First was my birthday on the 7th May, we went out for tea with Juan and you all saw the pictures.
Second was the “Mother’s day.” Although it is 10th May, people celebrate all week long here. On my birthday morning I went to the gym, they are giving out roses to the mothers, they didn’t give it to me because I’m not a mother, but it was my birthday too. Never mind, I won’t compete with mothers on their day.
My teacher Dayma has two young children at school and they have school performance for the mothers. To attend the celebration, she has to change my morning class to the afternoon. It allowed Andi and I have free time together so we decided to go to Laguna Chicabel for a quick visit.
Laguna Chicabel is a crater lake which is about 20ks from Xela. We locked it into our GPS as close as we could and off we went on a beautiful Thursday Morning. We turned off the main road as the GPS pointed but we couldn’t find the sign as Juan told us to follow.
We stopped and asked three local woman, they pointed a road ahead to us and said it for “carminar” means walk, we asked if we can take our “moto” up, they smiled, laughed and then said “si”. So we went.
It was REALLY soft from the previous nights heavy rains
Andi wouldn’t want the hill any more steeper or longer as we were two up and I had to hop off the bike, not that I don’t trust him, I just don’t feel being on the bike was helping. Lucky we only stuck once near the top of the hill, and it took us both to push Maya out off the ditch.
I tired backing off to stop digging but the Mayan earth mover dug very quickly and within half a second was on her belly
We carried on that road not very long and it took us back to the main road into the park.That was a little adventure detour for this trip.
The first week of May is very significant for the local Mayans. They all went to Laguna Chicabel to have their ceremony before the winter. When we got there, there were people everywhere, they were letting off fire crackers, having BBQs, drinking and putting flowers and crosses in the water. It wasn’t as quiet as we thought, but we were very pleased to see all the ceremonies.
On the way back we tried to find the “Mirador” - the look out, we had to walk around the hill and finally found it. The view from the top was very nice, definitely worth the mucking around. It turned out if we came back from the lake took the steps it would lead us there straight there.
On the way up there was some mountain bikers making the most of it
We could not have had a better day so someone above was on our side
Back at the normally quiet carpark it was like a toyota hilux convention
Then is the real celebration for Mothers day. The church started 3am in the morning, we heard the music, the singing then the fireworks.... BOOM and they went up, then it woke up the dogs, the chickens and everything else that was breathing including us.
I’m sure real mothers would like to get on with their sleep-ins but not in Guatemala. Anyway, the celebration carried on the whole day. We should really get into selling fire works business here, Guatemalans seems to love to blow up shit all the time... and they are BIG bangs
.It’s also our last day in Xela, we had our last tea in Utatlan. They bought a cake for me and another student who has his birthday on Saturday, so I have a birthday cake in Xela. That was very nice. Thank you Utatlan, you make our time in Xela very memorable, we had six students in our home that day, time to leave.
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