Krysten is always lost

sometimes it´s worth the pain and suffering

ghostofkrystenpast — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 14:59:00 GMT

So I made a last minute decision to climb another volcano. A bigger volcano. Acatenango to be exact, the one with two peaks. All I can really say about it was that it was 11 of the most excruciating and simultaneously most amazing hours of my life.

Now I feel like I’ve been hit by a truck… twice.

If you ask me later, I might feel like telling you more about it, but right now I just don’t feel like it.

vacation from vacation

ghostofkrystenpast — Fri, 9 Feb 2007 02:06:00 GMT

I went to the lake this weekend, and it was nice.

That sums it up pretty good actually, but I suppose that if I were to try and get more specific I could say that (almost) the whole group of us headed for Santiago on the shores of Lake Atitlan on Sunday Morning. We got there around noon, and basically just hung around for awhile. Not a huge fan of Santiago, not much going on but it was still busy, and everywhere you turn there are people bugging you for money. We did get to see Maxmion (Ma-shee-mon) tho, a catholic/mayan saint that people give cigarettes and alcohol to. It’s basically an idol that they keep in this little hut/house full of candles and incense and people chanting. It was pretty cool.

Later in the afternoon, Lisa’s husband, Luis (who’s from another village on the lake) took us to a nearby village (still technically Santiago) which was just completely devastated by a landslide after hurricane Stan a year or so ago. It poured rain day and night for three days straight, until one day around 6am people awoke to the sound of their neighbors screaming, as the mud buried the entire village. Literally buried it, not even the roofs could be seen anymore. They said it was like there was a moment where the villagers cried out and then just silence and everything and everyone was gone. I don’t know how many people died, 1200 or more. At least 7000 displaced. They managed to pull some people out of the mud but some are still buried there. Since then the survivors have rebuilt a large part of the village. We didn’t spend a lot of time there on account of we warned that there’s been a lot of gang activity and violence toward tourists in the area, and well a giant group of white people in a tiny mountain village tends to draw a lot of attention.

So we headed just a little ways down the road from the sight of the landslide to where the government had built housing for people who had lost their homes. Actually, I’m not really sure if you could call it housing. Shameful little shacks made out of canvas tarps and tin with “USAID” stamped on the side: they’re nothing to be proud of. Generally I’ve found myself to be pretty much desensitized to almost everything. So much so that it was almost a relief to look at this village and actually truly feel terrible about it.

We left the village behind and headed for more pleasant things in San Lucas Toliman, about 20 minutes down the road from Santiago. By the time we got there it was already dark, so rest of the day consisted of dinner and just hanging out. Monday was almost as uneventful. Walked around a little bit, spent a good chunk of the afternoon laying in the sun on the lawn of what used to be a gigantic mansion of a house owned by Luis’ sister and her husband but has since crumbled into ruins because it was built too steeply into the hillside. All that’s left know is a small house with one big room full of beds, a bathroom, and a kitchen, still a nice place to relax tho. Eventually we got tired of laying in the sun and went and jumped into the lake. It was a pretty excellent swim, though it was insanely deep so we had to tread water the whole time, and therefore weren’t in the water quite as long as we might have been otherwise. That’s about all I did of any interest the whole trip. Mostly just kinda relaxed, which was nice. I’ll have to go back to see more of the lake, it’s huge and we really just stayed in the bay by San Lucas the whole time, so there’s a ton of it left to see.

all dressed up and nowhere to go

ghostofkrystenpast — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 15:42:00 GMT

I´m not really sure that that title has anything to do with this entry, except maybe for the fact that I´m not sure that this entry is actually going anywhere. Basically I´m bored and have nothing better to do than sit here and ramble for a little while.

So yeah, basically not much going on here... Went to Chichicastenango yesterday a little market town in the highlands. It was cool. Bought some suff, walked around a bit, nothing to exciting. The trip there was a bit scary though. We we´re definitely with a couple feet of a head on collision with a bus, and there were a few other close calls too, but we survived. It was a little unsettling to see that our driver didn´t even think twice about passing against oncoming traffic. Like literally we were passing cars inbetween the ones in our lane and the ones coming the other way. Also unsettleing was the bus upside down in the ravine at the bottom of a rather steep section of road that ended in like a 100 degree turn. But yeah, again, we survived with no real excitement to speak of.

soooo... what else can I ramble about??? Not much apparently. Had some creepy dreams Saturday night about Omish people staring at me from a hill. It was like their eyes were piercing my soul. Seriously, it was terrifying, and I woke up not be able to move which was even more terrifying.

ummm yeah. Spanish exam Saturday worth 75% of my mark. fun. But it does mean the start of only having class on Thursdays and saturdays, which will be nice. Well... it´ll be nice if I can think of something else to do with my time besides eat and spend money.

