Guatemala 1 - Cold mountains and hot beaches

22.03.2014

So, finally the first blog from inside Latin America. We are now for 3 days in this amazing place and found for the first time some time to hang out and write the blog.

After a 30 hour trip from Belgium over Spain and the USA we arrived in Guatemala ciudad. We took straight away a bus to Antigua as Guatemala is now one of the most dangerous cities in Central America. A lot of "narcotrafico" has moved to this country since the police in Mexico is forcing local cartels to look for "safer" places. Even we have experiance with hard core street gang violence in "gangland" Hauset and Alhaurin de la Torre we decided not to get mixed up with that ;).

We arrived in Antigua and moved into the Hotel from our old "frensh-irish" friend Claire. There we met as well Anette, a german friend from Berlin we will be with us in the villages in Mexico in a few weeks.

In Antigua was as well our first experiance from the genious of Guatemalecan negotiation skills. It was right as I (Roman) wanted to buy some sunglases:

Salesman: "This cost you 40 Quetzales"
Roman:" No, this is too much - I give you 30!"
Salesman: "OK, you can have them for 35"
Roman: "32 Quetzales and not one more"
Salesman:"OK, because of you - you can have them for 30!"

I probabely will recomend such a genious for Oracle in Malaga ;)

After a first relaxed day yesterday (21.03) we started our first trip to the volcano Pacaya. Very nice, even the trip was quite hard (despite our maximum trained bodies ;) )and very windy but the view on the volcano made us forget everything. Unfortunately we could not get very high as the volcanos is still active and the last explosion was two weeks ago (people got evacuated and everything....).

After our trip we took a bus for 5 hours to the beautiful village Monterico on the Pacific coast. It is like in paradies here but the heat is killing us. I don]t know the degrees but it must be something around 35-38 with a humility you can}t imagine. But we probabley are complaining on a very high level.

We stay here until Monday, and then... who knows. We are not here to make any plans who are more then 2 days in the future.

All of you a nice weekend and have a nice cold Belgium, Bolivian, Irish, Spanish, German beer on us

Carla & Roman