Lake Atitlan and San Juan

I know some of you have been waiting for our pictures of our trip in January but I have over 500 shots to choose from!  And it will take me awhile to get them sorted to post on the blog.  So in the meantime, I will add in a few short trips and experiences.  Today we took a day trip to Lake Atitlan which is about an hour and a half from Xela.  It is a beautiful lake surrounded by volcanoes and there is much to see and do there.

The first thing we did was go to the small museum which holds artifacts pulled up from the bottom of the lake where they have found the ruins of a small city which buried under the lake. They believe it was an island which sank when some catastrophe happened. They found many indications that it was a religious sight for the people to come from the surrounding areas to worship.  There are pictures there of the six ceremonial monuments and altars that they found underwater at that location.

 These are some of the pieces they brought up from below depths.  They are pretty intricate and so well preserved for being down in the water so long.

The lake is actually surrounded by 12 small towns that are each named after one of Christ's apostles. We decided to take a boat ride across the lake to San Juan and San Pedro although we ran out of time to get to San Pedro.  Saving it for next trip. The lake was smooth as glass going over (about 25 minutes) but in the afternoon coming back it got REALLY CHOPPY with white caps on the waves!

Each of the small cities has a specialty and San Juan specializes in making textiles, the whole process starting from raw cotton.

This lady belongs to an association of women who work together to make fabrics and woven things to sell.  She showed us the whole process from the raw cotton to weaving.  She had two different shades of natural cotton, the brown and the white which she removed the seeds from by hand and then beat it with sticks to make it ready to spin into thread.

She just takes a piece of cotton and starts spinning it onto this little spindle in the bowl to make thread.

 She then went through all the plants that they use to make the natural dye for the thread.  Amazing!

They use different parts of the plants like leaves, bark, seeds, etc.  This is showing how they use a metate to crush the seeds they use for the color orange.  They they boil the plant parts in water for 2 hours before they dip the hanks of thread in them.  The pots to dip them in are over to the right.

 Then we got to see one of the women in the association weaving a scarf from the cotton threads that had been dyed right there.  She is using a back-strap loom.  Don't you love their tipica clothes?

We had not intended to do any shopping but we went across the street to this association's store and couldn't resist some of their beautiful things.  Aren't these bags cute with their bows on the side?

This was our yummy lunch which was certainly big enough for both of us to share.  Fresh fish right from Lake  Atitlan.

 We rode back to Panajachel through very rough chopping waters and got rather wet from the sprays.  Next time we will remember to return earlier in the afternoon.

  We relaxed a bit at a beautiful hotel right on the lake edge which had some lovely gardens.  This area had huge bunches of bananas hanging right there in the garden.

 These flowers were so unusual I couldn't resist and few pics of them too.  All in all, it was another wonderful Guatemalan adventure!  But we saved a few things for next time too.

I promise I will get at our travel postings soon but life is pretty full here throughout the week at the temple.  Glad we have Mondays for p-days. Although I missed my trip to the mercado for all the wonderful fresh fruits and veggies that we love so much here.  Maybe tomorrow.