Well, we’ve been on the road for a few days now, and it dawned on me that we never quite finished our pre-trip “how-to” type posts. So today, we’re officially releasing our daily budget.

Our daily budget for two people is $100 Canadian Dollars per day. This figure includes airfare, food, lodging, new clothes, replacing stolen cameras, and each and every other expense we may incur on the road.

To keep on budget, we have the following tricks up our sleeve that we intend to use at some point:

• Volunteer in exchange for food and lodging, or a portion there of.
• Avoid pre-arranged tours, and the tour operator’s cut.
• Travel overland where possible, avoiding expensive flights.
• Buy groceries and cook for ourselves more often than not (we love cooking anyways).
• Do our own laundry.
• Don’t buy “stuff” unless necessary.
• Couchsurfing.
• Stay in locations long enough to get a good price on accommodation. Often there are discounts for stays of a week or longer, over a month apartments can generally be rented cheaply.

Our running daily total can be found on our statistics page. Ashley diligently writes down our expenditures in a little notebook and later transfers them to a nifty little site called budgetyourtrip.com, so we always know how far above or below our goal we are.

Country Summary (so far):

These numbers do not completely jive with our goal, as they do not include airfare, or other transportation between countries.  But none the less, they give you an idea of what it costs by day for the two of us country by country.

Mexico: $51.80 CAD
Guatemala: $43.04 CAD ($24.97 excluding Spanish classes and camera replacement)
Belize: $42.44 CAD
Honduras: $52.97 CAD ($25.28 excluding diving)
Costa Rica: $52.68 CAD
Nicaragua: $31.84 CAD
El Salvador: $23.26 CAD
Austria: $55.00 CAD
Bulgaria: $12.32 CAD (not including buying a house and car)
Turkey: $42.44 CAD

European Cities
Barcelona: $52.97 CAD
Paris: $107.16 CAD
Vienna: $80.01 CAD
Zagreg: $20.97 CAD
Belgrade: $16.73 CAD

To me, San Pedro La Laguna was a paradoxical town where you always had to walk uphill to get where you’re going. Seriously, it’s the town our Grandpas always talked about – you know… “I had to walk uphill both ways to school”? That’s San Pedro.

San Pedro La Laguna, from Volcan San Pedro

We lived there for six weeks, and the sounds of the town will forever be burned into my memory. So I thought I’d share them here…

Tortilla Making

It doesn’t matter what time of day it is (5 a.m. or 9 p.m.) or what part of town you’re in (except for Gringoland, which we usually avoided), you can always hear the slap-slap-slap of tortilla making somewhere nearby. We didn’t encounter a single machine pressed tortilla in San Pedro… each one was handmade and delicious.

You can always find tortillas at the markets, but you need to follow the sounds of tortilla-making to someone’s home for the best ones…

Explosions

Several times throughout the day, there were loud explosions from fireworks and firecrackers. Even after six weeks, I still jumped every time I heard one of the big bangs. We asked around and learned that the explosions are part of local celebrations… birthdays, political gatherings, the purchase of a new chicken… it seems if anything happens of note, there must be a bang to go with it.

Marching Bands

Marching bands appear to be ingrained in Guatemalan culture. Every school has one, and the matching feathered caps to go with it. They have a huge competition for Independence Day (September 15). Since any good marching band needs practice (and so do the bad ones, which we heard our share of), we had the pleasure of waking up to the sounds of them some days (at 5 a.m. on election day) and hearing them throughout the streets of San Pedro nearly every day.

OK, this marching band isn’t actually marching… and it’s in Xela… but you get the point

Turkeys

I can’t forget the turkeys. Chickens, roosters, and turkeys ruled the town. We often heard them scratching on one of the corrugated tin roofs nearby and we woke up/studied/fell asleep to their cries each day.

