Last Stop: Guatemala: 4/28-4/30

Well, after circumnavigating the globe I’ve finally come to my last port and last blog entry for this trip.

People on the ship were really nervous and no at all excited about Guatemala because of all of the threats of disease and violence, but we were all very surprised by what we found when we actually got into the port. I went with Jackie, Lisa, Nick, Mandy, Kristin and Tim from Puerto Quetzal to Antigua, which is a small colonial city about a 2 hour drive from the port. The charming cobblestone streets are filled with pastel colored stores and restaurants, and we quickly found a place to sit down and eat lunch at “Donya Luisa’s”. Jackie had seen in Lonely Planet (these books are a godsend) that the little restaurant baked fresh banana bread every day at 2pm, and since it was 1 o clock we decided to grab some tostadas and wait for the bread, which tasted just as delicious as it smelled. They even let us into the kitchen to see how the bread is made in the giant ovens!

After our extremely filling lunch, we grabbed a cab and headed into a pueblo about 20 minutes outside of Antigua to a small family-owned coffee farm. We were greeted by a girl named Grace, who was our age and originally from Maine. Her parents had bought the farm and the house on the property a little less than a year ago, and they had been living there ever since. Grace had been in Guatemala since she graduated high school, and now that her parents had returned to the states for an extended visit, two of her friends were living with her. She gave us a tour of the beautiful 1 acre farm and walked us through the process of organic coffee making which was really cool, and I recognized a lot of the process from the work I did on the coffee farm in Nicaragua. Grace and her friend Amanda showed us around the house and the guest house (which they offered up as a cheap place to stay if we ever come back) and played with their three dogs. We ended up sitting and having coffee and chatting with them for a few hours. They were so great, and it was so nice to meet other people who were on the same wavelength as us when it comes to travel. Amanda was talking about how her friends at home kept asking her when she was going to start her life, and she just keeps saying this IS her life. I can definitely relate. All of their friends are living and working and doing volunteer work in Guatemala and loving it. After getting their contact information and leaving the farm, we went back into Antigua to meet the car that was taking us to our place for the night.

We had been warned by semester at sea not to take the local “chicken buses” as a form of transportation, but with our strength in numbers, two guys and encouragement from Amanda, we hopped on one and headed back into the city. We all lived, and we saved about $12. The only problem was that the bus didn’t go exactly what we thought, so we ended up having to pay a guy named John to take us in the back of his pickup truck to the place where we were supposed to meet our ride. We thought this was a little sketchy, until we found out that our ride to the “Earth lodge”, our hostel for the night, was the exact same mode of transportation. After a little time in the local market, we got into the back of another pickup and drove a half an hour up a mountain overlooking Antigua. Once we were up the hill, we had a half an hour hike into the mountain to reach our home for the night. Earth Lodge ended up being a little hippie compound built into the hill side that overlooked all of the city and the volcanoes. There were tree houses and a tee swing and hammocks and we all had a delicious vegan dinner with the other guests, and stayed up listening to music and watching the volcano’s nightly eruption from across the valley. It was amazing. We finished the night off watching the movie “Vicky Christina Barcelona” on bean bag chairs and then got a really good night’s sleep. In the morning, we got up early to watch the sun rise over the valley. We spent the morning milling around the Cliffside and playing on the tree swing that went out over the edge of the mountain. We said goodbye to some of the new friends we’d made and bought some new “tree hugger” t-shirts, and made the trek back out to meet the pickup for our ride down the mountain.

Back in Antigua, we found a city hostel called the Black Cat to stay at for the night, and booked a tour of the volcano for the afternoon. We had a little time to wander around the city before our tour left, and then we piled into a van for the hour and a half drive to the volcano. When we got to the base area where we started the hike, our van was mobbed by children screaming and trying to sell us sticks for our hike. I was totally overwhelmed, but once I saw the trail I wanted to kiss the child that sold me that stick. The hike was a lot tougher than all of us expected, and it took about an hour and a half to get to the volcanic rock, which we realized was going to be an even harder climb. The black rock was really hard to walk on without falling, and when you slipped it was so sharp that we all ended up with cuts all over our legs. I got one on my leg that bled all the way down onto my leg, which was pretty nasty. In the end, it was definitely worth it, because we got to get about 5 feet away from the running lava at the top of the volcano. It was insanely hot but such an awesome thing to see. Once we had spent some time at the peak, we realized that a thunder and lightning storm was about to hit us, and our guide said that hike down in a storm was dangerous, so we had to go as fast as possible. It took us about an hour to get down, and even though it didn’t rain, the lightning was so bright it lit up the whole valley at some points. It actually ended up being helpful because it was getting dark and most of us didn’t have flashlights. It didn’t start to really rain until we had gotten to the bottom and back in the van. We were all really proud of ourselves for getting through the hike, and it’s not every day that you get to see an active volcano. We went out for a late but delicious dinner and celebrated our last night in a port with a couple pitchers of Sangria.

In the morning, Lisa and I woke up at 5am to take a cab back to Puerto Quetzal since we had a service project that left from the ship. I was dead tired since I hadn’t really slept the night before, but we went on the project with our friends Ashleigh and McKendree and it ended up being a great day. My favorite professor on the ship, Joan, was leading the trip, so it was nice to spend my last day in port with her. We went to a place called the Open Windows Library, which was started by a Guatemalan woman from the pueblo and her two American friends. The library is one of the first public libraries in the country, and what started as a one room program with 300 books now has a whole building with over 8,000 books, 20 computers and a community room. We took a tour of the town and visited a school and spent some time with the children painting art projects. The kids ended up making us into the projects, and we left completely covered in paint. While we were walking around town, I was talking to Joan about the trip and about my plans for the future. I realized on this last day how much I loved Guatemala, and how I could really relate to the people I had met there. Joan now lives in a small village with her husband in Mexico, and she told me she thinks that central and South America just get to some people, it gets under their skin and they find it hard to leave. I think this was definitely true for me, and I know one day I’ll come back to this place. We boarded the ship one last time, leaving behind a country that perfectly summed up my experiences on this trip.

We’ve spent the past few days wrapping up classes and having celebrations, and last night we had a fancy dinner and a dance. It was a lot of fun, but today we had to pack all of our things and now it really feels like this is the end. We’ve spent a lot of time in the past days talking about re-entry into the states and reflection about what we’ve done, and it will definitely be a tough process. I’m so excited to come home, but if I was restless before I can’t imagine how I’ll feel after this trip. I know everyone expects you to come home and say you had a life changing experience, but I don’t think I’ll know how this experience changed my life until I come home. There is one lesson I know I’ve learned and will keep with me for the rest of my life and is relevant to this trip, and it can be summed up in a quote by Mark Twain: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Thank you to everyone who followed my journey. Sea you later.