Antigua and Atitlan

Another sunny day in Antigua and we decided to climb up Cerro de la Cruz, a hill about 2km from the edge of town from where there was supposed to be an excellent view. In the past there have been muggings on the hill so we were advised to go accompanied by a member of the tourist police, so off we went to the tourist police station which is about 1km in the opposite direction from the hill. We wrote our names, ages (!) and nationality in a book and waited for our companion. She soon appeared – all 5 feet of her packing a hand gun in her holster but unlike her colleagues no sub-machine gun, perhaps it wasn’t going to be so dangerous after all. We were joined by two young Canadian women who also wanted to go up the hill and we all set off at a pace that was just a little slower than a run – and she kept this up all the way to the hill, where we had a brief rest before climbing a steep slope and 326 steps (G counted them) to the top where the view was literally breathtaking (the city is about 1500m above sea level). On the way up the only people we saw lurking in the trees were other members of the tourist police force –well it helps keep unemployment down.
In the afternoon back on to a different mini-bus (which was so small Gregg had to sit up front with the driver in order to have any room for his legs) and a drive over the mountains to Lake Atitilan. Two of our group (David and Roey – our new friends from Bexley) decided to stay on in Antigua for an extra day in order to go into Guatemala City to see the anthropological museum, just as well they did as there wouldn’t have been room for them on board the “adrenalin tours” bus (that’s what was written on the side). On the drive we passed through a number of Maya villages where both men and women still wear traditional colourful dress and cultivate the land using implements not too dissimilar from those we use on our allotments and we saw them harvesting carrots and mange-tout (appearing soon at a Waitrose near you) and we also observed an interesting way of cultivating broad beans – in between the rows of already-harvested maize, which had died but still stood there, presumably to help increase soil fertility.
Lake Atitlan was described by Aldous Huxley as “the most beautiful lake in the world” but as he was probably high on locally-produced hallucinogenics at the time we took this with a pinch of salt. We went for a walk by the lake as the sun was setting behind one of the volcanoes that line the shore and thought he might have been right.