Turkeys on a roof

Political Rallies & Songs

Because we arrived about six weeks before the election, and left the day after, we were serenaded with the sounds of nightly political rallies. Our hotel happened to be half a block away from the incumbent mayor’s political headquarters. His name was Chico Mendoza and he had three of his own songs. They were blasted from about 8:00 p.m. until 11:00 or so. We later found out, as we were walking through Centro in Xela, that he actually just ripped off popular songs by rewriting the lyrics. Nonetheless, here’s our favourite (we even have a dance that goes with it, but I’ll leave that to your imagination):

What are some of the sounds you’ve come to know (and love) at your favourite travel destination?

According to our neighbour, San Pedro is conducive to sloth. You would have no trouble spending your days looking out over the beautiful lake, reading a book, and eating out at top-notch restaurants. Likewise, it would be just as easy to consume your evenings with your favourite beverage, some live music, or a movie. Rinse and repeat.

To be fair, we had no shortage of sloth filled days while we were in San Pedro. And we enjoyed every relaxing minute of them. That said, we were also able to waste away a few days in slightly less sloth filled pursuits or day trips. Most of them were arranged through our Spanish School.

Zip-lining:

Just up the hill from San Pedro, near Santa Clara exists the Chuira-X-amolo zip-lines. They proudly boast to be the longest zip-line in Central America at 400 meters, though a quick google search proves their claim false. Still, zipping 400m between two mountains with a deep gorge between them and a fantastic view over Lake Atitlan was worth the trip. The second I cleared the trees and found myself suspended so high, I was in awe. So much so that I forgot to snap a photo… sorry.

There are a total of two zip-lines at this park, the first being somewhat shorter than the second, and a platform at the highest point of the mountain where you get a chance to practice some rappelling. If you’re lucky with your timing, you can witness the local Catholic/Mayans performing a service at the Mayan alter. Their mournful wailing creates a strange juxtaposition to your adventure sport. It was eerie, and certainly added to the experience. We paid Q150 per person including transportation.

A view from the bottom of the 400m zip-line

Coffee Plant Tour:

On the outskirts of San Pedro exists a cooperative coffee plant where the local farmers bring their coffee for processing. When we visited, coffee season had not yet begun and the machines were in various states of assembly as workers made repairs and alterations in preparation for the upcoming season which begins in November.

Because we took this tour with our Spanish School, we opted to have a Spanish speaking guide. We pretty much understood everything that was said, and took turns translating into English for the benefit of the rest of the group.

The basic process is quite simple. The lightweight (floats in water) coffee beans are first separated out for local consumption. For these “garbage beans” no more processing is required aside from a quick roasting.

The good beans that are meant for export are next sent to have their pulps removed followed by a three day soaking in water to remove some of the acidity from the beans. Once the beans have soaked, they are separated based on density in a sluice with the most dense beans being of the highest quality. Finally, the beans are sun dried for 5 days and either shipped as is, or roasted by hand and packaged both ground and whole.

The waste water is further processed by filtering, and treating with lime to reduce the acidity to a point where it can be re-used for processing or released into the lake. The pulp from the beans is stockpiled and fed to worms to make compost. The resulting compost is sold as inexpensive fertilizer and is highly prized for its ability to be used for many years without any negative effects unlike chemical fertilizer which has been known to “burn out” farm land when applied in heavy doses.

This same cooperative also produces honey and pollen. If you’d like to purchase their products, or arrange your own tour, they have a store just up the hill from the Pana Dock.

Soaking ponds and pulp remover

Kayaking:

This one is pretty self explanatory. You can rent kayaks from either dock for Q15, or from the Hotel San Francisco for only Q10 per hour. As for where to go, there is a swimming beach just past the point of Volcan San Pedro marked by a wooden dock, and good rocks to jump off of near San Marcos.

