Weekend in San Pedro

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Well, we are having a nice rainy evening to cap off a pretty good weekend. Saturday I woke up slowly and began preparations for a trip to San Pedro with some friends. San Pedro is a lively town full of hippies and young tourists. It’s full of life and beauty and is located across the lake from Panajachel. So as I got moving Saturday morning, I stopped at the office to check my email and see what was happening in the rest of the world. At that time I found out what a horrendous earthquake Chile had and that it would be producing possible tsunami’s on many of the coasts along the Pacific Ocean. I was very alarmed and disturbed by this for many reasons; one being the devastation that occurred in Chile and the other being that Caitlin was staying on Pacific Coast that day in Costa Rica. She had emailed me and informed me that their location was predicting a tsunami to hit at 2 or 3 in the afternoon. After learning about all of that I was really preoccupied and worried about her wellbeing and wasn’t as keen on going to San Pedro until I knew everything would be alright. I also knew I needed to get out of Pana for the weekend. Luckily, the tsunami’s were not as severe and I was able to get San Pedro with a little peace of mind. So as for my trip to San Pedro, I took a boat across Lake Atitlan at 4:30pm with my friend Jezer, who is from Pana, and Erica, a girl from Norway that just began staying at the same homestay. The ride across the lake was fantastic. The water was beautiful and the mountains that surround all parts of the lake were magnificent. It was a very cool ride. Jezer talked to a friend that was playing with his band that night in San Pedro. He was an interesting guy and been to Barcelona and we chatted about that a bit. We got into the city and found cheap room to stay in. Jezer took us around to some beautiful parts in the city and then we stopped by the market to get some food to make sandwiches. Our other friend Harry met up with us after a bit then we got ready to go watch the band perform at a place on the lake and also to watch Jezer perform his Poi routine. Poi is a performance art in which balls of fire connected to chains are swung around in circular patterns. It was an extremely cool experience to see Jezer perform with the band playing and seeing the lake and mountains in the background. I took videos for him and will be putting them online soon. At the show, the police came by, as they have been for a while, to search the entire place for drugs. They searched everywhere and everyone! I even got searched for drugs. San Pedro has been known to have a lot of drugs and this is the reason for the search. It was crazy. The police walked around with heavy duty guns and everyone yelled. No one liked them there. I can understand both sides. The following day (today I guess), we got up slow and found breakfast and a restaurant set up by an Irish fellow. We slowly made our back to the boat and rode across the beautiful lake to our home in Pana.