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¡Buenas dias!
We're in full Spanish mode now, having had our first few lessons back at school. Hmm, seems this travelling lark doesn't necessarily get your grey matter in
the shape it should be for intensive 3.5 hour sessions of one on one Castellano. But it is a good thing; Guatelmalan Spanish is lot slower and clearer than all the 'thhhhh-ing' and 'kkkcccchh-ing' I encountered trying to learn from a Vallencian. Claire & I now invite each other to perform menial tasks in a language neither of us is getting right or really understands - lucky they're all about the manana here.
Where have we been since the last blog? Mostly around Lake Atilan, which is stunning as usual, but we've also been out into the highlands, practicing our haggling (numbers + lots of 'mas barato' in Spanish, everything else in English & body language) at the markets of Chichicastenango, which was awesome fun. The myriad of colours from traditional woven goods, carvings, pottery, bunting (still almost worryingly prevalent), local dress, stray animals, food of questionable origin let alone hygiene was an assault on the senses, but in a good way. Bizzare and humbling to have kids start haggling with you in Spanish before taking you on in English, before packing up their entire store to carry it home on their back with a retaining strap round their forehead. Weirdest of all had to be feeling like giants though; Claire was good head & shoulders above anyone else and I felt genuinely tall for the first time since I was about 14. We ended up with nothing from the dude who looked like he'd emptied a bin onto a plastic sheet (presume the broken glasses were a pair with the smashed mobile phone, the respective cracks cancelling each other out) and probably more than we should from the guy who carved & painted replica chicken buses. These purchases were great, having to explain to every other nationality we met the concept of foreign tat less so. Overall a great experience though and real insight into how some very warm people deal with the poverty they're faced with.
Journies of course provide a constant stream of entertainment. Changing boats in the middle of Lake Atilan as the weather closed in because the cheeky helmsman had run out of gas wasn't necessarily an experience I'd rush to repeat, but all fun & games. Least we weren't sinking (yet). Fortunately kayaking around the lake under our own steam was a lot more pleasant, if hard work given the cotton buds we were using to propel ourselves. Still, turns out they work (just) if the public ferry starts
chasing you down. Always worth it though to find your own private beach for a freshwater paddle with the volcanoes as a back drop. Buses continue to amuse & terrify in equal measure. Turns out the health & saftey inspectorate didn't neglect to monitor caving adventures at the expense of road work regulation. I gather one cone is sufficient to indicate either a trench in the main road or just 50 odd punters and JCB round the next corner, but only if the guys on the ground deem it really necessary. Why get trucks to deliver building materials regularly, when you can obscure the main carriageway with raw cement? And so on. Which is all before your driver's got his F1 hat on for blind corner overtaking. You half grow immune to it though, if not the landslides... yeah. Still pushing a few teeth back into place after a tuk-tuk journey around Antigua´s ungrouted cobbled streets too. Haven´t decided how much of the vibration was down the earthquake damage and what percentage can be attributed to workmanship. It all looks very pretty though.
Our nigh-prescient decision to fly over Honduras is starting to look very shrewd; Antigua was full of slightly confused travellers the day before yesterday. They´d all just been told their buses were cancelled where the Honduran border had been shut - oops. So much for many claiming last week that "yeah, but the coup won´t affect tourism"... try telling that to everyone frantically booking flights today having done a runner out of Honduras when the curfew was briefly lifted. Having said which, some other people took the opportunity of a lack of curfew to rush out to the Honduran Bay Islands in the Carribean, where they´re now marooned given the lack of any ferries back to the mainland. Still, there could be worse places to get stuck I suppose. Us, we´re just happy to have a flight on Sunday, where we´ll pick up proceedings in Costa Rica.
More photos should be coming soon. One Guatemalan proudly told me (no, in perfect English - my teacher isn´t a miracle worker) that sometimes they now see broadband speeds of up to 0.5Mbs. I smiled of course, but that may help you understand why photos can be tricky!
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