I'm sitting in the bust station (well one of them) in Guatemala City, having just taken a shuttle bus from Panajachel to Antigua and another from Antigua here. Since we have close to an hour until our overnight bus to Flores leaves, I thought I'd take this opportunity to start recounting some of our undertakings from our second stop-s.

We arrived in Pana (as the locals call it), the main town on Lake Atitlan, early in the morning and immediately hopped onto a ferry to San Pedro La Laguna, another village on the lake. San Pedro is small and pretty and sits at the bottom of an extinct volcano of the same name. We were tired from too many early mornings and too many bus rides, so Ola decided that we needed to get the blood pumping- on bicycles! Anyone who knows me knows that bikes are not my thing. In fact, other than a twenty minute stint that I was talked into this summer by a charming four year old, I hadn't actually been on a bicycle since I was twelve; that's a lot of years ago!

We rented bikes and inquired about the safety situation as we'd heard that there were random armed robberies that occurred on certain roads. The woman at the agency assured us that it would be fine as long as we didn't stop until we got to each village. She failed to mention that with my fitness level, not stopping on mountainous roads would be near impossible. Happily, it was a busy day traffic-wise- a big mugging deterrent. We rode to the first village, San Juan La Laguna, and I decided almost instantly that I still don't like this form of transportation. San Juan was quaint and lovely, so we stopped for a beverage before moving on. Our next stop was in San Pablo which was not frequented by tourists and had no restaurant for us to eat at despite its seven thousand inhabitants. This meant that I had no choice, but to carry on since it would take longer to get back than to ride to San Marcos and take a ferry from there.

San Marcos, another village we had contemplated staying in, was like being on a completely different planet. Every person there had dreadlocks, tattoos and a decided lack of respect for hygiene. There were places that offered massage training, chakra alignment, reiki treatment, even amoeba therapy (whatever that is). The food was excellent and the people incredibly friendly and relaxed, but we were very pleased with our decision not to stay there. We caught the boat back and returned the bikes; three days later my butt still hurts!

The next day was market day. I'll write about that separately since it was a different city, and I'd rather keep this from becoming too much of a novella, so we skip ahead to yesterday. I somehow got into my head that I should climb a volcano on this trip. After all, it had been years! So we got as much sleep as possible and then met our guide at 2am. Much like the bikes, climbing mountains is not actually my thing. I know they say that you're supposed to have this wonderful feeling of accomplishment when you reach the summit, but as beautiful as the sunrise was, the combination of pain, dizziness, and being drenched with sweat while freezing, was not enough of a pay-off for me. I did reach the top, which seemed unlikely for a while, but all I could think about was how much I was dreading having to climb back down. That's when I knew there was no way I would take an overnight bus that night, and that I was not so sure that I'd be doing any more trekking this trip despite earlier discussions of doing just that.

We spent the rest of the day wandering around the various villages, shopping, eating and being cranky and tired. We went to bed early with the intention of sleeping as late as we pleased- a no alarm morning!! I made it all the way to 7:30, and aside from the fact that I couldn't move my legs when I got out of bed (you know that buckle to the floor and crawl to the bathroom kind of morning), I felt very well rested for once. I had breakfast at a little café overlooking the lake, while Ola got some of her bureaucracy dealt with, then we packed our bags and caught the ferry back to Pana.

Today I went paragliding!!!! Yes me, who is terrified of flying, strapped myself to a man named Christian and let him drop me off a mountain. What an insane and amazing rush! When I could take my mind off the possibility of death, it was incredible. I relaxed a great deal when he explained that we had parachutes as fail-safes just in case…not that we would need them. The views were fantastic, the quiet rush of being up there with no one around was unbelievable, and the rollercoaster-like acrobatics that Christian decided to demonstrate part way through put any ride at Wonderland to shame. We actually did a full 360 loop, and he had me holding the video camera while we did it! I haven't seen it yet, but imagine it's just a lot of me screaming with my eyes closed!

Okay, the man that was under the bus working his mechanical magic, has just crawled out and people are lining up their luggage to put in the under storage. Here's hoping that we make good time, don't get stopped by bandits and don't have any break-downs en route.