Today I took a side trip with some friends from my spanish school to an abandoned town that used to have 10,000 residents until a devastating lava flow and then an earthquake forced the residents to say "it sucks here", and they all moved. The town is called Pelmar Viejo and it´s a quick 18 mile chicken bus ride outside of town. You need to pay attention to find this place. The directions are to get off the bus at the 3rd bridge where the sign reads Puente Samala III.
Sounds easy except that chicken buses go 100 miles an hour when you need them to go slow and too slow when you want them to hurry up. Before the bridge, there is a road that leads to the town after a 2 mile walk. The highlight of the the town is the remains of an old church that was ripped in two and is now separated by a huge gorge with a small river running right through it. It was a pretty cool place to explore except we got crushed by a warm tropical rain that made it difficult to take photos and also cut our visit short. For some reason, the chicken buses were packed for the ride back home to Xela. You can tell a bus is at full capacity when you see a white gringo face smashed against the glass of the back door and distorted in a way that says "this is painful" and "get me the hell out of here".
In Guatemala, however, there´s always room for 2 more. There were 4 of us though and we decided to hitch hike. In minutes, we were in a pick up truck headed to town. The back of the pick up provided awesome views of the surrounding mountains and valleys that I had not noticed on the bus ride to Pelmar. Check out the pics from the day.