We left Guatemala 2 days ago and managed to catch some breath to start reflecting on our latest leg of journey. We spent a week in San Pedro La Laguna, a small town on the shores of lake Atitlan, popular with the tourists because of many Spanish language schools. We opted for a homestay with a local Mayan family and 4 hours of lessons Mon-Fri. After reading about the popularity of San Pedro and the beauty of lake Atitlan, with its 3 volcanoes, we were a bit disap...

Good bye Antigua. We are leaving for lake Atitlan on a clear and sunny day. Antigua was a beautiful place to visit. It is clean, it feels safe and, above all, it is very charming, tasteful and harmonious. By the end of our stay here, we've discovered that it is, after all, a tourist destination for every budget option. We enjoyed walking through markets and cobble stone streets, seeing beautiful courtyards with fountains and plants hidden behind wooden doors. We ...

What an enjoyable afternoon we had yesterday! We went on a coffee farm tour to a nearby town of San Miguel Escobar. The town is a short walk away from the original location of Antigua (Ciudad Vieja) and was named after a Spanish patron who helped the people who stayed here to rebuild their lives after a big disaster in the 16th century. We found out the accurate information on the following: contrary to the info I found online, it was not the eruption of the volc...

It's been a few days since we arrived to Antigua on the night bus from Flores. The journey itself probably deserves a separate blog space, but I prefer to keep it short and not remind myself too much of it! As I mentioned before, we are both used to the "freestyle" of the bus drivers in Bosnia, but I would call the Guatemalan version of relaxed safety rules a "kamikaze style"! The buses are also old and never seem to be what they show you in the travel agency. W...

We "ticked" Tikal off the list yesterday. We were picked up by a shuttle at 4.30 and arrived to Tikal at 6am, the opening time. There is a 17km drive from the entrance to the National Park to the actual entrance to Tikal. It was unusual to see the animals on the road sign warnings such as the jaguar and a snake! Tikal is in the middle of the rainforest and we saw toucans, parrots, monkeys, pacas and a Coati (an animal from the raccoon family). Most animals were ...