. I suspect we were in a pretty good neighborhood; in fact, I think we were in a gated community and that the armed guard we passed last night was a sentry for it.

We booked a shuttle from GC to Panajachel through the hotel we stayed at last night and a minivan picked us up at 10 a.m. this morning for a short-ish ride to Antigua. There was one other couple in our van who were quite pleasant to chat with and then who quite pleasantly realized there was no need to chat the entire way which would have been an agony. She was British and they both spoke English but didn't; instead, when speaking to one another, they spoke some other language that wasn't English or Spanish.

Along the way, we stopped for gas at a station with another armed guard and Chris reminded me that we have armed guards all over the place at home; we just don't see them because they are ours. True enough... we have them at school. On the road, we also saw clowns in the roadway knocking on the windows of people's cars and cows (today Chris coined the phrase “skinny as a Guatemalan cow”) and goats and horses and chickens and dogs.

We had an hour or so in Antigua, which was enough time to realize we would like to spend some more time there and so we will make a plan to return before our stay is done. It was charming and, from the cursory look as we walked around a bit, reminded me of Merida. We switched minivans in Antigua and the rest of the trip took about two and a half hours. It would have taken less but our driver stopped once at a roadside grill for some corn and then again later to pee by the side of the road.

I realized as we drove higher and higher on narrow little roads, some of which were full of the parts of the mountain that had just recently fallen off, that I haven’t really been in the mountains before. I’ve driven through Pennsylvania a million times back and forth to DC and Chris and I were camping in West Virginia, but the climb today was nothing like those other. There was a point where I was hyperaware of my organs, not in the terrified way that makes me hyperaware of my organs hurting, just a general awareness. It was like I could feel my liver knockinng up against whatever the hell my liver is right next to. There were moments as I was looking down at where we had come from and up to where we were headed that I was nervous about what we had chosen for ourselves. It was clear to me while we were still in the minivan that this was going to be a different kind of trip than we have taken.

And then we arrived.

Chris said when we were walking around the property earlier that it was like the Garfield Park Conservatory only real life and outisde. It appears that every single plant is in bloom and they come in hot pinks and bright purples and yellows and oranges and every other color imaginable. The property sits right on the lake and the lake is surrounded by volcanoes which are peaked with clouds. The buildings are red brick and two-story. Our first floor is bedroom and bath and small patio and our second floor is living room and kitchen and terrace. We have a woodburning fireplace and a television that gets more channels than we do at home… here we are in Guatemala and we are picking up Channel 2 from Atlanta; makes you wonder why we can’t get Channel 2 from Chicago in Chicago. We may never come back.

We walked up the road to the next hotel for dinner which was lovely. The dining room looked out over the lake and we watched the sun set over the volcanoes while we ate huge plates of huge shrimp. It was a beautiful sight but it meant that we had to walk back to our hotel through a pitch night and I was a vice grip on Chris’s hand the whole way.