El Salvador and Nicaragua

We would like to apologize for the infrequency of our blog posts, but having been on the move so much and with such inconsistent internet (and electricity) and pricey internet, we have been unable to post. We also have not posted any new pictures. We probably will not post any new pictures until we return to Leon in a week or two as it would take hours to get them online with the speed of service down here. So we just wanted to apologize and say we are still alive.

From Guatemala we went to El Salvador to visit Britsy´s friends. We had a fantastic time seeing their pueblo and the neighboring pueblos. The Sensentes were far too kind, feeding us and showing us their country.

From El Salvador we went direct to Leon, Nicaragua. We spent a couple days meeting the owners of Bigfoot and Green Pathways and seeing the city. From there, we have spent the last two weeks touring Nicaragua. Working our way down the coast, we have hit the main tourist spots of the country. Now we are headed down the Rio San Juan, the border between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, to the Caribbean side. Depending on how far up the Caribbean coast we get, we will probably spend another week or two making our way back to Leon, where we will settle down and begin working.

Again, we will blog more later about our adventures, but for now things have been great and we hope you are all doing well.

Markets, Flying and death to all spiders!

Hola,
We are back in Antigua, after a little over a week of traveling through the Guatemalan Highlands. A week ago Sunday, we traveled to Chichicastenango (Chichi for short), which is about an hour and a half north of Antigua. There, every Thursday and Sunday, Chichi hosts the largest market in Guatemala. They sell everything from fresh produce, mixed with a lot of flies and bees, to shoes, to carved masks and jewelry, along with everything else in between. As it is the low season, we have become accustomed to vendors hanging on our every move. In Chichi, this was particularly intense, especially as the day wore on. We spoke to a couple vendors who told us that they hadn´t sold a single thing all day. Among the vendors who buy ¨store¨space or stalls, there are many women who wander the maze of streets offering hand sewn table covers, scarves, tapestries and the like. At the end of the day as people started to become desperate, one older woman took a keen liking toward Britsy. With the help of my egging on, Britsy was soon being draped in various garments that the lady thought looked nice on Brits. I laughed, took pictures, and asked the woman to put more and more things on Brits. Although this was pretty funny, what was not funny was how this woman had spent, we were told by another vendor, probably around a month to two months sewing these pieces. As we had no space for them we continually said no to her attempts to sell. She started by offering them for just over $30 USD and after about 30 minutes she was down to between $3-4 USD. So she was willing to sell something that took her a month to make for 3 dollars. We tried to explain to her that it was worth more than that but that we didn´t have space for it, but she was that desperate. Unfortunately this seems to be common in many areas of Guatemala.

Most of the tourists buses dropped people off in the morning and picked them up in the afternoon to return to Antigua. We decided to spend the night in Chichi and we were glad we did. At night, all the tourists were gone and the market turned into a bunch of food stalls and a general hang out area for locals as people dismantled their stalls. There was music blaring and people chatting...and then the two gringos, the giant and the blonde, sitting and observing. Although to be fair, I think we are observed more than we observe. We think because of our height and hair color we have become somewhat of a local attraction or freak show as Britsy says. I keep telling Britsy its the gun show that people are gawking at, but she just glares at me. But in seriousness, it was fun to see the real side of Chichi, that it seems few tourists stay to see.

Following Chichi, we took a 15 passenger van with 23 people in it to Panajachel, a town on Lake Atitlan. We had communicated with a really cool guy about doing some paragliding and we got to meet him in person. After about an hour long conversation with him, I (Britsy) finally realized that I had thought that we were going to go hang gliding, which is surprisingly, quite different from paragliding. Oh well. Whatever sport we did (paragliding), it was awesome. Graham went on our first outing and due to poor winds (and maybe too much weight in the passenger seat), their flight was short. For the next couple days, we visited some of the other towns around the lake and then returned to Pana for round two of paragliding.

This time, I went first and although I was super excited about it, I almost threw up all over myself while flying. We had really good winds, so shortly after taking off, we got to start doing aerials - basically doing spinning turns in the air. That didn´t sit super well with me apparently. But it was awesome anyways. Graham also did a lot of aerials and was manly enough not to feel sick afterwards. We would definitely do it again.