My money is better spent on things like Coachella, which I´m going to btw, I don´t care what it takes, I´m using that ticket.

K, that´s about it... umm... here´s a list of stuff that makes me think of Guatemala:

men with large guns
sweet bread
beans
bank line-ups
Gallo beer
Pollo Campero
those little candies shaped like fruit but made of pure sugar
super fresh fruit for breakfast almost every morning
bimbo bread
people trying to sell you stuff
phone calls to canada for the same price as calling locally
cell phones that cost the same as my dinner yesterday
being hungry all the time
volcanoes everywhere
people carrying Jesus down the street
scariest driving ever

It was nice but...

ghostofkrystenpast — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 15:31:00 GMT

“Please, please, please just check my bed for scorpions,” I knew I was asking for a reason.

My first night in Monterrico was not off to a great start. I had Emilie check my bed for me before I got into it; the first thing she did was lift the pillow, and the first thing I did was yelp and run away as there just so happened to be a scorpion there. Why do these things keep coming after me? My nerves are wearing thin.

At least between the scorpions, sunburn, 1000s of mosquito bites, and sand absolutely everywhere, there was a really beautiful beach in Monterrico. Black sand and violent waves together with a pretty great sunset made the view pretty nice.

We had bonfires on the beach both nights which was pretty cool, it was nice to just kinda sit and listen to the waves and look at the trillions of stars. I seriously have never seen so many stars in my life, not even up north.

The beach itself was pretty cool, although black sand makes for scorching hot feet, and a really strong surf made swimming fairly difficult.

The highlight of the trip for me was probably the ubber fresh smoothies be served up at one of the hotel restaurants on the beach. They were pretty freaking delicious.

Sadly I did not see any sea turtles, tho we did wake up at 5:30 Sunday morning for a sunrise boat trip through the mangroves, where I saw some 4 eyed fish, and a nice sunrise.

All in all the beach was nice, but I was happy to get back to Antigua.

Gallery: pacaya

ghostofkrystenpast — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 08:16:00 GMT

climbing volcan pacaya

Oh what a beautiful view

ghostofkrystenpast — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 15:12:00 GMT

It was Monday afternoon that I forked over the cash (around $6 US) at the Barco travel agency for my bus ride and a guide to volcan Pacaya. I decided long before getting here, that climbing Pacaya would be something I had to do. I’d basically been looking forward to it for months. Needless to say I was pretty freakin excited.

Then, as if it couldn’t get any better, the front page of yesterday’s paper was filled with a picture of Pacaya spewing lava something like 50m into the air. Apparently it erupted Monday morning.

So yeah, words can’t really describe the experience so I’m not gonna try super hard to write it all nicely or anything. Even the pictures don’t come close to what it was actually like. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my short and boring life.

We got on the bus at 2:00 yesterday (Tuesday) afternoon and headed out on the 1 ½ hour drive to the park at the base of the volcano. The drive itself was pretty cool, though once we got onto what I guess was basically the base of the volcano the roads got pretty sketchy, what with being super narrow and having large drop-offs and what not. We got there alive at rate, and were immediately inundated with small children selling walking sticks, and guys with horses asking, “taxi? Taxi?” despite the fact that I’m dying to go riding, I decided that this was not the time, and these were not the horses on which to do it, and besides that I really wanted to hike the whole thing. I needed the exercise to counteract all the eating I’ve been doing here.

I found the hike up to be pretty hard. Not so much on my legs but I was definitely out of breath really quickly. Fortunately the scenery was pretty awesome, so that made up for the difficulty of the hike.

We walked for just over an hour and a half before we came to a point where the vegetation just changed completely, I found myself on a relatively bare hill, looking out over Guatemala city and volcan Agua and Fuego on one side and the remnants of lava flow in the valleys on the side of the mountain on the other, it was like rivers of black rock had been flowing and then just got tired and stopped. I dunno, I can’t describe it, but it was cool. The wind was really strong here, and the clouds were moving faster than I’ve ever seen a cloud move before in my life. Between the way the light was shining through the clouds, and the sound and speed of the wind and the movement of the clouds, the whole scene was really eerie, but also really cool. I tried to get video, but it was like everytime I turned my camera on the wind would die down. From this point it was a really short distance to the volcanic rock that had been deposited there in November by the last huge eruption.

