Acatenango and Atitlán
The Mountain of Fire and the Most Beautiful Lake
AFTER Antigua de Guatemala, I went on an overnight guided hike up the Volcán de Acatenango, which is next to the continually erupting volcano called Volcán de Fuego (‘volcano of fire’) in Spanish, or Chi Q’aq’ (‘where the fire is’) in the local Kaqchikel Mayan language.
Here is an information sign showing the two lookouts you get to, one at the top of Acatenango (which means ‘walled place’) and one which gives a view over a saddle to Volcán de Fuego / Chi Q’aq’, which lives up to its name by erupting every half an hour or so in a minor way, and from time to time more seriously.
There are various ways of getting up the trail. Foreign tourists generally employ motorised transport until the last stages, when you hike for about half an hour to some chalets where you spend the night, and then another hour and a half to the top of Acatenango, at 3,976 metres above sea level (13,045 feet). This is some serious altitude, and warm clothing and a certain degree of fitness are essential.
There are coffee shops along the way.
We cooked our evening meals over a fire.
It was misty on the way up, but the next morning we were rewarded by the sight of Volcán de Fuego / Chi Q’aq’ doing its thing.
There are different guiding companies, offering different levels of service. It pays very much to inquire as to what you will get, including the quality of the food.
The currency unit of Guatemala is the Guatemalan quetzal (Q), worth about 13 US cents. My tour cost Q 500 per person, about US $65. This was too cheap: our food was dominated by pasta and we slept two each to a small mattress. In the morning, our ill-paid guides, who I heard only got paid the equivalent of US$25 each for the trip, were reluctant to get going and we went on ahead with the guides bringing up the rear.
On the flip side, I met some interesting people, and we chatted about our various backgrounds and adventures. There was a nice Swedish woman who lived in Malta, and a seasoned backpacker who sneaked into hotels to get showers and so on, though he could afford to eat out: perhaps that was why.
Here is a video of scenes from our trek.
After Acatenango, I headed a few tens of kilometres further west by bus to Lake Atitlán: a deep volcanic crater lake, surrounded by many towns, which has long been hailed as one of the scenic wonders of the world.
If you are lucky, you can see the large conical volcanoes of central Guatemala across the waters, though when I was there you could hardly see them, most of the time, because of atmospheric haze.
I believe that this haze results from the air pollution of nearby Guatemala City, due east of the lake and as such, in the direction of the prevailing wind in tropical latitudes, which is easterly.
That, along with some pollution of the lake itself, causing algal blooms, detracts a little from the praise showered on Lake Atitlán by nineteenth-century world travellers, who saw it when everything was still pristine.
However, as you can see, Lake Atitlán is still very much worth visiting. Like Antigua, which also suffers from air pollution, it would probably be even more worth visiting during a spell in which the wind was blowing the other way (there’s a tip).
These days, there are boat tours on the lake, whose name means ‘between the waters’.
Here’s a photo of one of the several towns on the lake and its beach.
I was going to stay at Panajachel, the largest town on the lake, which is on a sprawling delta of flat land and from where the boat tours depart. But I had since heard that San Pedro La Laguna was the best place to stay — the ‘Laguna’ being, of course, the lake — and so I booked a place to stay there on Booking dot com — the Hotel Gran Colibrí — and cancelled the other one.
At the Gran Colibrí, there was cheap accommodation in metal A-frames with a zipper and canvas, with lots of French people staying in them at the time. But I was afraid rats would get in, and I asked if they had anything better, and got a dorm to myself for two nights, where I was able to cook for myself in a kitchen.
The area is very much set up for tourism, with hotels, hostels and spas for every budget and level of comfort. A lot of people come here to live and work as digital nomads as well: I heard that nomads can negotiate cheap monthly rates that don’t come to much more than what it would cost a tourist to stay for a week.
As I visited the lakeshore towns, one after the other, I was impressed by the colourful artwork, buildings, and murals that were everywhere to be seen.
One of the greatest attractions of the lake is the hike up to the Rostro Maya (‘Mayan face’), colloqiually and perhaps less respectfully known in English as Indian Nose. This hike is best done before sunrise so that you can watch the sun come up over the lake from a high lookout. The Rostro Maya is located on the outskirts of the community of Santa Clara la Laguna, and is only about three or four kilometres northwest of San Pedro.
As with Acatenango, I did this with a tour group, which I booked early on after arriving in this area, along with my future bus trips, which I booked on luxurious buses, to Quetzaltenango and Flores.
I travelled to San Pedro by shuttle bus. And I caught a boat to the steep village of Santa Cruz, also a very nice town.
In Santa Cruz, I visited Johanas’s Medicinal Plants and Herbal Garden.
Johanas does a tour of the larger gardens, but it takes three days to arrange, so be aware of the need to book this, and other things, in plenty of time.
I enjoyed the restaurants and the food, in little cafes that often had good lookouts over the lake themselves. Cafes like the Arca de Noe in Santa Cruz.
And Ki Sabor in San Juan.
Here’s a photo of a breakfast I had, at the Gran Colibrí I think.
If you wanted, you could attend Mayan cooking and weaving classes as well.
As in other places, the decorative nature of the buildings and bright colours really blew me away!
However, there some really tumbledown places alongside. Were these where poorer citizens lived?
At the foot of the Rostro Maya, I visited San Juan, a mostly Mayan town with villages that you can do cultural tours around.
This was with a woman named Elizabeth who was a student of urban forms from Washington DC. She was talking about how Washington had been planned, and didn’t have skyscrapers. Many towns and cities in the Hispanic world are also famous for being well-planned.
In San Pedro, we came across a street strangely decorated with umbrellas and an unusually long alfrombra.
I think this was to do with Holy Week, for which a local Catholic church of colonial appearance was also decorated in festive purple, just as in Antigua.
In Guatemala, the Catholic religion now faces competition from Protestant sects, such as the proprietors of a brightly orange church I came across: hopefully not orange in the Northern Ireland sense, just in the also-looks-nice sense.
On a less cheerful note, we also spotted a backpacker trying to steal from a cafe we were in and called him out, saying that he came from a richer country than Guatemala. A lot of the long-term backpackers descend to something like this level: I think some of them are on drugs.
As I mentioned above, everywhere I went, I was impressed by the murals and the other artwork, much of it a fusion of Mayan and modern styles, and very often on sale.
In my next post about Guatemala, I head still further westward in the highlands, to Quetzaltenango.
