Friday, 22 March 2019
Antigua, Guatemala
Sitting having breakfast on the terrace watching the volcano erupting. It’s quite a sight spewing big black clouds of smoke out every few minutes. There was a major eruption last summer, killing about 200 people. The current eruption is even featured on the news bulletin.
Walking tour of the town. Used to be the old Spanish colonial capital until it relocated to Guatemala City because of the volcano. There’s a lot of churches. It’s not really a town tour, more a church tour. Churches. Everywhere.
Walking along the main road into town, see a bus driver tending a large cauldron of soup on a wood fire by the roadside. All the tourist bus drivers come here for lunch and share the soup. It’s bubbling away good and proper.
Outside one church are plenty of stalls selling different coloured candles. You buy a candle for 10 pence, light it and then pray for what you want. So, for example, if you need help with money, studies or business, you buy a blue candle. For love and relationships, a red candle. Each to their own but I’m a bit cynical about such things.
As with most towns in Central America, all the buildings are single storey and the roads are set out on a grid pattern. Most of them cobbled. Which is a pain to walk on.
In one of the squares is a public fountain bordered on one side by stone basins. This is the local laundry. Local women still come here to do the laundry. Small recesses in the basins act as place to hold soap. It’s the local Facebook page too where they all come to trade gossip. In the same square an old woman is fanning the charcoal grill to cook the sweetcorn. She’s 72 and having to work still as there’s no pension to fall back on.
Whilst Antigua is a really nice town, there’s not many interesting points of interest. Unless you like churches.
Quick visit to the market after lunch and told not to take photographs of Mayan children in the market. There’s an element that come to Guatemala who are either paedophiles or child snatchers. It’s been known for Mayan kids to be taken and sold on in the US. Told a story of a tour group in Nicaragua. A married couple were on the tour. One day the husband said he’d pass on that day’s excursion as he said he was feeling ill. Wife returned to bedroom after the day trip to find him with an 11 year old boy.
Adjacent the market is the ‘chicken bus’ station. Brightly decorated former US school buses. They have different colours to denote different destinations. Many people can’t read or write, especially in the indigenous Mayan population, and so they can only tell the destination of the bus from the colour.
Excellent dinner at Hector’s Bistro. The best meal we’ve had on this trip. Off to the airport first thing in the morning so we all say our goodbyes. There’s been a frisson of niggle between the two women and one remarked, “They’re too left wing, even for me.” So must be bad. It’s not been the best group I’ve travelled with, I have to say.
Tell them not to start the revolution until I get back to the UK.
Fortunately. They laugh.
