We Love Guatemala

Colour colour colour! We were delighted with the shops on the port especially set up for us. It was a cheerful and artfully set up place to be. We were whisked off to Antigua though for our tour, and I'll bet I wasn't the only one wishing we were staying closer to the ship. The bus ride was more than an hour which meant almost three hours sitting! As it turned out we were delighted to reboard just to enjoy the air-conditioning. The temperature hovered above 90º. We were constantly searching out shade.

Volcanoes were all around us during the journey. Our guide was a perky young English student called Selmi. She did her best to entertain us with a silly game of introducing ourselves. The farms along the route had sugar cane and coffee. We were surprised to see the shade trees that had been planted on the coffee plantations. The coffee plants need dappled sunlight.

La Antigua was full of sellers who bargained, "two for twenty, okay two for fifteen, okay what you pay? Beezness is beezness." You had to move quickly, and not look interested, which was difficult when we wanted to see it all. I was sad to hear the guide say that rural families had as many as twenty children in order to help the family earn more money. Kids don't go to school as they are required to do in Costa RIca. Yet, Guatemala was more prosperous than Nicaragua which seems politically unstable still.

Paul and Pat were almost taken in by a scam. We think they were after Pat's watch. Two attractive girls asked Pat to take their picture with their camera. Once done, they asked her to help with a school assignment where they took their photo with a watch, pretending to drop the watch in the fountain to illustrate waterproof. Of course, they would only pretend. "SCAM" I hissed as I came up to them. "Can you run faster than they can?" "no no not scam" claimed the girls, "you can hold the camera" Pat figured her watch was worth more than the camera, but was willing to sacrifice Paul's watch. The girls disappeared. We still wonder. Meanwhile, Dave had been taking a movie of it all from a distance.

On our return, we shopped and found a stand that opened a coconut for us, asked us to sip a bit, and replenished the space with rum. Three bucks! There's nothing like a bit of that with the heat of the tropics. We drank, chatted with friends from the ship, and then went back to the room to fondle the colourful treasures we'd bought before going to dinner and starting all over again.