GoForth and Blog

I arrived late last night in Bogota after a long, long day of travel that started at 4:30 am in a dingy hostel in Guatemala City, dragged on during a longer-than-expected layover in Miami (I know, it doesn’t make sense to me, either), was sweetened somewhat upon being seated next to a ridiculously cute 2 and a half-year old on the second leg, and ended in relief when there were people waiting for me at the airport. But more about that later- first I’ll catch you up on the previous 2 weeks.

So, after I finally worked out the whole internship thing and knew I was going to Colombia, I decided it made sense, since I was already heading south, to make a couple stops along the way, see some other places, brush up on some Spanish. So I bought a plane ticket to Guatemala City. That’s it. Book a hostel for my first night? Unnecessary. Contact a Spanish School? Waste of time. Decide where I was going to go in Guatemala once I arrived? Not important. I’d work that all out later. I’m an expert traveler, after all. Nothing to worry about. I was scheduled to land at around 6:00 pm- early enough to be safe by myself. I figured I’d take a taxi straight from the airport to Antigua, since a cursory glance at the Lonely Planet was enough to convince me that there was no reason to linger in Guatemala City (#5 of the top 5 highlights for Guate according to the LP: “Leaving”). But as the hours ticked by in, once again, Miami (worst international terminal ever, by the way), as my flight was delayed and delayed and delayed, I started to worry that I would be arriving too late to feel safe going by myself, whether to Antigua or to a hostel in Guate.

Our plane finally started boarding, and in the first of many fortunate incidents that would take place over the next 2 weeks, I found myself seated next to 2 nice guys from Montreal, Seth and Aaron, who also were interested in heading straight for Antigua and would share a taxi with me. And they, expert travelers like myself, also had not booked a place a stay in advance, so I would not be alone in my search.

When we arrived in Antigua, we had our taxi driver take us to a few hotels, but after the first 3 “completo”s we decided to ditch the taxi and just search on foot. It was about 11:30 pm on a Saturday, dark, deserted (the bars don’t let out till 1:00 am)… and I was just glad I wasn’t by myself. Then, in the second fortunate incident of the evening, some kind “locals” (an American man and his Nicaraguan wife) saw us bumbling around and offered to help us, and eventually got us a room at the hotel where their wedding guests stayed- a great place. After finding some dinner, we met a super friendly Guatemalan guy named Alex and the 4 of us spent the night at an “after party”- basically anyplace that gets away with serving past 1am- in our case, a bar that felt like what a speakeasy must have been in the ’20s- a colorful, rowdy, completely discordant group of people united solely in their desire to drink when they weren’t supposed to.

It was a fun night, but the next morning I decided that Antigua was not where I wanted to spend my week. It’s a beautiful colonial town, but packed with tourists and therefore also with souvenir shops and over-priced restaurants… not much particularly authentic about it. I spent the day touring the town with Seth and Aaron and then hopped on a shuttle bus to San Pedro La Laguna.

Take me Home!