2024/25 Fox Family Gap Year

Time to move on again, on the 4th February we headed to Antigua (the city in Guatemala as opposed to the Caribbean Island), a 6 ish hour drive! Personally we don’t mind some of the longer drives as we get a glimpse of the different communities that surround the highway and get to see some stunning landscapes. The children on the whole have coped well with the journeys, we are just ensuring that we get the balance right and have enough entertainment and snacks to keep them occupied!

Antigua is a beautiful, picturesque UNESCO protected city. The vibe wasn’t unlike Oaxaca in Mexico that we’d visited in the previous month which is also UNESCO protected. It is a low-rise city made up of cobbled streets and colourful buildings. Antigua was a real hub for ‘Chicken Buses’, so called because they often carry animals amongst the passengers! We didn’t ride on one but they are the main form of public transport in Central America and they are a fantastic sight. They are mostly old northern American school buses that have been jazzed up and are serving locals and travellers alike, they’re noisy, colourful and driven like crazy but are always a sight to behold!

On our first evening in Antigua whilst out eating at a nearby taco restaurant the lights began swaying about and we had the sensation of sitting on a boat, was it a strong gust of wind or something more sinister? We checked the local monitoring station the next day which confirmed that we’d experienced a 3.1 earthquake. Elana expected it to be more dramatic having been on the earthquake simulator at the Natural History Museum in London (which simulates a much more severe quake)! Antigua is in the shadow of four volcanoes and an active tectonic zone, Guatemala experiences over 700 earthquakes per-year on average ranging up to magnitude 7 so it’s no surprise that we experienced something (the earth doesn’t often move for us anymore so we appreciated the experience)!

We also experienced, on a couple of occasions that night walking through the town, a catholic procession of what we think was the Virgin Mary. It involved carrying a large float of the religious figure along with drumming, singing, burning incense and the occasional reenactment. They marched through all the streets in the centre of Antigua hence why we bumped into them on several occasions. Quite a different experience to observe!

The following day we embarked on a self-guided tour of the city, taking us to all the different nooks and cranny’s and learning more about the city. A real highlight is seeing the women and their daughters go about their daily lives, the vast majority wear traditional dress which gives a real sense of stepping back in time. Antigua offers some charming sights along the way, a lot of the history surrounds the nunneries that once occupied the town. The 17th century Santa Catalina arch, which has the Volcan de Agua in the background, dominates a street off the main square. It contains a concealed passageway that Nuns once used to cross between the cloister and a school without being seen by the outside world (the children loved this story!). The cloister and school are no-more, destroyed by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions but the arch remains. A visit to the Santa Clara Covent and Church was a highlight, it has been damaged by numerous earthquakes over the years and is no longer in use as a Convent, it has however been partially restored and has some lovely gardens. It was a really nice place to spend an hour wandering around. There were partially restored rooms within the complex which provided a glimpse into living conditions for the Nuns, a little like prison cells, Elana reckoned she’d happily live in one of the rooms! We also visited the local Jade museum where they look at the historical use of Jade throughout Latin America and are trying to resurrect the trade through manufacturing and an array of jewellery.

The final stop of the walk was at a playpark (highlight of the day for the children)! It was actually quite nice speaking to local parents who were fascinated in Elana and Bert and were encouraging of the children playing together which was nice for Elana and Bert. It’s amazing how the children find ways of communicating despite the language barriers (albeit both children are picking up some Spanish). The reaction we get from Guatemalans when we tell them how old Elana and Bert are is always funny, they’re both quite tall for their ages in British terms, but with the average height of a Guatemalan man being 5’4” and a woman 4’10” we stood out – we had noticed that the general population was shorter than we were used to!

We couldn’t leave Antigua without a trip up to Cerro de La Cruz (Hill of the Cross), this is a scenic lookout point that affords fantastic views over the city and the surrounding volcanoes. Due to being tight on time and the children having already suffered much walking we jumped in a tuk-tuk for the journey up. This ride was interesting with the steep, rutted cobbled roads, but we made it to the top! The views of the volcanoes was fantastic, but even more breath-taking was watching the active ‘Volcan de Fuego’ spew plumes of steam and ash into the sky at 10-15 minute intervals. We were all mesmerised by the sight, Elana couldn’t believe she was seeing a real-life volcano having learnt about them at school. The last significant eruption from Volcan de Fuego was in June 2018 which resulted in 159 deaths, subsequently there have been regular eruptions causing pyroclastic flows particularly over the last three years. These have only resulted in preventative evacuations of villages near the volcano (it’s 16km west of Antigua). Living with the constant unknown must be horrendous but people just get on with their daily lives often having no other choice. After taking in the sights from the top of the hill we walked back down to our hotel where our onward connection was waiting for us.Read more