Climbing the Indian Nose:

The Indian Nose

Named for its appearance (can you see the profile of a face looking up with its mouth open?) the Indian Nose stands 1,800 meters above sea level (I think…) and can be reached from two routes. The shorter begins in Santa Clara, and requires only a half hour or so of walking to reach the summit. The longer starts in San Juan and requires a 2-3 hour assent. We split the difference taking the long way up, and the short way down. Transportation to either location is easy to arrange by pickup near the market and park in San Pedro. We paid Q50 each for entry fees and a guide from the school.

Volcan San Pedro:

This is the big volcano at 3,020 meters, although on our way to Xela our driver told us it was only a volcanito (little volcano). None the less, we thought it was pretty big, and the views were spectacular. We left San Pedro at 5:30AM and arrived back by 12:00. That included a little bit of time for transportation, and an hour long break at the top of the Volcano. I highly highly highly recommend leaving early for this hike, especially during the rainy season. We were lucky and had great visibility while we were at the top, but the clouds were already rolling in by the time we started our decent. The cost was Q100 per person and included a guide.

The guide is not optional. About two and a half years ago, there were a lot of robberies on this trail. We were told that the bandits used to hide out in the trees with full sized automatic weapons and would steal everything (shoes, watches, backpacks, everything). Since then, the government has made the volcano into a national park, and now it is regularly patrolled by police officers. It seemed quite safe to us.

Us at the top of Volcan San Pedro

Clouds rolling in during the descent

Stuff We Didn’t Do:

There’s lots more to do that we didn’t find the time for:

• A day trip to Chi-Chi on Thursday or Sunday to see one of the largest markets around.
• Paragliding over Lake Atitlan
• Horseback Riding
• Scuba Diving
• Exploring the surrounding towns and villages.

Just because we didn’t fit these activities in does not mean that they are no good. On the contrary, everyone we spoke to who had done these activities had nothing but good things to say about them. As such, we are still wrestling with the idea of returning to San Pedro to take in some more activities, and chill a little while longer on the balcony of Hotel San Francisco.

When we set out on this RTW trip, we wanted to travel light. And here we are, 74 days later, 44 pounds lighter in Quetzaltenango (Xela), Guatemala.

44 pounds, you say? What happened to the 44 pounds? Well, we finally found a weigh scale here in Xela, so here’s the breakdown:
– 20 pounds of fat were lost by Mike
– 23 pounds of fat were lost by Ashley
– 1 digital camera-shaped pound was lost by both of us, thanks to a clever pickpocket at the Independence Fair here in Xela. Therefore, we have no pictures for this post… though we’re currently working to remedy that situation. Note: The only pictures we actually lost were the ones of the fair… everything else was backed up.

Now, it’s probably worth noting that our goal for this trip was not necessarily to lose weight. It was to live healthier, happier, and more active lives than we were before. The weight loss is just a happy side effect.

The Diet

Despite cake lady’s best efforts, we’ve been eating almost exclusively healthy, fresh, and local food. We cook about 2/3 of our meals and most of our ingredients come from local mercados, or markets. We don’t stock up on food, either. We prefer to buy fresh produce, bread, and tortillas the day we plan to eat them. We’ve been joking with each other about how we’ve practically become vegetarians… we only eat meat about 3 or 4 meals a week. Otherwise, it’s fresh vegetables, rice, beans, tortillas, pasta, and fruit for us. And Mike loves his cashews (even though they cost twice the price of meat). Despite the title of this section we are not actually on a diet… we still regularly indulge in banana bread, Texas BBQ, tacos, tostadas, and pretty much anything else that looks or smells good to us.

The Active Lifestyle

Our favourite way to get oriented in a new place is to go for a walk. We spend a lot of time each day just walking… to the market in the morning, to the bakery in the evening, to the museums, the parks, or really anywhere else we want to go. The only time we pay for public transit (taxis, buses, or tuk tuks) is if our safety would be in jeopardy, or if the distance is really just too far to go on foot (10k+).

