Bob:

We had booked the "Antigua On Your Own" tour option that consisted solely of bus transportation to and from Antigua, the colonial-era capital of Guatemala. The bus ride to Antigua took about an hour and a half. The first section of our drive was pretty much due North on an interstate-type of highway through the lowlands, where we saw field after field of what I think was sugar cane. For this no-frills type of excursion we had no tour guide, of course, and we had been forewarned that our bus driver would not speak English so we couldn't ask him either. The mountains rose rather suddenly from the flat coastal plain through the bluish morning mist and shortly thereafter we turned West and wound our way up into the mountains on a twisting two-lane highway.

The mountain scenery was more interesting than the plains, but the steeply sloped land was also less intensively cultivated. Scattered orchards and rocky pastures replaced the sugarcane fields. The road imposed a natural speed limit and some of the uphill grades were so steep that our driver had to slow the bus down to a crawl to make it to the top! The bus leaned quite bit on the curves, but I never had the feeling we were really at risk.

As we arrived in the valley in which Antigua was located, we saw a huge, perfectly-shaped volcano (think Mt. Fuji) dominating the horizon. But as mountains often will, it created its own little cloud system near the peak so we never got a chance to really see the whole thing; I expect it's quite magnificent.

Monika:

Bob:

Once we parked near the old section of town, we were met by the Princess coordinator in Antigua who fortunately spoke enough English that he could clarify exactly when we were supposed to return to the bus. He also threw in a map of the old city area before they carefully shepherded us past all the waiting sidewalk vendors to the Jade jewelry factory just down the block. There we listened to a quite interesting presentation on jade, which had been mined in the area since ancient Mayan times. The proprietor, in fact, claimed to have rediscovered those ancient jade mines, and certainly she had established a little jade jewelry empire consisting of shops in Antigua and several other cities in Guatemala. The sales pressure was, however, distinctly soft sell and they even gave us complementary bottles of water before we were finally turned us loose on the cobblestone streets of the old capital.

Once on the streets we were immediately surrounded by the sidewalk vendors who, understandably, preferred the hard sell to the soft sell. After all, we represented a prime market for the textiles, trinkets, and handcarved masks, flutes, and so forth that they had to sell to make a living. We aren't used to be accosted on the street, however, and although the vendors were unfailingly polite when we said, "No Gracias" and kept on walking, we were rattled enough to become disoriented about which way to walk to get to the town square. It didn't help, of course, that our map had West upwards on the page rather than the typical North up, so in the end we had to carefully find the street names set in little bricks or tiles up on the walls of the buildings at each intersection and use the GPS to find our which way we were in fact walking. My Nuvi 170 did not have detailed maps of Guatemala, but it did have the major cities and highways represented so we could still use it to get a basic North, South, East, or West orientation. Fortunately the old town section of Antigua is basically an 8 x 8 block grid aligned on the North-South and East-West axes, and that made finding our way a lot easier than if we had to cope with the helter-skelter street arrangement of many old cities.

Monika:

Bob:

Having no particular destination in mind, we headed over to some likely-looking ruins and ran into a nice city park with a double column of Royal Palm trees lining the center esplanade. It was very pretty, but we were struck by the crowd of women using the fountain at one end of the park to wash clothes. They were beating the clothes on the rocks at the edge of the fountain to knock out the dirt and then rinsing them in the shallow waters of the fountain. That is something I have read about but never actually seen, and the sheer physical labor involved brought home to me the stark fact that we were really in a third-world country.

At one end of the park we found a nice old Spanish-style church. Lacking windows, the interior was cool and quite dim--a welcome relief from the sun beating down outside. Being a Roman Catholic church, I presume, it had several lifelike statues besides the basic Christ-on-the-cross statue behind the altar. I enjoyed the church but I did miss the stained glass windows, though, because they seem to add so much light and color to a church interior.

