Antigua, Guatemala, Holy Week

Wow, sorry it's taken me so long to write this, it's a week late,

Anyway, during March 11th-to the 15th, I went to Antigua, Guatemala with the married couple Tristan and Beth, and another Honduran teacher named Dania. Antigua is the 2nd most popular "Holy Week" place besides a city in Spain that draws alot of people. So it was very crowded.

Anyways, we left on friday right after school, drove 5 or 6 hours to Copan, Honduras, which has many Mayan Ruins there. To bad we didn't have time to stop there. We spent the night in a hotel and then continued on to Guatemala the next day. Tristan and Beth had friends there who run a Youth With a Mission Base down there (YWAM). So when we finally got there at like 2 in the afternoon, they led us to there house where we stayed for the 4 or 5 days we were there. That night there was a spanish movie night for a bunch of little kids and their parents that all lived in the same village as the YWAM base. There was already a team of high school and college age kids there, but they barely knew any Spanish, so I got to interact with a few of them alot, since my spanish has gotten better. After the Christian movie was over the leader got up there and shared the gospel in Spanish. Then gave popcorn and juice to everyone.

The next day we went into downtown Antigua, there were so many gringos down there I wasn't used to seeing so many white people, it felt kinda weird. We went to church and it was a bilingual church, which also felt weird, preached in English and translated in Spanish. After that we ate lunch at the "Mono Loco" (the crazy monkey) the food there was definitely more expensive than in Honduras. We ate American food pretty much the whole time too, since the family we stayed with didn't like Guatemalan food that much. Although we did have some really good tacos the first night. The town is so cool because all the buildings are very colonial looking, and you feel like your in a city 2 or 3 hundred years ago. All the streets are made out of cobblestone, so it's pretty old fashioned looking. The city is also surrounded by 4 or 5 volcanos, 2 of them being active, we saw one of them erupt right before church, a huge plume cloud of smoke came out, it was unbelievable.

Monday, we did a little reading and then went into town. We went often catch public bus headed into town, it was usually like 10 to 20 cents, and sometimes they were so packed that I was literally hanging outside of the door, hanging on for dear life! That's the kind of bus ride I like! We went into the market, which was huge!! And right away I noticed the immediate differences between the markets in Honduras and Guatemala. In Honduras people don't barter as much, you can't talk people down to much here. But in Guatemala, it's like they almost automatically expect to lower there price at least 3 or 4 dollars, depending on what you buy. Also Honduras has alot of wooden carvings and boxes, things like that. Guatemalan's sew alot more and had much more fabrics and clothes at their markets.

I almost forgot, on Sunday night we witnesses what so many Latin American cultures are famous for during holy week. "Alfombras," basically what they do is they start making these huge designes or patterns in the street. Excepts to make these designs, they use colored sawdust. We saw some of the most amazing designs, they were unbelievable!!! Anyways, they have this huge procession or parade, and they have like a thousand people dressed up in these purple robes with white pieces of clothe tied around their heads. And there are a few people that are carrying big metal containers of burning incense and swinging them back and forth. All of these people take turns carrying this enormous wooden box, with Jesus on top of it carrying the cross up Calvary. It was basically like a big float for a parade, except made of wood and finished very nicely, and carried by maybe 30 men on each side. These took turns carrying it all day, it was carried to all sorts of different villages and then ended up in the city at the end of the night. When all they people and floats march through the streets they walk over the alfombras and ruin them. There were also many Roman Soldiers dressed up in real armor and spears. They had a leader who was accusing Jesus, and there was also a few smaller wooden boxes being carried by other people with the same purple robes. Mary was on the 2nd biggest box, and there were 2 more smaller one's than that, I'm not sure what people were on those boxes. I was told that all the people who volunteer to carry one of the boxes believe that they can help earn their salvation by doing that, it was really sad to hear that.

The procession probably lasted 25-30 minutes, it seemed like the people with the purple robes never ended. There was also like a mini-high school marching band type of deal walking behind the wooden box parade things. And then a bunch of balloons as well behind them.

Tuesday morning we woke up at 5:00 AM because we had to catch a shuttle in town at 6 that was going to take us to the bottom of a volcano. So we got picked up at around 6:30 and drove about an hour and a half to the bottom of Pacaya, one of the active volcano’s in the area!!! We got there and everyone was selling hiking sticks because they were saying that the rocks and the lava were really sharp and that you needed them in order to keep your balance up there. And just in case you fell, you could put your stick down and keep from falling on the really sharp rocks or into lava. However, I’ve been Latin Americanized by now, and I know he people try to sell you things you don’t really need. And I was very confident in my hiking ability, maybe a little nervous though, seeing as I have never been anywhere close to lava before though.

