Prettiest city in Guatemala8-22-06 to 8-25-06 After the big hike to Lake Atitlan, I spent a pretty uneventful day doing laundry, buying a few things and just recovering. That night I went to a presentation on the election controversy in Mexico. If you recall some of my adventures in Oaxaca, you know why I had an interest in what was happening back there. While this talk was mainly on the national election, they did talk about the Oaxaca thing some as well. It was held at a restaurant called Cubatenango, which, not surprisingly, served Cuban influenced food. I had dinner there also. I won't go into the details, and it was in Spanish, so I'd probably get them wrong anyway, but I did find out they are still burning busses in Oaxaca city. I wanted to take another week of Spanish, somwhere in Guatemala, and the obvious choices were Xela, San Pedro, or Antigua. I had already been in Xela for a while, and had at least seen San Pedro when we hiked there, so I decided to go to Antigua to see what that was like, and figured if I didn't like it, I could backtrack to San Pedro. I had an uneventful ride, except for some road construction. They are still recovering from Hurricane Stan down here, but in general, the roads have been in great shape. I should say that the weather this whole trip has been a lot better than I have any right to expect, since this is supposed to be the rainy season for much of this area. The pattern has been that the days start out sunny, then clouds up in the afternoon, and may rain after 4 pm or so. The temps have been great as well. As long as I stay in the mountains, which has been this whole trip, except for Palenque, and the coast near Acapulco, the highs have been in the 70-85 F range, and the lows in the 50's. I've been watching to San Antonio weather and it's been over a hundred regurlarly, so I'll take this. So I got to Antigua, and I know I keep saying this, but it is another beautiful, colonial era town. It is quite small, you can walk everywhere. This is definitely the most upscale town in Guatemala, and consequently overrun with tourists, but it's so pretty I almost don't mind. This is definitely a vacation spot, in contrast to my description of Xela. I keep thinking I am in Mexico, instead of Guatemala. I got a room in a guest house, which I'll try to post some pictures of. Excellent private room, shared bath, 3 meals a day, and cable TV (I have the NASCAR Busch race from Bristol on now) all for about $15 per day. I'm really roughing it now. There is another guy from Sante Fe here on a KLR like mine, he has been living here for several months, and is waiting for some buddies to get here in October, then they are going to South America as well. I went ahead and signed up for a weeks worth of 4 hours a day Spanish, and had my second lesson today. It's a slow process, learning another language, but I'm finally learning some stucture, so hopefully I'll sound a little less like a caveman to a Spanish speaker sometime soon. The guy I'm taking Spanish from uses a room in a restaraunt for lessons, and after class, he showed me around the place. It is over 400 years old, with 400 year old timbers holding up the roof. The whole town is like that. We just don't have this kind of stuff in the states. Saturday I am going to hike up the volcano, that dominates the sky south of town, with the son of the guy who owns the guest house and some of his friends. It has been fairly active, and supposedly you can see some moltem lava down in the crater. I'll be here till wednesday, and the question I have to answer is where to go from here. I would like to go back to San Pedro, on Lake Atitlan, but I want to get to Panama City by the end of September, and there are lots of places I'd like to see between here and there, so I don't want to dawdle too much. I have never been to El Salvador, so I would like to go, but it is out of the way from some places I want to go in Honduras, so I will probably just head to Honduras from here. Antigua: The Santa Catalina arch, that you see in all the pictures of Antigua, with the Volcan Agua in the background. Would you rent this for a week, including 3 meals a day, cooked by a former chef on a Mediterranean cruise ship, for $105? I did. Antigua is full of these kind of shots.