We’re not just losing weight, either, we’re building muscle and developing our cardiovascular systems. For example, when we first got to San Pedro, we were ready to collapse at the school after carrying our backpacks up the hill. By the end of that first day, it was all I could do to lay in bed after all the hills and stairs (of the dozen hotels we checked out with rooms on the top floor). I honestly wasn’t sure if I could even climb the volcano, I felt so out of shape.

Six weeks later, we have climbed the Indian Nose (1800m) and the Volcan San Pedro (3020m), gone on kayaking excursions, and don’t even break a sweat climbing the hill to the market.

I have also started doing pilates most mornings and Mike practices karate now and again.

The Result

In general, we feel better, have more energy, and are enjoying life. Our clothes, which were on the tight side when we left, are way too big for us… wearing a belt is not optional anymore. In fact, I had to cut three inches off my belt just to make it a reasonable length. Currently, we are looking forward to climbing one or more of the volcanoes here in Xela… we might even have another camera by then to take some pictures 🙂

I guess it´s true, travel is good for the waist line.

On Friday we finished what was 5 weeks of Spanish Class for me, and 6 weeks for Ashley. We took our classes at the Cooperativa Spanish School located just up the hill from the Santiago Dock. The school (or escuela) is located in the middle of a well kept garden full of flowers and various fruit bearing plants including lemon trees and coffee plants. Inside the garden there are roughly a dozen thatched roofs covering an equal number of tables and twice that number of chairs. All instruction here is 1 on 1 with a qualified instructor (as in university trained). As for the school itself, I really have nothing but good things to say.  However, since they are not paying me to write this, I’ll try to keep it brief:

• The instructors are friendly, helpful and knowledgeable.
• A portion (10%) of all tuition is given out as food aid to 20 different needy families in San Pedro. As a student, you are given the opportunity to visit one of these families and deliver the food yourself every second week.  A very rewarding experience.
• The school is not just for foreigners. The teachers also teach Spanish to the local population, many of whom speak only their indigenous Mayan Language.
• Outside of class time, they provide free activities several nights a week. The general staples are movies on Tuesdays (illustrating Central American history, sometimes graphic, always tear-jerkers), salsa classes on Wednesdays and conferences on Thursdays (where a live speaker comes to speak about and answer questions on a topic of local importance in Spanish).
• Other excursions the school arranged at minimal extra cost.  Examples include a kayaking trip to the beach, traditional weaving classes, zip-lining, a coffee plantation tour, and hiking to the top of two mountains (the Indian Nose and the San Pedro Volcano).

I’d like to thank Scott and Shawna from Get Up And Globe for telling us about this school, we thoroughly enjoyed our time here.

Mike and his teacher Lucy

What we learned in 5+ weeks:

When we first started looking into Spanish Classes, we really wanted to know just how long we would need to take classes for until we could speak Spanish. Our goal was not just to be able to order a drink in a bar or book a hotel room, but to be able to actually have a conversation with someone.

To give you an idea of where we started, here are a few of the things we actually said in Spanish because we didn’t know any better:

She believes in fish
Where I live it is very plate
Can we room tomorrow one night corn

We were truly that good.

Ashley and her teacher Flores

So, after 5 weeks of study, you’re probably wondering if we’ve reached our goal. Honestly, not quite, but we are close. I think the knowledge base is there, it’s just a matter of getting out there and practising. We can generally understand most of what is said to us and we can get our point across fairly well too.  Unfortunately, it still takes us a fair amount of time to think of the words we are trying to say and to conjugate our verbs.  Most of what we require now is practice.

Personally, I think 5 weeks has been a great introduction to Spanish. For me, it wasn’t until about half way through week 5 that I was able to understand almost all of what was being said to me.  Any less, and I could still get by, but I wouldn’t have been nearly as conversational as I am now.

Here’s an idea of the language concepts we learned to say. Of course, we can also turn them into questions or negate them.

I do this
I’m doing this
I have done this
I had done that
I will have done this
I probably did that
I did this
I was doing this
I am going to do this
I will do this
I might do this
I do this for you
I do it
Do this

Really, a good chunk of the practical parts of a language. There’s still a lot more lessons for us to learn, for example on my last day of class my instructor estimated that it would take me another 3 weeks to complete their program. I may go back to class if I find there are a few concepts I can’t wrap my head around, but it seems to me the more I practice the better I get, and the rest may just fall into place without the need for more direct instruction.

The teachers of Cooperativa and our giant selves

While we still have lots of posts to come from San Pedro (since we’ve been living here for over a month), we thought we would jump into real time for a moment to share our latest news with you…

We have decided to leave San Pedro (gasp!) and head to Quetzaltenango (better known as Xela, pronounced “shay – la”) NEXT WEEK!

Surprised?  So were we.

Just Sunday, we told our families via Skype that we would be in San Pedro for another month.  On Monday morning, we read about the huge festival and fair in Xela for Independence Day called Feria Centroamericana de Independencia in the newspaper.  At 16:00, I asked my teacher about it since she had lived in Xela for nine months.  Although the festival is two weeks long, she told me the best days are the 13th, 14th, and 15th of September.  At 18:00, I shared all that I had learned with Mike and at 18:30 we had a new plan… finish Spanish classes this week, leave San Pedro on Monday morning and arrive in Xela in time for the festival.

At first we were filled with excitement about the new adventure.  Then, I was surprised to realize, the excitement gave way to anxiety.

Even though we’ve been away from home for two months now, it kind of feels like we’re leaving on our RTW trip all over again.  San Pedro really has become a new home to us.  And, as all you travelers out there would know, leaving home comes with the worries of packing, planning, researching (although we tend to this more in the thick of things rather than ahead of time), and making reservations (especially since the city will be packed for the festival).

All of a sudden, we had too many groceries left to eat and not enough time to see the sights we still want to see in San Pedro (not to mention, climb the Volcano that’s been calling to us since Day One).

There’s an easy solution here, though… after Xela, we’re going to return! At least that’s the plan, we think… who knows what will happen between now and then?

Xela here we come!

6:30 a.m.

Wake up.  Check to see if the water is working.  It’s not.

6:35 a.m.

Mike climbs up on the roof to see what today’s water problem is.  There’s no water in the tank.  The son of the hotel owner is supposed to look after this, but we find it’s easier to take care of it ourselves (well… let’s be honest… for Mike to take care of it).  Mike goes down four flights of stairs to plug in the pump, and we wait for about 20-30 minutes until the tank fills up.

7:00 a.m.

Mike goes back up to the roof to siphon the water through our room’s pipe.  We are lucky enough to have the only pipe that is stuck in the top of the rooftop tank.  The others are properly connected to the bottom.

7:05 a.m.

We take turns showering.  It’s anyone’s guess how warm the water will be today.. anything from lukewarm to steaming hot (if there’s not enough pressure, there’s no hot water at all… but this can easily be fixed by sending Mike up to the roof).  The electric shower head is finicky.  You can adjust the temperature by adjusting the water pressure… the more pressure, the less heat.  It requires precision and skill to get a hot shower, finding the exact level of pressure that will give you the hottest shower without making the electric heating element cut out.  I’ve learned that under no circumstances should you touch it while it’s operating (or bring your razor near it).  Zap.

7:30 a.m.

Mike goes downstairs to make us pancakes for breakfast, while I make the bed and straighten up the room.  I eat the first few hot cakes with New Zealand butter (the only type of butter you can find in all of San Pedro) and syrup, then take over cooking while Mike eats his.  We do dishes together.

8:00 a.m.

Market time!  The only way you can get fresh fruit, veggies, or meat is to go to the market.  It opens at about 8:00 and is usually shut down by noon.  From our hotel, it’s two blocks straight uphill.  We buy a couple slices of piña (pineapple) for 1 queztal each (12.5 cents CAD) and return to our balcony to feast on its sweetness (with only a slight hint of acidity, unlike the green-picked pineapple we get in Canada). We linger on the balcony, enjoying the warm sunshine and views of the lakes and surrounding mountains.