The rock was really cool, you could feel the heat coming up out of the cracks, and even just the formation of it was really cool to look at. It reminded me a lot of Lord of the Rings. Geeky but true.

There were some spots where the cracks were big enough that you could see the orange glow, and if you stuck a stick in there it would catch on fire. It had just erupted on Monday but it looked like the lava had already hardened for the most part, though we weren’t able to get all the way up close to the crater (mostly because it’s been really active lately). We spent about a half hour just hanging out on the rock, eating the food we packed for dinner and watching the sunset, which was absolutely amazing.

Like I said we didn’t get to go right to the top, but that didn’t even bother me, what we did get to do was just so incredible. It was definitely worth the hike. We started to head back just as it was getting dark. The wind was insane on the hill before we got into the more forested area. There were a couple moments there when I thought I might actually get blown off my feet. It was at this point that Daniella got kicked by a horse. There were two of them that had been let loose to graze or whatever and as we walked by the one (and we were a fairly decent distance away) he pinned his ears and walked towards us before swinging his ass around and letting both legs fly. I could see it coming, but all I could managed to do with the wind and everything was just kinda say “ummmm,” and pull on Heather’s arm to get out of the way. Fortunately Daniella was far enough away that it just got her in the shin, instead of the knee and it wasn’t a hard blow. It was pretty funny on account of she didn’t get hurt, but it could have been bad. Here I was worried about getting injured by an eruption, it never occurred to me that the horses would be the thing to worry about.

Anyways, we came down the mountain in the dark, using our flashlights to find our way over the uneven ground, there were a few stumbles but nothing serious, and everyone lived to tell the tale. I got home exhausted and filthy. My feet were black and my shoes were filled with ash and dust, so I took a shower and went to bed, I think I must have been asleep the moment my head hit the pillow, I was just that tired.

Definitely worth the effort though, I want to go again… just not today.

Gallery: Antigua

ghostofkrystenpast — Mon, 8 Jan 2007 05:45:00 GMT

what was lurking in the dark...

ghostofkrystenpast — Sun, 7 Jan 2007 13:01:00 GMT

It all started last night when I got home from the bar and turned on the light in my room to find a gi-normous black bug scurrying across the floor. Obviously I found this to be quite disturbing and did not want to sleep with that thing in my room. Of course I was much too terrified to thoroughly search for it. I did very carefully nudge my suitcases that were sitting on the floor with my toe, and I stood on my bed and looked in all the corners of my room, but I couldn’t seem to find it again.

My solution was to go to the bathroom and hope that while I was in there it would leave on it’s own, or at least convince myself that it had gone while I wasn’t looking. Upon returning I carefully crept across the floor to my bed, made sure all the blankets and sheets were tucked in nice and tight all the way around, and just prayed that I wouldn’t wake up in the morning with this thing on my face. Thankfully I didn’t.

This morning I woke and assumed that whatever the horrifying creature was had gone on its merry way, and I didn’t see it at all the rest of the day. That is until I finished supper. After we had finished eating and I was about to walk back into my room I stopped myself for some reason. Instead of just walking in and turning on the light, I stood back a bit when I opened the door and just stretched my hand in to hit the switch. Sure enough when the light came down and looked at the floor, there in front of me, right where I would have been standing in my bare feet and flip flops, was a ferocious beast of a spider. The animal had claws that could rival a small lobster, I kid you not.

After leaping about 5 feet in the air I got my roommate Sarah to try and get rid of it for me, as my extreme fear of all things with an exo skeleton prevented me from doing so on my own. We thought it best to take a picture first, as to show everyone else what we were up against later. The subject remained quite still while Sarah took care of the proof, and I watched from a safe distance. Now the only thing left to figure out was how to get rid of it. It was way too big to step on, I think it would have carried me away if I had tried, which I wasn’t about to do anyways, there was no way I wanted to feel that thing crunching under my foot (plus I wasn’t willing to get anywhere near close enough to step on it). We decided to get a broom and chase it out. Yes that would work. Problem was, I didn’t keep a close enough eye on the thing while Sarah went to get the broom, and when we went back to get rid of it, it had disappeared.

