Home » Guatemala » Antigua Guatemala

Antigua, 27 January 2003

Antigua Guatemala

Odv
2004-09-15 12:23:23

Displayed times (last time: )

at the end of each week we can really feel the progress we have made.

Dutch people are overrepresented by an enormous amount of Dutch women studying Spanish here. We often jokingly call it a Dutch colony. There are also lot´s of German and US students. In fact you can´t walk the street without seeing hordes of foreigners. The good side of this is that all the facilities you might want, exist here. Nearly the entire economy of Antigua runs on tourism. It is so important to the town that there is even a special police force to protect tourists and accompany them to dangerous spots. Also many places are guarded by policemen with oversized guns.

Unfortunately Antigua is a bit colder than we had expected. December and January are actually the coldest months, in day time it can be 25şC, but it night the temperature can drop to 12 degrees Celsius. In march it is supposed to get warmer, but by then we will be gone, so that´s no help to us.

In what seems to be an extreme coincidence, we stumbled on a group of Estonians who are driving around the world (www.rollingestonians.ee), when one day we walked around a corner and saw three jeeps sporting an Estonian flag. Maris is probably one of the few Estonians around here (if there are any others at all), so we decided to find the people who drove those jeeps. We looked in shops and restaurants in the street were the jeeps were parked and finally heard some people speak Estonian. We walked up to them and said "Hello Estonians" in Estonian. Needless to say that they were quite surprised.

They told us there is one Estonian living in Belize. The only other one they had met in the region...

After finishing our lessons in Antigua, we are planning a tour of all the famous Maya ruins: from Tikal in the north of Guatemala, we will travel through Belize on to Mexico to visit the Mayan ruins of Chichen-Itza, Uxmal and Palenque. We will probable visit Copan (another Mayan ruin) in Honduras on a weekend trip from Antigua.

After this tour, we will head back south to Guatemala, were we might take some more lessons if we feel like it, or head on further south to El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. From Panama, we will have to find a way to get to South America without passing through Colombia (which we think may be too dangerous at the moment).

Below are a few pictures of New York, where we visited Erik & Chisako on a stopover of a few days on our flight from Amsterdam to Guatemala City. Pictures of Antigua will appear in the next travel update.

Copyright Otto de Voogd

All rights reserved.

Please visit my website