Volcan de Pecaya and Chichicastenango

On the Sundays of Spanish School I had the day off and so I visited the active volcano of Pacaya and the market town of Chichicastenago.

Chichicastenango (Chichi)

6 days of 8am starts meant it was a great idea to start my first day off with a start of 6am in order to make it nice and early to Chichi where the region´s best market kicks off.

Barely had the shuttle bus turned up had we spotted it´s flat tyre. 10 minutes later with one new tyre and the driver had an faulty starter motor. One huge push down the street and we were off again on the 2 hour journey.

50 minutes later and the starter motor died completely. 2 hours later we finally made it to Chichi and to a market more akin to a labyrinth than anything I was expecting. Losing time to a knackered old van before a replacement turned up wasn´t the end of the world as there is only so much a person can take of the market there. With touts only to keen to make you their new amigo it was a place ou had to do a lap of very quickly (in about an hour) before re tracing your steps to identify something you actually wanted and commenced Operation: Barter like Hell.

A few little presents later and I discovered that Chichi is hybrid of Mayan and Catholic tradition. The local church is to the untrained eye a regular catholic church, but head inside and it´s like the Mayan tradition has not gone far and the two religions are practiced side by side. With ornamental flowers, incense, statues of saints and crucifixes, this is quite a confused church but still one that has me interested.

Having soaked up the market (several laps - it is huge though) and visited the church I decide to risk a full meal at one of the market stalls. I figured, it´s time to test that constitution that seemed to fail after most visits to Chicken Cottage. After a tasty meal of fried chicken, rice, buritos, veg and something that looked suspiciously like a dried up poo (left alone I should add) I was on my way. On the bus back to Antigua it was clear to see just how many and how severe the landslides had been a month before. Whole sides of hills were gone in some cases and despite there being adequate diversions in place after seeing one landslide that had a truck at the bottom it, it was quite easy to see how fragile Guatemala when hit by the rainy season.

Volcan Pacaya

On my second Sunday in Antigua, and with a new partner in crime (Tom from Yorkshire, but with more of a Canadian accent) we decided to climb up the local active volcano with a bunch of randoms from Antigua. En route to said volcano I had my second, "it´s a small world moment", when I met Baz, who worked for The Guradian and knows a multitude of people from Mindshare, least of all Henrietta Bridgman and some lazy bum from Invention called Mark Campbell.

Finally at the foot of the volcano in the pooring rain we had our guide and security (this consisted of a man, a child and a donkey - fearsome, especially as the kid had a machete). Not a difficult climb but one tht had amazing views and even a vent up top where you could see some liquid hot magma. After melting my face off cooking a marshmellow we decended the volcano at what was now 6pm and pitch black. Far more entertaining in the dark with out a torch we skipped our way down the volcano whilst helping out the oldies and being scared shitless by the tour guide who took it upon himseld to jump out at us from no where!  What a guy!

A great afternoon out but I´m still keen to get a good trek under my belt, as the volcano wasn´t that challenging and I had to resort to getting out a penknife to modify a marshmellow stick in order to feel a it more like Bear Grylls.

photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/richsmith/sets/72157625283241404/

Arrived in Antigua, Guatemala - and time to go to school

After 6 hours on a flight and being in the minority who´s Spanish is definitely more Spanglish, I decide it a good idea to enroll in Spanish School, upon getting to Antigua, Guatemala. Besides, my hand gestures, aren´t that good anyway...

Somehow I manage to get to a hostel called the Ummagumma. My first official review of a hostel: Don´t stay here, there are bed bugs, big ones at that.

I´m swiftly sized up for spanish school by the hostel manager and I get swiftly enroduced to Marco a local "headmaster", more accurately more of a Delboy Business man than a head teacher. Marco has more bling on his teeth than most hiphop stars, and after a while, I realise not all Guatemalans are doing too badly out of tourists who can´t speak spanish...

