Today we are in the town of San Pedro by Lake Atitlan in Guatemala.  We've been here for a few days, and plan on spending a few more days finishing up some much needed Spanish classes.  I'm going to try to keep this one short since this keyboard isn't very smooth and I'm spending too much time trying to catch typos.

We left Palenque and headed back to San Cristobal since it was a nice town and we already knew where to stay.  The other option was to head closer to the border and try to find a decent hotel on the fly.  Since we didn't see the sign for the shortcut road San Cristobal became our default destination for the evening.  The following morning we headed straight for the Guatemalan border at La Mesilla.  I had read this was the easiest crossing and it turned out to be a breeze.  The immigration people tried to screw us and a few other for 30 pesos, but they had already handed back our passports with stamps so we all just walked out on them.  The vehicle check station was easy too, and fortunately they did not ask for my title.  I am carrying a copy but apparently I may run into borders where they require the original.  I'm really really hoping the copy will suffice, I decided carrying the actual title was not wise, which, as it turns out, was perhaps an unwise decision.

The cool thing about riding into Guatemala was that it actually looks like another country.  Chiapas had been rugged, but flattened out as it got towards the border.  Guatemala rose straight up out of this mellow terrain in a series of steep green mountains separated by enormous canyons.  After crossing the border we rode up into a giant gorge that at first I thought we were riding down into - the perspective seemed skewed.  We stopped somewhat early in the afternoon at the town of Huehuetenango - a chaotically busy town with little charm.  We may have made it to Lake Atitlan but had been told by Michael, another motorcyclist that is heading all the way south and was ahead of us at the time, that there may be bad delays on the road as they were fixing the hurricane damage.  As it turned out, we were not delayed at all the next day and arrived promptly at the lake, but we certainly saw where they had been working on the road.  There was one section where a valley had completely washed out leaving two pillars of road standing about 30-40 feet high out in the mouth of the valley.  They had just finished paving a new section of road that went across the washout and looped back to hook to the old road on the other side.  The road down to Lake Atitlan was in pretty attrocious shape also, in many places there was only one lane, the other lane having fallen down the side of the valley.  We saw literally hundreds of landslide paths, dozens of them had crossed the road.  When we got to the bottom of the valley and started traversing next to the lake, there were many spots where debris from other valleys had swept across the road and in many places washed it out.  This was about a month or more ago so the debris had been cleared away leaving a rough dirt road in these areas, sometimes with a stream flowing across it.  The town of San Pedro, where we are staying for about 10 days, was entirely spared by the storm.  A town further around the lake was half washed away, along with half its inhabitants. 

San Pedro has a fairly unique atmosphere.  It is one of the cheapest places to stay in Guatemala, and that has caused a lot of tourists to extend their stay by months or years.  There's a guy named Dave that hangs out near this cafe that came here from Toronto 10 years ago.  Many of the better restaurants are run by gringos and staffed by gringas.  Woman dressed in traditional looking Mayan garb are trying to sell us banana or coconut bread on every street corner.  Most of the men in the town don't wear the traditional clothing, but a few do - they definitely stand out.  Yesterday we started our Spanish course.  5 days, 20 hours total.  I did well on my 'entrance exam' so I've been pushed to learn an enormous amount of stuff really quickly.  I can form longish sentences now vveerryy sslloowwllyy.  I was given a lot of homework that I should really go back to the hotel and dive into.  I´m supposed to learn about 50 verbs, more nouns, and conjugate all the regular verbs and also the more common irregular conjugations of 'to be.'  Maybe if I get through it today I'll go on a boat ride across the lake tomorrow and see what some of the other towns look like.  I'm also tempted to climb the San Pedro Volcano, which rises right behind town, but the tour guides have not been getting good reviews, and the Lonely Planet warns not to climb it alone - bandidos.  There´s another volcano, I think it may be the Atitlan Volcano that is visible from our hotel porch, that is active and supposedly you can sometimes see the glow at night.  I've looked every night and not seen it.  The view from this porch we have is amazing - we took both of the top floor rooms for 70Q, about $9, and we have an amazing panoramic view of the lake and all the volcanos.  Best $3 a night I've ever spent!

Well there I was promising this would be short and it looks like I got all wordy anyway.  I'm going to head back to the hotel and dive into that homework.  I need some functional Spanish with which to talk my motorcycle title copy through a few border stations.  Either that or just pretend not to speak a work of Spanish and just smile and hand them the copy...

Saturday December 3, 2005 - 01:30pm (PST)