After my one week of Spanish crunch in Antigua, I headed west to Lago de Atitlan, a beautiful lake surrounded by volcanoes. There are numerous villages surrounding the lakes including Panajachel, San Pedro, San Marcos and a few other smaller ones. The bus dropped me off at Panajachel, the most developed village, where boats are available to take you across the lake to the other villages. Sitting lake side and trying out the local comedores, I was beginning to take in the whole scenery. 
A few Mayan women and young girls, one of them only 6 years old, came by to show me their weavings for sale. The handcrafts here are well made; I bought a light, colorful scarf from the woman for 10 Quetzeles, or a little less than $1.50. There are many Mayan women selling similar handcrafts in Guatemala, depressing the prices for all of them. I also met another Mayan woman who was selling tortilla, hot little pieces of flat bread made from corn. After buying some tortillas from her, she happily agreed to let me take some pictures of her with her basket. Tortilla is such a main stable of food here that I don’t think I have gone many meals in Guatemala without some form tortilla.
After lunch a small boat took me to San Marcos, one of the smaller villages with a population of 3000, according to my book. It wasn’t until I got to my hotel there when I found out just how small the village is. There is basically no main area of the town, a “parque central†if you will, other than a few small interconnected walkways like this.
A few people with dreadlocks and dressed like they belonged in 60’s, stayed in my hotel, which consisted of a few straw-covered wooden, triangular huts surrounding a garden. Talking to them, I quickly found out that San Pedro is the big party town, and not just that, a lot of foreigners come there for the cheap and available drugs there. Marshall, an American Taiwanese from San Diego I met, told me that when he got off the boat, the people waiting at the docks offered him a running list of everything from weed to hard drugs. Whatever you wanted, they had there – for cheap. I guess if you wanted to get really messed up, it’s to do it by a beautiful lake than in a basement somewhere. I haven’t really met or talked in depth with many anti-globalization, anti-capitalism thinkers, so their agendas, such as the idea that capitalism in the long run is not sustainable because profit-first decision making is destroying the environment, are quite foreign to me. We weren’t going to solve the world’s problems, and his solution of learning how to hunt before doomsday comes didn’t appeal to me. However I was happy to listen in on his view of the world’s problems. After all, how often do I get to hang out with people on the far rustic end of the scale?
San Marcos supposedly has the best view of the lake and I couldn’t disagree more. I got up bright and early the next morning to catch a few indigenous people fishing on their small rafts in the tranquil water. I dove in for a swim. Water wasn’t too cold, even though this time of the year is winter in Guatemala. The day before, I met up with Guy, pronounced “Giâ€, a Frenchman who offers paragliding rides from the surrounding mountains down to the village. He showed me a video of a man running full speed jumping off a cliff. Just as his foot was about to land on nothing but air, the parachute lifted him and he began to coast in mid-air. The weather hasn’t been too great, raining on and off. That morning the sky was pretty cloudy but by 10:30 AM, we finally got a break. Marshall and I packed up our bags and along with Guy, we went in his boat back to Panajechel. It was a waiting game. There needs to be enough wind to take off and sky need to be pretty clear with some thermal flow to keep us in the air. We waited, waited, ate some lunch and waited some more, but as the afternoon came around, Guy gave us the bad news. Today was not going to be it. I will have to wait for another day, maybe back here.