Enough of this introspection stuff!
I´ve been stuck here in San Pedro for about two weeks with not a lot to do other than try to figure out how to get my clutch working. And well, my mind tends to wander a bit and I ended up spending quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to fix my life as well :)
I got tired of all the waiting on the clutch front and finally got help from Canada: Much thanks to Dave and Janine for doing all the leg work, and to the good folks at Modern Motorcycles for the information and the necessary parts. So now that the parts were sorted out and on their way to me, I decided to take a few days off and travel like a regular tourist (on a bus) to Antigua to see what was there.
Antigua is only a couple of hours from lake Atitlan where I have been stuck (well actually most of the country is only a couple of hours from here!) and there are all sorts of transport options to get there. I took a launch to a bigger town on the other side of the lake and then a small shuttle bus to the city. The trip there cost me about $10 and took half a day to complete (lots of stops). The small city is situated in amongst three or four large active volcanoes and the views in the area are quite magnificent (if a little smokey). The city was once the capital of the country but has been destroyed by earthquakes on a regular basis throughout its history (could be related to being in amongst those active volcanoes - duh!) and the capital got moved quite a while back. So now, the city is a right little tourist mecca and one of the great attractions of the place is the old colonial architecture and the ruins of the grand buildings of the past.
Well, there were certainly enough tourists there and it was in fact quite hard to find places to eat the local food rather than the western dishes offered at the myriad restaurants and bars .(Street meat is one of those regular adventures I try!) There were also more coffee shops than I could poke my trusty stick at but I got no joy anywhere when I tried to get a decaf - oh well.
So I wandered around the city for a few hours and checked out the colonial architecture - Yep... old houses and quite a lot of pillars and window and door frames carved in stone... Sorry to say but I liked Oaxaca and even San Christobal in Mexico more. Then there were the ruins - Well, umm, ...They´r ruins! Again, I have to say I felt a bit let down (my own fault for reading the stupid guide book and swallowing their over-impressed opinions). So there were a bunch of destroyed buildings that were once very impressive to be sure but most of them are really not much to speak of now in my opinion. So I went back to looking for local food and enjoyed the sunset with the views of the volcanoes and then retired to my hotel room for the night.
But early in the night it seemed that some sort of uprising got under way, and the sound of gunfire started to be heard from assorted quarters of the city. I had not seen any evidence of extra military presence during the day, other than the usual regular smattering of military looking police with automatic weapons in groups of two or three around the place. This sort of military presence is more or less normal down here and I was completely unaware that they might actually use their weapons on a regular basis.
However, from my hotel I could hear sporadic gunfire from several areas. Occasionally there would be some automatic weapons fire as well (I´d only heard that once before in my travels in Kashmere years ago) and there seemed to be the regular use of a mortar or grenades in one district too... but that didn´t "gel" with the calm voices of people having a beer on the hotel balcony and the complete absence of sirens... A walk to the window and watching the city for a minute or two and it becomes clear that the locals just have a bit of a fireworks fixation! :) ... But it really does sound like gunfire!
Every day (holiday or weekend or just regular week day) people wait till the darkness falls and then go and play with fireworks (real little pyromaniacs). Its the adults as well as the kids but certainly mostly the men rather than the women. They really like the great big "bangers" that scare the hell out of anyone in the immediate vicinity when one goes off. The kids mostly get to play with the little poppers that are only big enough to blind them or blow off a finger or two :)) ... Great, so now the locals are blind, deaf, and maimed as well as poor - how to make a mundane life more exciting - if a little more challenging! And the kids are often only 3 or 4 years old that are playing with these things - completely unsupervised!
The next night when I was out of town in a small village I saw one little tyke (3 or 4yo) getting a real telling-off by his whole family... mum, dad, brother, grandmah etc... He had been careless with his pyrotechnics and had managed to set the family corn field on fire. I found it quite funny since the parents were the ones who gave him the matches and crackers and then left him unsupervised :)
And then there were the kids who ran out of matches and came over to ask the tourists if they had a light (almost all the tourists smoke it seems)- to which the tourists responded by happily lighting up the explosives for them and letting them try to blow their own fingers off... really quite friendly :)
Its funny how quickly ones views can get "morphed" - Every adult involved in these situations (or even just watching) would have been guilty of some sort of negligence in Canada.. Perspective is a wonderful thing!
So it wasn´t gunfire but it may as well have been for all the sleep I got that night :)