The next day and Spanish School starts and I meet my teacher, who comes up to my armpit. I´m not a tall man, but Julio definitely isn´t. But what he lacks in the vertical, he certainly makes up for with patients and the ability to teach as I soon discover Spanish the way Michel Thomas was trying to teach me isn´t quite the way it works... not sure if that´s a Central Amercica thing or not. Julo is a nice bloke about 49 with more kids than you can shake a stick at, and very keen to redirect me when I commit the odd conversational faux-paz. For instance, describing your self as hot with the Spanish, "Estoy caliente", is a sure fire way of getting yourself slapped as it means "I´m horny",where as, "Estoy calor", means ,"I´m hot". Julio also quickly informs of how to call some one a Gay in Central America - as any other bloke with a mind of a child will agree...a skill I´m glad I´m not with out. Also after my escapades in Venice Beach,  I´m sure to accidentally end up in a gay bar again.

Apart from thefirst day, school recommences in the front yeard of the family I´m living with, which I quickly learn is Marco´s family and quite a family they are too.

Marco: Delboy with a head for getting the family asmuch money as he can (and often at the expense of the teachers).

Maria: Marco´s wife or ex-wife (I think), my favourite of the family, she´s 62 and the  head of the house, cooks all our meals except Sundays and always spoke her mind. Every meal was delish and on some occasions when she was feeding 4 young male students on top of the family this was no mean feet. She always spoke with us at dinner time and was always keen to tell us the country and her family´s problems! Who cares about missing East Enders, when you´ve got Maria?

Julio (not my teacher): Marco´s son, a teacher in his late thirties with over 6 children with a crazy obsession with computer games and he female students. He´s also keen to tell us the local history of Guatemala and tell us all the rude spanish words the other teachers won´tell us!

Alehandra: A grand daughter of Maria, she´s 19 years old and the mother of Jose (2 years) and Nacho (9 months). She´s quiet and always seems to be trying to control her two sons, the oldest of which was either sick, throwing a tantrum or trying to nick his uncle´s tuk-tuk.

Julio´s brother: A recovering alcholic and coke fiend, I´m annoied I can´t remember his name. He drove a tuk-tuk like every other tuk-tuk driver in Antigua; at speed and firmly relying on God not to crash.

Marco II: Marco´s son, in his mid-forties and I could never work out what he did aside from run errands. My teacher Julio promptly told me he was a bum, but he take me and the other students to a football match one Saturday so wasquite good fun!

Jose: A little tyke who took a liking for Tom´s ukele and anything he couldn´t have. I also think he liked to rehome the family tortoise in front of my door, so that I kicked it first thing in the morning. Little scamp

Nacho: 9 months old and owner of an awesome mobile contraption that meant he could bounce aroundthe kitchen to his heart´s content!

There were several others, but they were all good fun and aside from not being able to remember their names the PC I´m on in northern Guatemala is awful...

On one Saturday afternoon Marco II took us to an over 35s football match up the road. A great afernoon out with the other students as most of the local supporters seemed more keen to feed us rum that let us watch the football. There were some awesome teams, mostly playing in combination of Chelsea, Portugal or Argentina kits and on a surface you´d win a prize for being able to spot a blade of grass on.

On one of my last days of study in Antigua Julio (Marco´s son) takes us all up to the look-out oint over the city as it´s just behind the school. A great local guide, Julio proceeds to tell us that it was an incident 15 years before at this place that involved teachers and students from the school that resulted in Guatemala having to have Tourist Police. In the incident, one teacher was killed by banditos when a group of students and teachers were looking over the city. The area many years later is now very safe and police are always not far away.

Antigua is the Guatemala´s old capital city, because it was devastated by an earthquake over 200 years ago. The capital was relocated to what is now G-City and the town of Antigua was re built losing a lot of it´s original character. Its a lovely place but a far cry from what most Guatemalans would call Guatemala but none the less with it´s colonial style and it´s surroundings of two volcanoes its still a wonderful place to try and learn Spanish.

for far too many photos check out flick: http://www.flickr.com/photos/richsmith/sets/72157625158231993/

San Diego II: Ron Burgandy clearly didn´t surf or ski

After getting bored with the Banana Bungalow escapades I headed off in the drizzle to Downtown San Diego. Yes, that´s right, Drizzle. Sunny San Diego has naffed off for the remainder of my time in California which turns out to be quite a problem in San Diego as it turns out the typically hot weather is the most redeeming feature, or at least the thing that makes everything else seem good. 

My remaining days in San Diego account for 3 of the 65 days a year when San Diego is officially not sunny, but rather than let this dishearten me I´m determined to explore the down town city of San Diego and reveal all that this place has to offer come rain or shine I will discover all. 

I think this might be a short entry today. 

Do I hear a sigh of relief? 

Forget it, this is a blog. Que Rant:

Highlights, and there are some are limited and depend on your mood, I was feeling geeky and quite optimisitc, so the Cold war Russian Submarine in the Dock at San Diego (I think) was pretty cool. The B-39 Soviet Sub demonstrated just how little investment the USSR had going spare when they built their subs, as my previous idea of what I thought cramped meant was squashed down a few more feet. This wasn´t the key attraction of the maritime museum, but compared to the Star of India (the world´s oldest active sailing ship, with not one sail intact... I smell a rat) and a bunch of steam powered ferries it actually was the few things that is actually interesting about America, the Cold War.

San Diego is a city famous for it´s Naval history, or at least it´s where the US decided to house the navy, not the same thing, and more the latter than the former. A huge naval ship is the hub for tourists interested in the US Navy, but after they got the start date of the Second World War wrong in the film of Pearl Harbour I feel reluctant to concede that the US Navy is better than the British (well at least before the impending budget cuts take hold) so humming the tune to Rule Britianna I march off to the Gas Lamp district to explore where San Diego´s brothel district used to be in full swing.

The brothels have now alas shut in favour of art galleries, dodgy American sports bars and pawn shops (I know... not the pawn I had in mind), so my tour takes all of 5 minutes. Which is handy as dinner beckons and my hostel is close by.

Keen to prove there is an underlying culture somewhere in San Diego I head off for Balboa Park and the zoo the next day. The zoo is huge, with more animals than you can shake a stick at. It is however, just a zoo. I think my photo of a bored/depressed/hungover Komodo Dragon says it all. Animals in cages. Brilliant. Determined to get the most for my $37 I power march all around the zoo, with very little to get excited about although a huge Harpy Eagle and some spooning hippos were quite interesting. But to be fair, they were only spooning. 

Ejected from the park for making jokes about said spooning hippos I make it to the huge collection of museums and galleries that is Balboa Park. There are more museums than would be possible to fully enjoy in a week, but this doesn´t stop me getting bored in less than 2 hours. Not through the lack of interesting exhibitions, but more that it´s so apparently obvious that San Diego is a city that is lacking. The city has no interesting architecture or heritage to speak of, so the creation of Balboa Park seems a massive effort to import as much culture as they can into a part of the city that looks actually looks nice even if the sun is not out.

Quite a good plan, but I like to visit places that have a history or actually try and build one. San Diego has culture, it´s just not it´s own, it´s imported.

My negativism is not completly justified as there are small galleries in the city centre that demonstrate that Southern California has some budding artists and one of the galleries in the gas lamp district does actually make me want to return and buy a painting, but it´s San Diego´s geography that makes it stand out.

In the last 12 months I was reminded that there is more to life than surfing after a ski trip to France showed me just how much fun it can be (you can´t stop for a rum and hot chocolate out back at the local break). It´s for this reason that San Diego is a brilliant city, not to a visiting tourist, but as a resident. If you can brag to most cities in the world that you had to flip a coin whether or not to go surfing or skiing this morning, (but that it didn´t matter as you were doing the alternative in the afternoon anyway), I think you could feel pretty smug. 

In a city that isn´t that attractive (when there´s no sun), there is always something to do. In just one day, those things can range from the piste in the morning, to a beach in the afternoon to catching a good gig or play in the evening, San Diego definitely gets my vote. In the film Anchorman, Ron Burgandy tells San Diego where to go by reading a sabotaged tele-promt. He discovers a lot of San Diegans are actually very proud of their city and I think if I lived there I´d be a bit put out too. You stay classy San Diego.  

photos in the usual place: 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/richsmith/sets/72157625193375556/

Staying Classy in San Diego

Arriving fairly late a night in San Diego I managed to get myself to the coast at a place called Pacific Beach. It felt like being in the town centre of Newquay on a Saturday night in in July but with fewer northern chavs, but more sports bars than you could shake a stick at.  I stayed in the Banana Bungalow and subsequently feared I´d never be able to get another night´s sleep ever again! 

Despite being in a party hostel I finally felt I was in a place that I always wanted to visit, warm waters, surfing on the doorstep and skiing only a few hours away, it sounded like heaven and I knew I wasn´t short of potential advocates. A number of people back home had mentioned a desire to actually live there and I felt not only that I was on my travels but on a reconnaissance mission with people back home keen to hear the debrief. Well here´s the report....

I positioned myself in Pacific Beach so I could easily get to the area called Windansea and La Jolla (pron La Hoya) as I´d been reading about the surf and longboarding scene of the area for years. To get out and about and explore quicky, I hired a behemoth of a cruiser bicycle and scaled and plummeted up and down the many hills of Windansea and La Jolla and was taken back at how I´d found such a beautiful area, something severely lacking from nearly everywhere else I´d been already in Southern California. Unfortunately this all came with a rather large price tag of a catch as the area seemed to be home most of San Diego´s elite. However, guessing that if a character such as Ron Burgundy ever existed, he´d definitely live there, I´m definitely putting it high on the list of places I´d have a house if those lottery numbers ever came up.

The area was by far the most scenic stretch of urban coastline I´ve ever seen in person or from the media. Lots of coves, reefs, beeches and plenty of wildlife with seals and leopard sharks apparently frequenting the area. I cycled all the way through Windansea; a small neighbourhood with some brilliant surf and quite a community feel all the way to La Jolla, a larger town that also had great surf and a seemingly unquenchable thirst for art galleries which helped it fuel it´s slightly superficial atmosphere, as it´s objective seems to attract Southern California´s wealthy elite. None the less I loved La Jolla and discovered one particular photography gallery of a chap called John Mangelsen. He travels for 10 months of the year taking some of the most amazing photos I´ve ever seen. A bit cute and cheesy you might think, but take a look, it´s quite staggering. http://www.mangelsen.com/

Pushing ahead with the hire bike (please note: only one gear) I rode to the Birch Scripp aquarium, which only looked like a short bike ride away on the map, turned into a near exhausting 4 mile jaunt up hill in weather that would make even the hardiest of sun worshippers to run for the shade. The aquarium  was a thankful escape from the midday sun and showcased a whole array of marine life that I knew I´d pay triple if I wanted to go to Sea World. Not wanting to get killed by a Killer Whale I was content with being a shark geek all over again before enjoying the 4 mile ride back down the hill and back to Pacific Beach.

Every surfer I´ve ever met hates wetsuits, pure and simple. Therefore going for a late afternoon surf at Pacific Beach in just boardies and a vest was something I´m hoping will make a lot of the guys in the London Surf Club green with envy. A few more evenings like this and I was more than content to spend the next day time snorkeling in La Jolla Cove with millions of Gary Baldi fish (bright orange), a group of seals who were more keen to parade and heckle the land dwelling tourists than entertain the hardy waterborne tourists in masks and snorkels. Despite not getting to see the highly anticipated Leopard Sharks I loved the experience of snorkeling so close to the cliffs and caves amongst a vast array of calipo coloured fish and would recommend it to anyone. 

The Banana Bungalow hostel where I stayed at became the place to introduce me to America´s premier drinking game. Beer Pong, complete with it´s own purpose built table (like an American Football pitch) I was keen to represent Great Britain and did so with deadly accuracy putting out a pair of Kiwis and duly sending them to bed early. Retiring (not passing out I must insist) undefeated I enjoyed the Banana Bungalow experience but was keen to get some decent kip and hit down town and see what the City which promised much, had to offer.

a few selected photos are on my flickr account.... 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/richsmith/sets/72157625158906102/

Santa (We´re-coming-to-get-you) Barbara

Leaving Los Angeles will no doubt provoke many feelings in you, whether you´ve been there or not.  Traffic, poor public transport and epic urban sprawl were at the top of my list, and having taken two hours to get from the beach to the station I was finally ready to depart for Santa Barbara. The Amtrak trains have the monopoly on the coast route but grabbing a sea view window seat for the last hour of the 2.5 hour journey was more than worth the extra $10 for the pyscho-hobo-infested greyhound. The aptly named surfliner covers the coast line of southern california for over an hour and approching sunset the views were spectacular, a journey that would later inspire me to seek out a like-minded soul to explore the surf along the coast.