Monika:

Bob:

We continued West to the Alameda Santa Lucia boulevard that had "Bus Station" and "Market" marked on our map. Not seeing anything that really looked like a bus station, we turned North and walked along the avenue. There I found a Suzuki motorcycle dealer who had about 5 new motorcycles displayed on the sidewalk in front of his store. They were all fairly small displacement bikes, but with gasoline prices that we figured to be the equivalent of $4 a gallon I could see the sense in sticking with the smallest, most efficient motorcycle that would do the job. The job in Guatemalan society seems to be to carry up to three people squeezed on board or one person with a load of firewood or other freight in back, so at the very least you need a 100cc-200cc motor. Several of the larger bikes were priced at 10,000 Qs, but I found a shiny new Suzuki 120cc single cylinder 2-stroke that only cost 5,000 Qs. At a 6-to-1 exchange rate that we were quoted, that would be about $850, and in my judgement it would carry a single rider and some gear up and down the mountains, even if very slowly on the uphill grades. I had a fleeting vision of buying the bike on the spot and starting down the Pan American Highway to rejoin the ship in Panama, but the thought of trying to negotiate the purchase of the motorcycle, the license, and the insurance in my non-existent Spanish held me back. Maybe next time.

Continuing down Alameda Santa Lucia we finally found a street with a stream of buses coming out, and that appeared to be the bus station. I'm still not sure where or if you buy tickets at the Antigua bus station, but what I think I saw was a coordinator at the street corner bellowing out the destinations of each bus as it rolled up to the intersection. The door was typically hanging open and some last-minute passengers would jump aboard as the bus briefly paused for the stop sign and then turned left or right to drive off. We had no idea what was going on and unwittingly interfered with this process as we crossed the street at the corner.

The local busses were, by the way, are of the basic American school bus design in shape. They seem to lack air conditioning--the windows are mostly kept open--but are extremely colorful, almost works of art. We later found the bus parking lot out in back of the bus station, and it was fun to see rows of the bright, cheerfully painted busses parked in careful lines waiting for their next run. How safe they are is an open question. The streets in Antigua and other small towns on the bus routes are extremely narrow in places and the busses really have to squeeze to fit through them. In fact, as we were leaving town our tour bus collided with one of the local busses. Our rear view mirror was folded inward and the left rear window on the local bus was smashed by the contact. Instead of stopping, however, the drivers merely honked at each other and continued on their respective ways.

Monika:

Bob:

Next to the bus station and just as promised on our map was the market area. However, there are two very distinct markets in Antigua: a tourist-oriented craft market, and across the street from that the local shop-for-everything market patronized by all the local folk. The craft market was guarded by the ubiquitous uniformed guys, most of whom were armed with those sawed-off, pistol-handled pump-shotguns. To me, those guns look really difficult to fire accurately because the barrel looks equivalent to a 12-gauge shotgun and those I know from experience have quite a kick, but I suppose like any scatter gun the object is to just wing the target. Those guards were, by the way, always unfailingly polite to us, but it is also true that we might as well had "TOURIST" stamped on our forehead so I'm not sure how friendly or unfriendly they were to the local folks. It appeared to me that most of the folks shopping in the guarded craft market were, in fact, tourists.

The craft stalls were neatly laid out along the interior atria and exterior walls of a one-story yellow stucco building that rambled back for half a block or so. We found the atria, with their borders of beautiful tropical plants at the edges and bubbling fountains in the center, were a cool oasis away from the noonday sun. The crafts were quite varied and appeared to my inexperienced eye to be first-class work, mostly by area artisans I think. Monika found a Mayan doll she really wanted, so we bargained the proprietor from 10 down to 6 dollars, and I found an embroidered black leather belt I really liked, and I bargained the vendor from 20 to 13 dollars. This process was not really pleasant for us as it is basically not done in our fixed-price-tag culture and so was quite unfamiliar, but bargaining is expected in Central America and to not do so violates social expectations. But personally I felt guilty about haggling for a few bucks when those few dollars basically meant nothing to me but possibly were significant to the vendor living on a subsistence income.

