Lago de Atitlán

After breakfast at the hotel, we walked a short distance to the lake and boarded a covered boat with a rather loud outboard motor and set out for the village of San Antonio on the opposite side. The air was clear and the water smooth.

View of the volcanoes from the lake shore.

Immediately we noticed that, once again, the local Mayan costumed featured a different color scheme and designs. We were told that the Mayan dialect spoken on this side of the lake differed so much from that on the other side, that without the lingua franca of Spanish, people from opposite sides of the lake would not be able to communicate with one another.

Our guide, Hector, points out the different costumes of the local vendors.

The women selling their crafts in the streets had no trouble communicating, however. They were quite aggressive here, and with a new sales pitch. They would say, “My name is Maria, and I will remember you. You buy when you come back!” Later, completely different women and girls would say, “I remember you. You promised to buy!” It was heartwarming to be remembered by so many people!

Aboard the local taxis.

We walked to the top of the hill and boarded pick up trucks, which serve as the local taxis. We stood in the back and rode through town to the local Catholic church, which was already packed, though mass would not start for some time yet. “Contemporary” Christian music blared through speakers as more and more people streamed in. We left before the service began, and outside our guide discussed the syncretism of Catholicism and Mayan traditions.

Traditional mass, surrounded by living saints

We walked a few blocks through a very crowded market to a large, modern commercial-looking building which was an Evangelical church -- also a very crowded and happening place on Sunday morning. But then our guide took us only a short block down a side street, and into a back alley, where, after some negotiation, a young boy came out of a tiny house swinging a smoking incense pot around all of us.

Our welcoming acolyte.

We were then led through hanging laundry, into the house, filled with candles, where a shaman was chanting prayers to the mummy of a dead ancestor. The mummy was dressed in a suit, covered with money, smoking a cigar, and small amounts of moonshine liquor were occasionally poured down its throat. Across the crowded room, a class coffin contained the image of Jesus taken from a large crucifix. The “body” was wrapped in blankets and decorated with strings of Christmas lights. It was quite a range of religious traditions for one Sunday morning.

At the shaman house there are no living saints, only dead Jesus in a glass casket.

After stopping to see a demonstration of how a young girl braided her long hair into the traditional headdress of the area, we made our way back to the boat through all of the street vendors, and continued on to another village on the east side of the lake.

A Mayan girl demonstrates how her hair is braided into the traditional head dress. She completed it with remarkable speed!

This place was much smaller and quieter, the costumes were again quite different. In the local co-op craft shop, the two young girls and one of the young boys in our group were dressed up in Mayan garb for photos. We had lunch above the shop, and then visited a local home, which was unbelievably small and bare. Poverty here is extreme.

Mayan man in the traditional dress of the area. Note the shorts!

The two young women in our group, Payton and Diana, with the Mayan woman who dressed them in the local costume.

The bus ride back to the hotel from there was only a half hour or so on a narrow, winding mountain road. The rest of the afternoon was free, and dinner was on our own. We ate at a very nice little open-air restaurant right around the corner from the hotel, with good prices, great people watching, and quite nice live music.

On the restaurant balcony after lunch, with lake and volcano.