San Pedeo de Laguna

Guatemala has 21 mayan dialects whereas Tz’utujil is spoken at the lake Atitlan by roughy 100’000 people.

Once in Lake Atitlan, you can spend weeks here, as many backpackers do. The lake is rather large, and all of the surrounding towns are completely unique to one another. Some towns are rather small and most tourists go there during day time and spending the nights in San Pedro for instance where you have all the bars and tattoo parlors.

Most places have written their tours or menus in Spanish and Hebrew. It is definitely one of the highlights for the Israelis on their humus path from Patagonia towards Mexico. Since they always travel in big groups it is almost impossible to make friends with them, if you found one or two nice guys don’t expect them to become travel buddies. They are often insecure with their English which always brings them back to other compatriots where they can speak their mother language.

Apart from that, the lake is famous for its hikes to the Indian Nose or to the volcano San Pedro. I tried to hike the volcano but was stopped after 30 minutes at an entry point where they tired to charge me 100 Quetzales. They even had a banner with all the prices written down. The weather was always cold and cloudy so I turned around snd went back to San Pedro.
Later on the girl working at the hostel told me it supposed to be free of charge to hike up

I decided to spend my second night in San Marcos de Laguna.

P.S. If pack of dogs is chasing you try to find some stones and branches to protect yourself. If you do nothing they start to attack you after a while.Read more