Monika:

Bob:

Carrying the doll and belt, we crossed over to the shop-for-everything market, which was a real rabbit warren of a place. The narrow, dark, low-ceilinged corridors had stall after stall of almost every conceivable item except vehicles. Besides your basic food, clothing, shoes, hats and knickknacks of every description, I also saw televisions, VCRs, MP3 players, boomboxes CDs/DVDs, and wooden furniture for sale. I was intrigued by the open sacks of raw beans, lentils, and other dry goods that were clearly sold by weight at a couple of stalls, because that seemed like a scene from the early 1900s in the U.S.

It appears that most Mayans are rather small people and to maximize sales space the vendors in the market had things hanging down from the ceilings. Since I'm noticeably taller than most Mayans, those hanging displays wares were right about at the height of my eyes. I avoided hitting anything hard by constantly ducking, but Monika had a close brush with a row of dead chickens. The only place with a high ceiling was a fresh food market somewhere in the center (I was disoriented at the time) that had raw meat hanging or lying around everywhere. We certainly picked up some curious looks while we were wandering the dingy aisles, but it seemed to be a friendly curiosity--I never felt uncomfortable or unsafe at all.

To me, that local market was the real heart of Antigua. I felt like I was really getting some insight into how the local people lived by seeing all the things that they shopped for on a daily basis. Since refrigeration did not seem to be used, even for eggs, I inferred that the local folks shop each day or at most every other day for fresh food. That pattern of daily shopping is just like Monika's mother used to do in postwar Germany, although she did it at a scattering of different shops rather than at one central market. All together I was having a grand time examing what were, in effect, cultural artifacts. Curiously, unlike everyplace else in Antigua the vendors left us strictly alone, possibly because we were so unexpected in that context, something like aliens dropping out of the sky, or possibly because the local market setting had different norms. But by this time Monika was getting a bad case of claustrophobia and a blinding headache from the dark, narrow, crowded aisles where we had to really brush past each person we encountered coming the other way. To a claustrophobic introvert, that's just torture. So we made a break for the next exit we spotted and once outside we found a shop that would exchange $2 for a bottle of beer so she could relax a bit.

Monika:

Bob:

Wandering back toward our bus stop, we passed a McDonalds but didn't stop to eat as they seemed to have the equivalent of $10 hamburgers. Instead, we continued on to the central plaza of Antigua, a pretty little square park with a large water fountain in the middle. The central park is clearly the the political hub of Antigua as the government building lies on one side of it and a building that we thought was a district courthouse or something like that was on another side of the square.

The third side had a walkway with a wooden colonnade supporting an exterior roof that reminded me very much of the old central square in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Just as in Albuquerque, the colonnade was the site of a set of interesting boutiques, and in Antigua that included a nice bookstore. After resting on a park bench in the square and drinking some water, we continued up street 4A on our map toward our bus stop.

Monika:

Bob:

Once we were sure we had correctly located our bus stop, we circled around the area while waiting for our bus to return and pick us up. We tried to get into a ruined convent nearby, but only succeeded in finding another branch of the Jade store plus a restaurant and an art gallery ensconced in an old hacienda. Still, I enjoyed seeing both the ancient Mayan art and sculpture and some of the modern work that was patterned on the older themes but executed in a fresh, interesting manner. Then we circled around and after two fruitless attempts to buy bread with dollars from the local bakeries, we found one that gave us 3 large, sweetish rolls for a dollar. We were so hungry by that point that it seemed like a real bargain, and we washed down the rolls with the rest of our water while waiting for our bus.

Monika:

Bob:

On the bus ride back to the ship I was again struck by the the difficulties of daily life for the poorest folks in Guatemala. The housing was often no more than ramshackle corrugated tin sheds, and the cooking must have been done by wood fires to judge by the number of folks we saw on the road carrying bundles of faggots on their backs. In the shantytowns the streets were dirt and I suspect there were no sewers or sources of pure water. I, of course, thought it would be a terrible way to live but I must admit the kids were playing cheerfully on the dirty streets and the adults were either lounging about watching us pass or working at various jobs.

Arriving back at the ship, we were tired from the unaccustomed strains of walking for hours on cobblestones, which are picturesque but quite difficult to balance on. So we just had dinner at the Horizon Court buffet, limped to our cabin, put our feet up, read a bit, and turned in for the night.

Monika: