I got into Antigua late Wednesday night, and took the Thursday afternoon tourist shuttle to Coban. The driver was a man of few words but many out-the-window hand gestures, typically alternating between an energetic flip-off and a contented little tap tap tap. We stopped once for gas, once for the bathroom and once when he found a live tortoise walking slowly across the freeway. He scooped it up and set it in the groove between the right backseat and the van door, where it shat itself repeatedly before curling back up in its shell. I'm still not sure what he intended to do with it. His tip was not a large one.
The next morning, I went on a tour of Semuc Champey and Lanquin, in the Alto Verapaz region north of Antigua. Semuc Champey is widely regarded as one of the most beautiful natural areas in Guatemala, and justly so in my opinion--a series of limestone pools and waterfalls, set in a cross between mountains and jungle. The water is a brilliant, clear turquoise, and comfortably cool. We lounged around the pools for a few hours, then toured a cave in Lanquin which is inhabited by hundreds if not thousands of fruit bats, many of which were coming out of the cave right when we were there.
At night, I joined a new friend from the tour for dinner at the hostel we both happened to be staying at, which randomly doubles as the fanciest Italian restaurant in Coban. The back of the menu contained a two-page diatribe about the evils of margarine, informing diners that margarine, which is only a handful of molecular changes away from being plastic, not food, was originally made to fatten turkeys, but they had to do something else with it because it was killing them instead. Normally, I'd assume that this was yet another hilarious Sonia mistranslation, but we both read it twice, so perhaps it's just hyperbole. It seemed like an odd thing to get worked up about in a fancy Italian menu, but there you go.
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