We started our descent up, the unusual thing about this trail was that it was a very steep trail up, the terrain wasn’t too difficult though. But they kept horses behind our group (there was about 12 of us) so that when someone got tired, they would pay 8 dollars to ride a “taxi” aka, horse, all the way up the horse. The guide was a native Guatemalan and we had Dania who was our Spanish expert, she’s from Tegucigalpa but she’s very light-skinned, so everyone mistook her for being a gringa. Anyways, she caught the guide saying that the “Honduran” is slowing the group down, which was pretty funny, be she did a good job making it up to the top.

It was about 2 hours to the top, and we were hiking on black sand for the last half of the hike, while avoiding huge horse turds the whole time. We finally got to the top, and what a view!!!! We got to see all the hardened black lava, that had obviously trickled down the volcano already. We were on top of a lookout point looking down of the hardened lava, and we could see a couple spots in the center where there was red-hot lava showing through. And there was people like 5 feet away.

So Tristan, Beth, Dania and I went down there, got some good pictures, and then Tristan and I went out to try and discover where the river of lava was coming from. It seemed like there was a steady stream coming down the center of the volcano, so we walked up the side trying to find the river of lava coming down to where we were. By the way the hiking stick salesman were right, the volcanic rocks were very sharp and if I would have fallen it would have hurt a lot. Since they were sharp, I never slipped on any on the rocks at all, it was perfect. However, a lot of the rocks instantly crumbled when I walked on them, so I had to make sure I walked on the big rocks. So Tristan and I were beginning to walk on rocks that were getting warmer and warmer, we knew we were getting close, then all of the sudden we saw our guide standing on a lookout point on top of some rocks. He told us we couldn’t go any farther, but he let some other kids go where we were who weren’t part of our group. We asked him why and he just said that the group was far away from us. Which was true, but a terrible reason. So we walked up to where he was and I asked him where the best spot to see the river of lava was. Instantly he knew where it was and pointed to the direction it was in. Tristan and I took off, but then he said we couldn’t go again, once again we asked why? He gave the same reason, the group was too far away from us. Then he said, I’ll lead you there if you do one thing for me. We asked what it was, and he said that we had to collect tips for him, from the whole group at the end of the hike, so we agreed and he took us right to the mouth of the river where the lava came up and formed into a river. The rocks were so hot, that my feet were really really hot, after being on them for 2 or 3 minutes. Tristan and I both got to put his hiking stick into the lava, as soon as it touched the lava, it burst into flames!!! And we each picked up a little piece of lava with the stick. We took a few pictures and videos and then I had to run off those rocks as fast as I could because my feet were so hot.

Unfortunately we only had about an hour to hike around the lava and stuff, we hiked back down and went back home to Antigua. We bought some groceries for the next days trip, because that was our last day in Antigua. So the next day we woke up at 5 AM again, and left, we stopped in Santa Barbara, Honduras, about 2 hours outside of Tegucigalpa and visited some of the in-laws of a teacher we know, Ms. Sabillon. It was in a little village, and her family was really big there. Everyone worked so hard in the village to make food and drinks everyday. They made us home-made “chilates” which are like a really hot healthy drink, combining cinnamon, ground cocoa, and 2 other things. It was pretty good, then they gave us homemade canteloupe juice, which was really really good. We left pretty soon after that though, because we were so tired.

When we were about 30 minutes from home, we got pulled over by a police officer, they have random police checkpoints everywhere during holy week. The police officer thought that we were all gringos, so he asked if we had a triangle reflector in our van, I guess it helps if you have a accident, you can put it in front of your car. Anyways he said it was illegal not to have one, and said his supervisor would write a huge fine and take away the driver’s license (Tristan). However Dania was in the car, and knew that the police officer was just trying to get a bribe. She was pretty ticked and kept asking to talk to the Police officer’s supervisor, since he kept saying that his supervisor would write the ticket. They argued for a while, then Tristan said he would buy one tomorrow and after about 10 minutes of intense dialogue, he just let us go, because he knew we didn’t believe him and we weren’t going to give him a bribe.

We were so thankful to have Dania with us, because the police definitely were trying to take advantage of us.

More to come later....