We sat on stools at a counter built right under the windows, and felt like we were eating at the edge of a cliff with the gorgeous view. On top of the beautiful space, the food was delicious and beautifully presented by Santiago, the young chef who graduated from the program last year.
We will be writing a glowing TripAdvisor review of this restaurant and experience!
We hiked down the road to the hotel, and took the lancha to Panajachel. When we got into town on Friday from Antigua, we had walked directly from the bus dropoff to the lancha dock and had not seen any of the town. We needed to get cash from an ATM, and Pana is the only town around the lake with ATMs, so we decided that this was a good excuse to visit the town. We are glad we visited, although it also made us glad that we decided to stay in Santa Cruz. It is a bustling Central American town with a market and lots of tourist shops. Although the lake has been rising, they have maintained the waterfront, and it is a nice walk along the lake. We found our usual type of little local restaurant in town and had a yummy carne a la plancha (grilled meat) lunch, with rice and real hand made tortillas cooked on a comal on a fire. Mmmmm! We then made our way back to the lancha dock to go and visit the town of San Pedro, on the other side of the lake.
The only bummer of our brief Pana visit was that the shoe shine boys are many and persistent, and really annoying. We found one who seemed fairly polite and told him we might be interested in having our boots shined on our way out of town, but when he told us that it would be $50Q when we knew it should have been less than $10Q - and the right answer turned out to be $3Q - needless to say we didn't get our boots shined, and won't in Pana. We also met some other boys who made me laugh because they were hitting us up for whatever they could get, and when we talked a bit and they found out we were from Belize, they first made fun of my Spanish, and then fessed up that they were just trying to get some gringos to buy them lunch. We didn't buy them lunch, or anything else, for that matter, but we parted company with everybody laughing.
We took the lancha directly across the lake to San Pedro, and were doubly glad we had decided to stay in Santa Cruz.
San Pedro is a small city, and just not the type of place we would choose to stay.
We wandered through the market and then started back down the hill to the lancha dock, stopping in a small bar on the way for a beer, mostly to get out of the rain. When it stopped raining, we headed back to the dock with a brief stop at a blanket salesman who could have sold us a couple of very nice blankets if we hadn't been worried about having too much stuff on the bus, and got on a lancha to head back around the lake.
The lancha was probably the most interesting part of that part of the trip since we met a nice guy from Australia who was asking advice about traveling in Belize, and then a young couple who just got to Lago Atitlan and wanted to know what we have been doing, so we got to feel like we may have helped them a little. We got back to Santa Cruz and have been catching up on emails and blogging and planning tomorrow's departure to head back to Antigua for a day before heading to Guatemala City to buy Land Rover parts.
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