8th April 2015 – Tikal to Lake Atitlan

We have an early start this morning as we have to be at the airport at 7:00 am for our flight to Guatemala City, where we are met by Rambo & Mario. We jump into our cars and Rambo leads us into Antigua to the hotel where the rest of the team have stayed for the past 2 nights.Today we have a short drive of 80 kilometers to Lake Atitlan but it will take us between 2 – 3 hours. It’s quite cool and drizzling as we head out of Antigua which is a beautiful 16th century town. We’ll have to come back here one day so we can spend some time exploring it. As we wind our way towards the lake we climb to over 2,500 meters above sea level and it’s quite overcast and still drizzling with light rain. As we drop down to the lake we get a magnificent view of the volcanoes and Lake Atitlan, it is just gorgeous.ÿ We stop to overlook the lake and there are people selling local handcrafts dressed in their colourful outfits. When we arrive at the hotel we go straight to the pier and board a motor boat that takes us to San Juan La Laguna, a village on the opposite side of the lake. We walk up the steep street from the jetty to the middle of the village and look at the wonderful murals that the local artists have painted. The women of the village form co-operatives and they make Mayan artifacts. They grow, spin, dye and weave their own cotton into scarves, shawls and cloth. We see a demonstration of the process at one of the co-operatives shop. Each village has its own particular colours and pattern in the woven cloth and the ladies wear skirts & the men wear pants made from this cloth with beautiful embroidered belts.Our hotel for the night is Hotel Atitlan and it has the most beautiful gardens that are full of birds. We have seen a lot of hummingbirds in different sections of the garden, they are very small and move incredibly fast so are particularly hard to photograph. There are also a few beautiful black and yellow toucans that are in cages. The hotel is on the bank of the river and we see a lovely sunset over the lake.