Well, this is a surprise post. As of last night, we had decided to spend the weekend in Xela working on project stuff and avoiding the rain. By this morning, we were headed on a day trip.
We had expected rain and thunderstorms today, and only one of those turned out to be true. Laguna Chicabal is 15km outside of Xela, on the way to Coatepeque, near the town of San Martín. We set off after a wonderful breakfast at El Mezón Escondido, just down the street from Casa Argentina. This was our first adventure at the Minerva bus station, which is nothing short of chaos, where brightly painted camionetas headed to any number of unknown locations gather to pick up passengers. It is important to understand that this "bus terminal" is really just a street packed with buses next to a market. (Actually, it may be a market next to a street packed with buses, but isn't that just a chicken-and-egg thing?)
Upon arrival in San Martín, we followed a family through the town to the beginning of the 5km dirt road leading to the lagoon. Soon after we started up the road, we bummed a ride off a guy with a pickup, who drove us to the start of the real trail for 10Q. From there, we hiked about 2km up the volcano (did I mention that this was a crater lake in a dormant volcano?) and down into the crater.
When we arrived at the lagoon, visibility was around 10 feet, and so we were pretty disappointed. Not knowing how big it was, we decided to walk around it. About 20 minutes into the walk, something amazing happened. I was taking a picture of a flower, and when I turned around the clouds were pulling up off the lagoon and into the surrounding jungly stuff. Suddenly, we could see everything, and we proceeded to orbit the lake (less than a mile or so around, pretty small). The forest here is like nothing in the States, with a dazzling array of trees and plants and ferns and lots of fun things. You can check the Picasa album for some lake pictures if you want.
The photo of the day is from the dirt road back to San Martín. We decided to walk back, because the countryside seemed quite beautiful on the bumpy, frenetic ride over. Along that road, we ran into a field of wildflowers, flanked by some stately trees. The clouds were just pulling out of the field when we arrived, and watching the clouds pull out was eerily similar to the way they looked dancing across the water in the lagoon. Only this time the water was yellow wildflowers. It was a pretty magical moment.
I grabbed a window seat for the ride back to Xela, again on a microbus, and took in the beautiful, rolling hills of hand-tilled soil that surround this part of the Guatemalan highlands. I love microbuses because of the people you meet along the journey. And more than any particular person, it's the fact that you meet people, that your lives intersect for a moment, or more accurately that they let you into theirs for a moment.
And more than anything, that bus ride felt alive. The breeze through the open window beside me was cold and damp, the hills covered in a blanket of clouds. I am always overcome when I travel with how well people adapt. There are problems here in Guatemala - legacy of the civil war and countless other horrors and injustices leveraged by poverty and meddling governments. But the people here thrive, with a genuine happiness and gentle manner which I have never experienced. Every Guatemalan that I have met has been nothing short of wonderful, be they taxi drivers, landlords, or women with sick babies.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is something wonderful and life-affirming when you see people living in a way that is totally foreign to you, have the chance to try-on that life for a few moments, and then realize that while it is different it is every bit as valid, and every bit as precious and fragile as the things that you hold dear.
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