I don’t know how a bug that big could hide so well, but we searched the entire room and couldn’t find it anywhere. Dismayed we gave up and went to meet the others at the park. There was no way I willing to stay home with that thing on the loose.

All evening I worried about that damn spider. How would I sleep knowing it was there, hiding with it’s pincers, just lurking out of site, waiting for me to go to sleep so it could crawl on my face. Eeegghgg, I shudder at the thought.

I was definitely not willing to go to sleep until I knew for certain that that monster wasn’t in my room anymore, so we decided to conduct another search after we got home. It didn’t take long before we found what we were looking for. There it was, in the most perfect position: right in my garbage can. Sarah pushed the can out in the courtyard with the broom, and eventually managed to work up the courage to tie the top of the bag and trap it inside. We tripled bagged it, but neither of us felt that was secure enough. I mean, the thing had claws for pete’s sake. The only solution we could think or was to put in the garbage can in the bathroom with a file folder and the lid on top. That’s where it is right now, and that’s hopefully where it will be in the morning.

I have nothing creative to call this entry

ghostofkrystenpast — Sat, 6 Jan 2007 23:21:00 GMT

Sooooooo…. Stuff is going pretty good here I suppose. I started Spanish lessons yesterday, which was crazy, they’re going to wear me right out. 4 hours is way too long to be doing anything. I did learn quite a bit tho, and I know I really need the practice, so in the end I’ll be thankful that I did it, but right now I’m just hoping that my brain doesn’t explode.

Still haven’t really done anything too exciting or taken too many pictures. I think I might climb a volcano on Sunday tho. Apparently one of them erupted the other day, but I didn’t actually see it so I don’t know for sure. Pacaya has been erupting pretty much non stop for years now tho. That’s the one we’re hoping to climb.

There’s a ton of stuff I want to do here, I have to try really hard to pace myself, and not do everything in the first month. We’ve been gong out every night so far which is kinda nice cuz it keeps me busy, but I really don’t want to be doing it all the time.

In other news, much to my relief, the food here is pretty good. We have beans for dinner every night, but I’ve found that if I put them on bread they’re not too offensive. I have unfortunately started eating meat again. I’m still gonna avoid it when I can, but I’m trying to eat whatever food they serve me. I’m definitely eating way healthier than I do at home. We have fruit for breakfast every morning, and I’ve been eating beans and stuff. Plus I’m not pigging out on junk food in between meals, so that’s pretty good I guess.

Anyways, that’s all for now.

Safe journies.

I am here

ghostofkrystenpast — Thu, 4 Jan 2007 14:40:00 GMT

Just a quick note to let everyone know I'm ok. Still setteling in, will write more soon.

Arrived yesterday to the beautiful sights and sounds that are Guatemala. The scenery is breathtaking.

I am staying with the Morelas family. They seem nice, but I haven’t really spent much time with them or anything. My room is super basic, just a bed, a warped desk, some drawers and a really uncomfortable chair. Haven’t done too much yet, so far just walked around the market a bit.

School starts tomorrow, it sounds like it’ll be a lot of work, I guess I’ll wait and see.

Some last minute thoughts to fill this empty space

ghostofkrystenpast — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 16:04:00 GMT

Since I found out last February that I would be going to Guatemala this winter, I have probably had at least 50 dreams in which I’m about to leave for the airport (or am actually at the airport) and haven’t packed yet. Someone is trying to tell me something. Why am I not listening? 5 days left at home and I have barely started to get my act together. I haven't even finished my vaccinations, nevermind started packing. My time management skills are seriously lacking, and instead of crossing things off my to-do list, I keep adding new things. New not necessary things. Like cake baking. At this point it will be a miracle if I manage a smooth departure.

In other news, the word from Guatemala is that there’s a bit of a money shortage going on. And by ‘bit of a money shortage’ I mean big money shortage. Someone forgot to order new bills from the mint or something. I’m short on details. What I do know is that cash will be hard to come by, which could make things interesting for the first couple weeks. Hopefully it’ll all get sorted out, and if it doesn’t… well… not much I can do really.

That’s really all I’ve got for now seeing as the trip hasn’t actually started yet. At this point I’m super nervous and stressed about leaving, but I’m also really excited. I have the benefit of knowing that Guatemala is a beautiful country, and that I already love it there. It’s just too bad I can’t be two places at once… that would be pretty awesome actually. I’m terrible with goodbyes.

Gallery: random stuff

ghostofkrystenpast — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 12:44:00 GMT