Tonight we’re going to brave the torrential rain in order for one last dinner out in Pana. Last night we weren’t so brave, and stayed inside with deli sandwiches from a market pointed out to a few of our party by their Tuk Tuk driver. With expectations of about 10 feet of rain per year, Guatemalan storms don’t waste time with little drizzles, but get down to business. Gutters and streets fill within minutes, and the little gardens outside our room looks like it will fill up like a swimming pool.  The rainy season is supposed to be over by now, so this weather is a little odd.

The weather for the most part has been great up until about 3 or 4 pm every day. Today, we ventured out first thing and found our new friend Mario down near the ferries to the western half of the lake. We had negotiated a price with him yesterday to take us to see several of the pueblos of interest: San Marco, San Juan and San Pedro de Atitlan, and a cruise near the shoreline to see several other smaller communities.

In Guatemala, families celebrate birthdays be setting off a barrage of firecrackers and firing something that sounds like a cannon. Either they try to do this as early in the morning as possible, to get a jump on everyone else, or they set them off to correspond with the exact time of birth of the celebrant. In either case, at least 5 people had started celebrating birthdays in Panajachel by 5am this morning. My initial reaction was to wonder if some sort of revolution was starting, and ponder where one could find the American consulate.

All was well, as it turned out, and when the rest of the family was up, we set out to meet up again with Semilla Nueva staff members Anne Barkett and Lauren Brown who planned on joining us on a trip to the village of Santiago Atitlan across the lake from Pana.

Atitlan is about 16 km wide surrounded and surrounded by volcanoes and little towns named after saints or apostles. Panajachel is the largest, apparently named for neither any saint nor apostle that I can think of. Today happened to be October 28, the day of Maximon (Mah-she-mon), who is celebrated mostly in Santiago Atitlan, which is why we decided to go there.