To get to Lake Atitlan from Antigua, we hired a driver for the day, took the 3 hour drive down and then hired a boat for the afternoon to take us to various little towns around the lake. We started at Panajal, the largest city filled with banks, shops, natives shopping, and lots of vehicle traffic.
Around the lake are little villages that are unique in their own little ways. In the first little town, our boat was met by a group of little girls who willingly showed us the way from the make-shift dock to the main village streets. They took us passed their moms who were lined up on a street selling various woven goods and then begged for lemonade or coke. Two little girls kept at my heels--I think because I could talk to them (curse knowing Spanish!!)-- and I eventually bought two little scarves from them for 50 quetzales. I sort of felt bad about haggling with them after finding out that they have to make the products they are forced to wander around and sell to the tourists who venture in. In one little shop, we found a cute little old lady weaving on a huge loom and who allowed Elizabeth to take her picture, for a price. It cracked me up how many times we'd run across cute Mayan clothed women who'd charge a small fee for pictures; talk about adapting to tourist wants!
In one town, all the women wore blue skirts and shirts and only blue. When I asked one of the teenage girls who followed me around (begging me to buy a scarf) about it, she said that it's a color they produce in their town and it's tradition to wear this color and the specific pattern. In this village, all the buildings were constructed on hills making for steep, winding narrow streets with ceramic shops all along the way. In both of these little towns, the largest vehicle we saw were a couple of construction trucks and little scooters.
After a 20 minute boat ride, we arrived in the second biggest town with the best market-- a long, uphill street jam packed with little shops for every Mayan product imaginable. We got sucked in to all the little places, finding bags, pictures, key chains, engravings. What was amazing to me was how perceptive the little sales people were-- seriously, you looked at an item hanging up for longer than five seconds and they'd pull it down, tell you their first price and then proceed to pull down any other item you glanced or (heaven forbid) pointed out. We found a great little restaurant for dinner where we sat outside under a bamboo over hanging with a great view of the market street and the very full cattle trucks passing by. One interesting element was a little beggar boy sat across the little fence from us asking us for scraps of food. The manager of the place had to come out and send him away once but he just moved about five feet and continued to look pathetically at us. When we left, we packed up the extra plantains and meat and gave it to him on our way out; it's incredibly difficult to eat a meal when you know that a starving kid watching you probably has eaten the amount of food on your plate in the past week.
On our way back to the "big" city, we got amazing views of the volcanoes surrounding Lake Atitlan and the incredibly beautiful cloud formations swirling around them.
It's no wonder that this lake is on the list of "Where the Waters of Mormon Could Have Been".
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