It wasn't too difficult, but it was somewhat stressful, although also sort of fun. We walked to where the buses left Antigua for Chimaltenango, every 10 minutes.
We jumped on a bus with our stuff just before it pulled out, and were surprised by how few passengers were on it. That didn't last long, as the bus stopped at every corner on the way out of Antigua to pick up more passengers. By the time we were on our way on the open road, the bus was SRO.
We knew we had to change buses in Chimal, as the porters called it, but we expected that we would get to a terminal like the one in Antigua and get off there. However, as we pulled into the center of the city the bus pulled to the side, and the locals told us that this was where we had to get off. We grabbed our bags and jumped out of the back of the bus, along with a backpacking couple also heading west. As we hit the ground, the woman backpacker looked in her bag and said that her wallet had been grabbed. Tom and I are still not sure if somebody really took it or if she had just put it in her pocket after paying her fare, but in any case the two of them ran through traffic after the bus, and after banging on the door made the bus stop and they got back on. That was the last we saw of them.
Tom and I looked around and couldn't figure out what was going on. We were at a very busy corner with cars and buses going every which way, but we didn't see anything that looked to us like a bus stop. Tom asked a man on the street how to get to Panajachel, and he vaguely waved his arm around the corner and up the street. We walked across the street and around the corner, and found a bunch of people standing on a corner. Buses were stopping and people were getting on and off, but it was all happening very quickly with the buses barely slowing down for the passengers. A nice man apparently saw our confusion and asked where we wanted to go, and when we told him, he pointed to a bus and said that was the one we wanted. We didn't see any indication on the bus that it was really going in our direction, but we didn't have much time to think about it before the man grabbed the backpack from Tom and threw it on the rack on top of the bus. Tom followed the pack to the back of the bus, and I got on in the front as the bus was starting to move. I looked towards the back of the bus and had a brief moment of panic since I didn't see Tom, but then watched him swing in from the ladder through the open back door as the bus was driving down the street. I made my way through the packed bus to the back, and Tom and I both found seat edges where we could sit and regroup. We were both worried about the pack riding loose on the top of the bus, and we were also a little worried about where we were going, although we figured it was early enough in the day that we could always get off and backtrack if necessary. Tom asked some of the passengers sitting near us if we were going towards Panajachel, and they assured us that we were, even though we were going to have to change buses again in a town called (we think) Encuentros even though we can't find it on the map.
It was a long way to Encuentros on a very hilly, windy road, and the bus driver drove very fast, and we spent the whole time worrying about the pack. We both spent a lot of time looking out of the back of the bus, waiting to see the pack bounce into the road and trying to decide what to do if that happened. Good for us, it never happened, and we finally reached Encuentroswhere one of the very nice men sitting near us told us to get off. We were worried that the bus driver was going to drive away before we could get the pack off the top of the bus, but the conductor had also apparently been keeping an eye on us, and he had also given us the nod that this was our stop, and he yelled at someone on top of the bus to throw our bag down. We were very happy to be back on the ground with all of our bags in hand, apparently closer to our final destination.
We asked about the bus to Panajachel, and were pointed to a bus on the other side of the road. It was a very rundown school bus, unlike most of the other Guatemala buses which are shiney and clean and totally blinged out. We got on the bus, and in about ten minutes it started down the hill towards the lake we had seen from a distance. The bus made a lot of stops to let people on and off on the side of the road, and we finally pulled into a bustling town. We had no idea what town it was, and asked a fellow passenger if it was Panajachel. The man said no, it was Solola, so we stayed sitting on the bus until the driver told us to get off. We did, and asked him how to get to Pana, and he called to a man in the street, told him where we wanted to go, and the man took Tom's pack and walked to the next bus. It turned out that the man was the driver of the bus to Pana, just as friendly as the rest of the conductors and drivers, not to mention passengers, that we encountered on the busses. He drove down the steep winding hill from Solola to Panajachel, and told us where to get off in the middle of town. Tom had been looking got a bathroom since Quinto, so his first question when people approached us asking if we needed help was where to find a bano. Everybody pointed to the Pollo Campanero, a chain of fried chicken restaurants in Guatemala, so we decided to get lunch there and use the bathroom before looking for the water taxi that would take us to our hotel in Santa Cruz.
While we hadn't made any official reservations, we had corresponded with a woman who owns a small hotel in Santa Cruz, a village right on the shore of the lake, not connected by any roads to any other villages. Besides walking on the shore of the lake, the only way to get there is to take a lancha, a small water taxi. We had decided on this village because it is very small and isolated, and from travelers we had talked to and reviews we had read, it seemed like it wouldn't be overrun with backpackers and the party crowd. So, we found our way to the dock where the lanchas leave for all the small villages around the lake. As we were getting to the dock, we saw a sign for shuttles to Antigua and Guatemala City, and we stopped to talk to then since we had made the mutual decision that we would not be taking the chicken bus adventure back to Guatemala City. We got information on shuttles, and then the shuttle manager told us that his son would take us on a private lancha to Santa Cruz. We politely declined and said we would take the public lancha, but the kid followed us all the way to the dock, telling us that the next kanch would not leave for a half hour. When we saw that there was a lancha just about to go with room for us, the kid changed his tactic and told us that the public launches aren't safe. He may have had a point since this one was very full and was riding very low in the water and probably wasn't the safest thing in the world, but we jumped in anyway, found seats on the benches with Tom just in front of me, and left for Santa Cruz, which was the second stop.
We knew we were at the right place because Hotel Casa de Rosa has a sign right out of the water.
We pulled into the lancha dock and disembarked. The lancha ride was $20Q each, and we arrived at about 2:30. We had left Antigua on the first bus at around 9am, and the four buses had cost us a total of $28Q each, so for a total of 5.5 hours (including our lunch stop) and $48Q or $6US each, we had traveled from Antigua to our hotel on Lago Atitlan...and had quite the experience to boot!
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