smoke & coffee

the marked first memory I have of Antigua is the minute we drive  from the airport in Guate city into the small town. It smells of fire with the scent of a familiar clean, wooden smoke. It is dark, in the way American cities will never be. The streets are beautifully lit with soft, yellow street lights and small fires in the corners illuminating only its intimate vicinity. The darkness keeps the surrounding scenes well hidden in the night. The next morning we wake early, not per our usual leisurely traveler schedule to explore the town as much as possible in the daylight. Our first mission is as it has been in every city and every country - finding good coffee and breakfast. Luckily, we are told that there is homemade pancakes, plantains, and beans where we are staying and our roots would never let us stray from this. We eat breakfast on the rooftop and it would have been worth the entire trip to have only seen the views from that rooftop. There are volcanoes to the north, monumental in their stature and Mayan ruins to the east and surrounded by mountains behind us. We are shattered, hearts soft, and eyes once again humbled by the inexhaustible beauty of the creations in this world.

I'll limit this post largely to pictures of the rest of our trip, for in situations such as this, words will undoubtedly fall short of capturing such grandiosity. 

view every morning. Its a surprise we did anything else beyond sitting here all day 

this much romance in just a breakfast

Rooftop views of volcanos and ruins

rainy stone streets of Antigua

Town square, stone streets of Antigua 

you could never fatigue of the amount of color

plantación de café 

If you're not tired of hearing this yet, it still bears repeating...Lake Atitlan is quite possibly one of the most beautiful places Anila or I have ever been to. It is one of those dangerously beautiful places, one in which you could completely lose yourself, in all your senses while at the same time remembering your place in this massive expanse of the world. There is the giant and magnanimous San Pedro Volcano in the middle and it is surrounded by water. The lake is dotted with villages around it and each village boasts a slightly different personality, some renown to be a haven for artists and craftsmen while others have preserved the most indigenous culture of Guatemala. 

To stand at the foot of a 10,000 ft volcán and to look up is to have an experiential knowing of God. 

Arriving in one of the many villages surrounding Lake Atitlan

Drove around the village of Santa Cruz in tuk-tuks of course

Village of Santa Cruz - where a carnival of some sort was ongoing. The entire village was on the streets eating, walking around, and dancing. 

Santa Cruz still has much of the original Mayan traditions, beliefs, customs in practice

 “Lake Como, it seems to me, touches on the limit of permissibly picturesque, but Lake Atitlán is Como with additional embellishments of several immense volcanoes. It really is too much of a good thing.” Aldous Huxley on Lake Atitlan

que te vaya bien, 

besos.