Monday, July 16, 2007

at the coban...coban cabana...

it was an uneventful trip to Coban in the central highlands of Guatemala. 5 hours in a reasonably comfortable minibus with 2 poms, 2 Dutch, 2 Germans, 3 Austrians, 2 French and moi. So lots of people to chat with. We Aussies on the whole are lazy bastards and tend to expect everyone to speak English. And generally they do.

One of the greatest pleasures i have in travelling is meeting people. Not just those indigenous to the country, but other travellers too. The fact that I meet the latter in the hostels I stay in and on the buses that I travel means they are usually of a like mind as myself. We often share the same sense of adventure and similar viewpoints on the world, different cultures and the pure wonderment of the planet in general.

Sometimes you meet people for just a few minutes, an hour or two, a bus ride or, as with the three American students (see previous photo) you run into the same people in different places as you are following a similar route for a while.

These types of brief meetings are more intense and open than when you meet someone new at home. You tend to be less guarded and can be more revealing as you both realise that you have such little time to share together.

And so people breeze in and out of your daily life on the road giving a little of themselves and in turn taking a part of you. This is great. It´s a perfect reason to travel.

So here I am in another internet cafe somewhere in the middle of Guatemala, where it is raining (I think I have found the wettest town in Guatemala - it should be twinned with Bergen) and I am surprised (as I often am when on the road) that I am actually here.

You ought to try it sometime.


crossing the river on a barge


women on the way home from church


village houses


cafe in Coban where I settled for lunch


the object that looks like some technicoloured giant bloom is actually Guatemalan nachos and tasted much better than it looks


Coban Town Square - a real hot spot. (ummm yeah)


Coban is built on the top of a steep hill so all streets are down


what a very wet town does to signs very quickly


right outside my bedroom door - so I better be good


other hotel decorations

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