We took a shuttle from Antigua to Panajachel. The shuttles are pretty cheap – about $12 each for a 3-hour ride – but they pack you in there. So we squeezed in for a relatively uncomfortable ride on some twisty and hilly roads. Panajachel is the largest town on Lake Attilán, a beautiful lake in the mountains surrounded by cone-shaped volcanic peaks. The lake sits at about 5000 feet.
We visited the market for some fresh produce. We make lots of guacamole these days.
The main road through Pana ends at the lake.
We took a 5k walk to the next town over, Santa Catarina, and took some pictures along the way.
A couple of shots of Santa Catarina, a vertical town along the lake.
As you head to the lakeshore.
From a dock in Santa Catarina.
After a few days in Pana, we took a 20-minute water taxi ride across the lake to San Pedro la Laguna. We rented an apartment on the third floor of a family’s house. The view from our window:
We spent a week in San Pedro and each took private (1-on-1) Spanish lessons for three hours each day. We even had homework!
The school has “classrooms” which are just a series of palapas along a path to the lake.
From the lakeshore of the school.
Classes were good. I went from jumbles of various words I remembered from four years of high school Spanish classes to some basic sentences, relearned lots of key verbs and conjugations, and even got into verb tenses by the end of the week. Leena minored in Spanish in college, so she’s way ahead of me and got back to a basic level of fluency.