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.