8:30 a.m.

Today is laundry day.  We haul our laundry and our camp soap down to the kitchen and handwash our clothes in the same sink we did our dishes in this morning.  I wash, Mike rinses and wrings, and then I re-wring the clothes so they might actually have a hope of drying before it rains this afternoon.  Then we hang them up amongst the corn plants in the hotel courtyard.  (After four weeks of this process, the hotel owner showed us the secret room that has a washing machine in it.  She lets us use the spin cycle for 5 minutes so the clothes are almost dry before we hang them up).

9:00 a.m.

We return to our balcony and sit on the hammocks to do our Spanish homework.  Inevitably we have a small fight over who should get to use the only Spanish-English dictionary.  For some reason, Mike usually seems to win.  I did most of my homework last night, so I spent about half an hour doing pilates while Mike finishes up.

10:00 a.m.

We lounge about outside, reading, writing, or playing games.  We went to the school yesterday to use the internet, so today we’re just enjoying some free time.

11:00 a.m.

We start thinking about lunch and realize we should have bought something at the market.  I head to the market and buy an avocado, tomatoes, green onions, garlic and lime (sometimes lemon, since they look the same… lemons here can be green, yellow, or orange).  I head back to the hotel, sweating from the heat of the day, the hills, and the four flights of stairs.

12:00 p.m.

Mike and I prepare lunch together.  He heats up some leftover beans from yesterday (we learned an important lesson about how long it takes to cook dried beans our first week here… now we borrow a pressure cooker from the hotel owner and make a big batch for the week).  I make a quick guacamole.  We go buy eight hot, fresh, handmade tortillas for 2 quetzales from the lady next door (so convenient… and they are the best we’ve had anywhere!).  We sit down and enjoy the food together.

1:00 p.m.

More reading or studying.  Mike is memorizing verbs on the flashcards and I am trying to plow through the story of Beauty and the Beast in Spanish (that’s right… my teacher gives me children’s books to read!).

1:45 p.m.

We share a rosca (a delicious hard cookie that is only made for festivals here… they won’t have any more for sale until June), bring our laundry in since it will inevitably rain, then pack up our books, sweaters, and rain jackets and head to school.  Three minutes later, we sit down and check email and Facebook messages on my former iPhone before class starts.

2:00 p.m.

We meet up with our teachers and find a nice cabaña in the garden for classes.  We each have our own teachers – everything is one-on-one instruction here.  For the next four hours, we speak nothing but Spanish (slowly and awkwardly, but nonetheless Spanish).

6:00 p.m.

We walk back to our hotel.  It’s cold, raining, and almost dark.  On the way, we stop at a tienda to buy some pasta and tomato sauce for supper (only 7 quetzales in total).  We avoid the river running down the steep streets, and cook the pasta.

7:00 p.m.

We eat our supper on our balcony since the rain has let up, watching the lights of the other towns surrounding the lake.  There’s a few fireworks above the hills across the lake.  I go downstairs to wash the dishes.

7:30 p.m.

We curl up inside our hotel room and read books, do homework, or otherwise relax.

9:00 p.m.

There is a knock at the door with the familiar call of “Pastel!  Chocolate!”  Cake Lady is here (I knew her name for about 10 minutes, but I’ve forgotten it).  Cake Lady has visited our room every night since we’ve arrived (except Sundays).  Tonight, we can’t resist the smell of the chocolate cake.  She gives us the largest piece in her tupperware tub, we pay her 10 quetzales, and share the cake.

9:30 p.m.

I am starting to fall asleep reading my book in bed (this one’s in English… my head can’t take any more Spanish today).  We brush our teeth.  I put on my long underwear because this night, like the last two, is exceptionally cold.

10:00 p.m.

Zzzzzzz……