Quetzal, Guatemala (MAR 05)

We were up before 0600 to watch ROTTERDAM enter the harbor and to prepare for today's tour. 

TOUR DESCRIPTION

Travel by coach through the Guatemalan lowlands -- rich and fertile and planted mostly in sugar cane. As you ride, take in the magnificent scenery of native villages and vast terrain dotted with farms growing local produce and coffee -- great photo opportunities.

You're headed to the small village of San Lucas Toliman, located on the shores of Lake Atitlan. Here, you will board a boat that will take you on an unforgettable journey across the lake. Adolph Huxley called Atitlan the most beautiful lake in the world. The lake was created by a series of volcanic eruptions and fills a large part of the caldera, reaching depths of 2,000 feet. The caldera-forming eruption dispersed ash over an area of some 2.5 million square miles, from Florida to Ecuador. Watch for the native chocoyo -- a species of bird that is often found nesting in the relatively soft ash layer. You will witness the majesty of the volcanoes surrounding the lake as well as seeing the local villages on the lakeshore -- home to the Tzutuhil Natives.

After the boat ride, you will disembark at Panajachel -- the largest town on the lake. Enjoy some free time here to explore the town on your own and to browse among the beautiful handcrafted souvenirs.

Lunch is served at a local hotel; then, re-trace your route back to the pier.is served at a local hotel; then, re-trace your route back to the pier.

TOUR REALITY

This was a 9-hour tour; the second with a 0700 departure in three days. 

Disembarking the ship, we ran a gauntlet of shops to reach our bus. The shops were already open for business, but clearly the vendors knew we would be better prospects when we returned from our tour, so they reached out to us only halfheartedly. 

It was a relatively new bus with the best windows for viewing we'd had in three days. The ones the previous two days forced you to turn your neck almost 90° to look out. Pam & I each got a stiff neck from doing so the first day and did periodic neck exercises to avoid one yesterday. 

Comfortably seated, we awaited with breathless anticipation our guide's opening remarks. They were, "This will be about a 2 1/2 hour ride...each way." Oh the joy and rapture those words conveyed. Possibly 5 hours of our 9-hour tour would be spent on the bus. It got better. We would return on the same roads we used to get there, thereby avoiding any tedious change of scenery. How could the tour description have missed those exciting points?

Okay, enough of the sarcasm (for now).

Pam & I have been on so many tours that we know from the description, duration and often a glance at a map, which ones are likely to require a lot of transit time. A 9-hour tour is usually a dead give-away. We sign up for them in part because they are going to take us away from the usual off-the-boat-and-buy-souvenirs venues or the "lazy" tours that are more about staying local than being interesting. I admit we have on occasion gone local or lazy, and not all local tours are lazy tours. Moving on...

Guatemala means "land of many trees" although for the first part of the ride we mostly saw truly vast sugarcane fields. I'm talking disappear into the distance vast. 

The first 25 minutes of the drive was on a four-lane road in need of some serious resurfacing. Thankfully it eventually got somewhat better and the subsequent roads we took while not great, were adequate. The numerous speed bumps in every town we passed through got old fast.

We eventually started working our way upward towards Lake Atitlan.  With increased altitude we transitioned from sugarcane fields to rubber trees to coffee bushes.  The guide said that we were lucky to see the flowering stage of the coffee bushes since it only lasted about four days.  It proved surprisingly easy to contain my euphoria.

Arriving at San Lucas Toliman about two hours after leaving Quetzal, we all enjoyed a comfort stop at "the happy place" before boarding the mighty ship TEL AVIV for our trip across the lake. 

As we departed the pier, we noticed a barge paying out line and a group of men ashore hauling it in.  We learned it was a basic, labor-intensive, but effective way of dredging weeds out of the lake in front of the resort where the project was taking place.

The further we got out onto the lake, the hazier the shoreline became.  This certainly compromised the promised beauty of the lake.  We were told this was uncommon and caused by a combination of moisture in the air from recent rains and smoke in the air from the burning of sugarcane fields. 

I was going to spare you a picture of a hazy shoreline just to support the storyline, but then I remembered that I had one that included the "elephant that was swallowed by the snake".  This is not my interpretation of the formation in the foreground - hell, I could barely imagine the pattern even with the guide pointing it out to me. Nope, using the same imaginative process (probably including large quantities of alcohol or some other mind-altering substance) that the Greeks used to envision the constellations, it was the Spaniards who came up with this one. After vast and extensive research (damn, there's my sarcasm flaring up again), scholars were able to categorically rule out the source of the story being the indigenous people of the region.  Can you guess how? * (answer at bottom of this post)

The view stayed hazy all the way across the lake to Panajachel where we got off the boat and walked a short distance to the Porto Del Lago Hotel for lunch. 

Along the way merchandise hawkers swarmed us like flies and they were persistent. Even a slight glance at one would cause them to almost attach themselves to you. Thankfully, Pam & I have each developed an effective game face over the years in similar situations. The look translates to, "You have absolutely, positively no possible chance of drawing me in, so why waste your time and effort on me?" We used it to shake off our attackers, sending them in search of easier prey.

After a good lunch, we wandered around for a while, game faces on. It seemed like a pleasant resort community for boating with water rather too brisk for swimming.

We re-boarded the good ship TEL AVIV for our return trip to San Lucas Toliman. Our guide noted that it was unusual for the water to be so calm; the prevailing breeze normally coming up about noon and creating a chop.  The breeze was late that day, but did meet us about halfway across, gradually getting stronger, although never to a level that it had any impact on our sturdy craft.

When the TEL AVIV was not shunting tourists across the lake, judging fromthe number and size of the speakers, it was quite the party boat.  I mention this only because I was amused by the mounting system - rope. It made me suspect that the speakers did not spend the night there.

Down from the mountains we came, again making somewhat better than expected time. We were back at the port about 1545.  

Particularly on the way back to the ship, I noticed a number of people we passed who gave us a friendly wave.  It happened frequently enough to register with me in some subconscious comparison with other places in the world we had toured. We had not been in many where a tour bus routinely received a wave, at least not using all five fingers. 

As ROTTERDAM stood out to sea, at intervals along the land horizon columns of smoke could be seen where a sugarcane field was being burned.

We cruised into the dark wondering what the weather had in store for us overnight.

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* The people of the region may have been indigenous, but elephants were not. At that point in history, only the Spaniards could have known of them.