Before I leave Guatemala

I should really say something about the things I've done in the last few days, non? I'm currently trying to upload photos to facebook, but the internet connection really doesn't want me to, so I shall try words instead of pictures.

Tomorrow I leave lovely Guatemala and all my friends here, and head for Nicaragua. My aim is to spend about 5 days there, seeing Lago Ometepe and taking in the Pacific coast, before speeding through Costa Rica on another bus to Panama. Panama might merit a week or two, then I'll jump on a plane to Ecuador and start my South American adventure. The Panama - Ecuador flight is my last one before the flight home, and although I still have a few months left, I have started to feel like I'm on my way home already. I'm now pretty scared about the prospect of coming home and having to face reality again.

But, yes, Guatemala. After the volcano climbing exploits, we headed up to Lago Atitlan for the weekend. It's only 3 hours from Antigua, but the journey might rate as the worst so far, only competing with Laos to Phnom Penh for discomfort and lack of roads. It's a miracle I wasn't sick.

We stayed at a little village called San Pedro on Atitlan, which is known as the 'backpacker' place to be, as opposed to Panajachel which now has 4 star hotels and San Marco which is full of new age hippies taking 7 day vows of silence.

To be quite honest, we didn't do that much there. It's very cheap, and we used it as a place to save money, cooking our own food and watching films for large parts of the time spent there. Atitlan is hippie central, so lots of other people are there sitting around and doing nothing, talking about yoga classes and reiki healing. I enjoyed it, but it did test my hippie tolerance to the limit. I had the phrase 'just get a job!' going round in my head for a lot of the time.

The one thing that we did do was visit a town called Santiago Atitlan, in order to see the fabled Maximon shrine there. Every year, a different house in Santiago takes turns to have Maximon in their home, and receive visitors all year round who come to pray for money and love and luck. Inevitably, the residents of Santiago have realised that they can make money from tourists who want to see it too, and on arrival at the dock there we were accosted by guides, tuk tuk drivers and small children who wanted to take us to see the 'real' Maximon, fighting with each other and with us to convince us that their Maximon is the real one. There are anywhere from 2 to 10 Maximon in the town, and much time was spent trying to work out which one to see. As half our group was girls, we ended up going with an impossibly cute 10 year old boy (who looked about 6) in a tuk tuk to the very outskirts of the town and seeing the 'real' Maximon there. I was a little underwhelmed to see what was basically a statue of Christ covered with headscarves and US dollar bills, but the locals did really seem to be worshipping him, and it was rare to have the opportunity to see inside a Guatemalan house. I suppose we'll never know whether Maximon is genuine or not - I could picture the locals bursting into fits of laughter after we left at the money that they just got out of us to see a small blinged up statue of Christ in someone's shed.