Sail With Ocean Angel
Our trip westward from La Antigua took us on the fabled Pan American Highway, CA1, a highway that right outside Guatemala City is 6 lanes wide and high speed, but as you climb into the mountains, it is often reduced to 2 lanes winding up through steep passes. In places like this one there was no doubt we were in the country with the cows and beef cattle trimming/eating the grass while tethered to stakes along the roadway. How's that for efficiency? No fossil fuel consumed to mow the grass, and feeding the families at the same time.
As the day wore on, clear skies gave way to rain clouds, and smoothly paved roads gave way to major re-construction of Central America 1. No one at the car rental agency told us to expect major delays for rebuilding the highway, but the directions to our hotel on Lake Atitlan (accent on the last syllable) did say to follow CA9 south out of the city to our jump-off point. We soon found out why.
Before we knew it, we were at the top of a mountain chain ready to bear off the highway and head towards Panajachel on the northern perimeter of the lake. Panajachel (pronounced Panahachel for all you gringos) is a bustling tourist city of about 50,000 people looking south onto the lake with a view of all three volcanoes. There are many hotels, bed and breakfasts, guest houses, and three ugly green towering skyscrapers built some years ago by enterprising foreigners. Two of the three were severely damaged by earthquakes and are leaning so badly they cannot be occupied. The third is only leaning a little so they will let you stay on the first 4 or 5 floors- fat chance that. Not realizing, we picked a holy week to visit the area, and every hotel in Panajachel was full, so Joy found an eco-hotel in Santiago on the south shore of the lake that seemed to our liking.
Here's a wide street in Santa Catarina
Our tourist guide for the area (Fodor's) showed a roadway rimming the lake on the eastern shore and it went into fairly good detail about the towns and stops along the way, so we turned onto the rim road and began our leg southward. Now, if you have ever driven the hills in Napa, California, and think those roads are steep and twisty, I can tell you from experience, those roads are for sissies! Off to our right and down about 1000 feet below us you can see the town of Santa Catarina sitting right on the edge of the lake. By this point in the day it was starting to rain just a little, but I wasn't overly concerned as I figured we were two-thirds of the way from "Pana", as the town is called locally, to Santiago. We wound down tight switch back turns into Santa Catarina and continued on to San Pedro, the last town before the city of Santiago.
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It was after 1pm by the time we retraced our route to Pana and took the right turn onto the highway heading south to Santiago. We were both hungry, tired, and the rain was pouring down in sheets. The wind tore the driving rain off the rooftops and the highway whipping it into walls of water around us. Joy and I both agreed to stop at the first place with a sign for food. At the top of small mountain and we found a small tienda (store) with a restaurant attached. Four hours of bouncing along had jarred our kidneys to the limit, and our first stop was the bathroom. Our hostess led us through their home behind the tienda, out onto a patio, then down a path way with the dogs and chickens to what looked surely to be an outhouse, only it was a neatly tiled clean half bath, perhaps converted some time ago. The owners were kind and helpful, the food good and hot, the beer ice cold. It was a well needed break.
That's a bus ahead. Can't you see it?
No more excitement today. We made it safe and sound.
So
or
Driving in Guatemala, especially in the rainy season, is definitely not for the faint at heart. Often the road reduced to one lane like this one sometimes with mud, gravel, and soupy ruts up to a foot deep. Our trusty Nissan Almera sluiced through the ruts like a champ though, and afterward, Joy and I joked that we could only take photos in the better parts like this one as the rest of the time the car was bouncing and weaving too much to steady the camera! It was by far the shortest route to the lake from La Antigua however, and by the time we realized how rough the roads would be, there was no turning back. The chicken buses made us feel like real amateurs though as they passed us bouncing through the mud and slush.
These diesel powered chicken buses fly. Pedal to the metal and leaning so far on the corners you would swear they would crash. We never passed one.
Views like the one below made the lake road trip worth every minute. We could see the run-off of decades of rain bleeding into the lake with two of the volcanoes, San Toliman and Atitlan, to the south. In the distance, about 8 miles away, the pinch in the lake leads towards its southern bay with the town of Santiago and San Pedro volcano out of sight around to the left. Soon after passing through Santa Catarina, we entered the tiny village of San Pedro, and the cobblestone-paved roadway abruptly dropped off to a rough dirt road. The road ahead looked even worse, and I wondered if our car could pass through. I stopped a young man walking towards us and asked him ( in Spanish, of course) if our car could continue on to Santiago this way. "Oh no, he said. Only trucks with 4-wheels, not cars!!" So I made a tight 3-point turn-around, backing oh so slowly as the cliffs behind us dropped straight to the lake. We drove back towards Pana and retraced our last hour's twisty steep route.
We can't leave this part of the trip without telling you about our last excitement for the day. I had to turn right off the highway in the town of San Lucas onto Guatemala 4 for the last few clicks to Santiago. I entered the town and promptly got lost, no signs, and now it was really raining. Water was rushing down the streets covering the cobblestones to depths of 6 to 10 inches. It was above the bottoms of the doors, roaring down the hilly streets. We reached a 4-way intersection and it appeared we should go straight ahead back down to the lake. The car dropped off the top of the hill heading towards the lake, and we saw a lady with a basket perched on her head, trudging up the hill with water over her knees. As I slowed, Joy yelled, "We can't go down there. Look!" At the bottom of the hill, right next to the lake, the water was roiling like Niagara Falls, and rolling into the lake! My heart about stopped, and I was worried whether I could back the car up through the water. But I did, we survived, and once again, I stopped to ask the way to Santiago at the intersection. Turn left, the cabdriver said, then straight ahead.