Arriving in Santa B I hit the only the hostel in town to be charged a backpacker unfriendly rate of $35 a day. Thankfully with showers that this time didn´t resemble what I´d only imagine seeing in a POW camp, and a dorm all to myself, I was at least grateful to be clean and have peace and quiet.

Santa Barbara is a great place for a night out but as with any place in America, finding a bar that doesn´t have a million TV screens and is the equivalent of Yates is another matter. The hostel rep Cesar took us on one such night out to classy venue called Sharkeys, and whilst I didn´t think twice about an "over 18 night", the bar slowly began to fill up with many of the local Uni´s (UCSB) wildlife and the bar´s ethos for doing anything for money was slowly revealed. A bar where if you can drink you can´t mingle with the rather attractive yet underaged students. Somewhat of a problem as dancing and not drinking is something I and most men simply cannot achieve! It was only later I discovered UCSB (The University of Santa Barbara), is more aptly known as the University of Casual Sex and Boose)... bugger.

Having explored the little of what Santa Barbara had to offer in terms of culture (one rather cool court house but not a lot else) and in desperate need of some saltwater I picked up a second hand board and hired a car with a guy called Joe from the hostel and headed out north to a hotly tipped Jalama Beach. An hour and halfs journey north in our rather masculine Kia Spectra and I was actually in heaven. The beach is 15 miles down a very windy road that would typically not be out of place in the hills of Andalucia and faces west so picks up the combination of south and north swells.

Keen to test drive my board (6´3" x 18&1/2 x 2&5/8 J7 swallow tail for those of you who care) which was smaller than anything I´d ever ridden, but after a couple of over head right-hand waves (truely awesome) I quickly became too cocky and took a couple of poundings. I´ve never known myself to get bounced twice off the sand in one wipe out but hey the waves were rather forgiving and Joe took a similar number of wipeouts and proved for quite a heated argument as to who had the biggest wipeout. 

Surfing at Jalama beach was exactly what I needed. When you´ve been on the road for days and been conned a few times or been relatively unimpressed with the local tourist attractions, it´s always good to have surfing there to re-charge the wonderlust and reinvigorate the reason you came away in the first place. Further south and around the point apparently lie some of California´s best surf spots, there is however, a catch. They´re all in 100 private ranches that restrict all access, even below the low tide mark. A concept I and I´m sure most of the surfers from back home find rather alien. Well if I can come back with a few hundred million in the bank I might splash out on a ranch, rename it Potions and restrict access to just the London Surf Club!

A few days of boozing in Santa Barbara with Joe, a German girl Joanna, her heavily tatto´d partner in crime Jasmine and some other guys from the hostel I not only reaffirmed England´s dominance of pool but reaffirmed our inability to drink more than Germans or the Danish with copious amounts of water in the early hours, to my shame.

I wasn´t overly struck by Santa Barbara, it´s expensive, a bit sleazy and typically American. But to quote the age old mantra, "it´s the people and not the place", this couldn´t be more true than in Santa Barbara, both the locals and the other backpackers turned a mediocre city (c´mon America, they´re not cities, they´re just big towns) into a worthwhile trip.

The journey south to San Diego was complete with just one extra surf at a place called C-Street in Ventura. A pointbreak with so many people it was almost impossible to get a wave to myself. Not a great session but after getting over my initial panic of seeing fins in the water 20 feet away, it was a delight to share the waves with a couple of dolphins that were very keen to show us how it was done.

San Diego, Ron Burgandy´s Whale´s Vagine beckoned...

For photos see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/richsmith/sets/72157625144548706/