Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Day 172 - A spiritual journey

Panajachel

We walked down to the wharf to figure out how the transportation around the lakes work, there wasn't much in the way of signs or information. Our plan was to spend the day visiting the towns around the lake, so we hopped on the first boat heading to Santa Cruz. When the boat arrived at the next jetty there wasn't much there and only one person got off, so we stayed on until we arrived at somewhere more interesting. Lake Atitlan and its towns are picture postcard beautiful and many of the stops along the way were at lovely resort type places, or what appeared to be gorgeous holiday homes.

At San Marcos we disembarked and wandered around the very small town for a while. It was getting warm and the town seemed pretty quiet, the main businesses appeared to be related to yoga, massage, natural healing, and other spiritual/holistic type disciplines - not really our thing, though I'm sure if we could make up develop a great new spiritual/healing technique I reckon we could make a killing!



After some time here M's chakra was telling him it was time to seek enlightenment elsewhere, so back at the jetty we took the next boat heading in the right direction and travelled to the larger town of San Pedro. Once there we wandered the streets looking for a place to have lunch and found a great place on the edge of the water.

After lunch we wanted to head to San Antonio, which was known for its ceramics. We were told the best way was to go back to Panajachel first. We took the express boat that went straight back across the lake rather than around the edges. Although much quicker this was a bit of a mistake, we thought it would be nice sitting at the front, but being a long way from the shore we missed the lovely views and on the way back the boat pounded the waves, so being at the front meant it was an extremely rough and uncomfortable trip.



Back in Pana we were told the only way to get to San Antonio was more than an hour by road, or by getting a private boat. We decided we didn't want to go that much and spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the town and the waterfront. We did find a shop that sold the ceramics from San Antonio, they were nice enough but not really worth the additional effort of travelling to the town, so it looks like we made the right decision.

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