Planes, a Train, Automobiles and a Boat to Yoga Camp on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala

Well, the train part is a bit of stretch because its only the tram in the Atlanta airport between terminals but otherwise the title of this post pretty well describes my travel day tomorrow.   A group of about 15 yogis from Minneapolis are going to a yoga retreat with our teacher, Momi Jhung, at Villa Sumaya on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala for a week.  My wife, who is not coming on this trip, refers to it as "yoga camp".

In previous years Momi has taken groups to Tulum, Mexico but it has gotten so developed we wanted to try somewhere different this year.  I did some internet research and found several places in Belize, Honduras and Gautemala and Momi chose Villa Sumaya.  However, one day in class a couple of months ago she said,"We're going to Guatemala and if nobody likes it we'll blame it on Dave". She was just kidding of course.  But still, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it turns out well. 

On Saturday at 5:30 a.m. we fly from Minneapolis to Atlanta and then from there fly to Guatemala City, arriving in the early afternoon.   We then drive about 3 hours west of Guatemala City on a winding mountain road to the town of Panajachel, an 800 year old pueblo with a population of about 14,000.  From there we take a boat to Villa Sumaya in Santa Cruz la Laguna, because there is no access by road.

 

The lake is at about 5,000 feet and has three volcanos on the south side.  Santa Cruz la Laguna where we will be staying is on the north side.The Mayan word "Atitlan" translates as "the place where the rainbow gets its colors" and according to Wikipedia, Aldous Huxley once wrote "Lake Como, it seems to me, touches on the limit of permissibly picturesque, but Atitlán is Como with additional embellishments of several immense volcanoes. It really is too much of a good thing." But you know how the Brits prefer understatement.

 

 "Lago de Atitlán 2009" by chensiyuan - chensiyuan. Licensed under GFDL via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lago_de_Atitl%C3%A1n_2009.JPG#mediaviewer/File:Lago_de_Atitl%C3%A1n_2009.JPG

As best I can make out studying the maps it seems like the picture above would have been in the hills above Panajachel looking to the south in the morning.

This is a picture from the Villa Sumaya dock
 

I'll be posting a lot of my own pictures next week. 


 

Return to Minneapolis

We left Kuala Lumpur on January 2nd on a 10:50 a.m. flight to Tokyo and arrived at about 6 p.m.  Our flight on to Minneapolis was not until January 3rd at about 5 p.m. so we collected our bags and stayed overnight again at the Narita Airport Hilton hotel.  We considered going into Narita to sightsee the following day before our flight but it was very windy and about 15 degrees colder than we anticipated and having left our winter clothes in Minneapolis, we decided to sleep in and laze about all day before our flight.

For some reason we got upgraded to Business Class on our flight from Narita to Minneapolis.  I liked the fact that I didn't have anybody tilting their chair back towards me and the food and service was obviously much better, but the seat per se wasn't that great.   When I reclined it to the sleeping position I could not get comfortable and changed it back to the seated position to get a couple of hours sleep.   The total flight time back to Minneapolis from Narita was only about 10 1/2 hours so there must have been a pretty stout tail wind.  Because of crossing the International Date line we arrived in Minneapolis on January 3rd at 1 p.m. - i.e., four hours earlier on the same date we left Japan.

At the Minneapolis airport they now have automated kiosks for answering the immigration questions and giving your fingerprints and it went very quickly.  Its a very nice improvement over the old system.

We had a great time on our trip and loved seeing Amy, Justin and the G-Kids!

Morning at Jump Street and Afternoon Horseback Riding Lesson

On New Year's Eve day we took the girls to Jump Street, a place with different trampoline activities, in the morning.  Kuala Lumpur has a LOT of very nice activities for kids.  Their children's museum, which I wrote about in a post regarding our first trip here over a year ago is amazing; much nicer than anything I've seen in the states.  And I've not seen anything like Jump Street in the states either.  My daughter said that she has seen something similar but that it was much more expensive:

After Jump Street we had lunch at a Wendy's, which is a little bit different in translation to Malaysia.  Then in the afternoon, the girls had horseback riding lessons again.

Return to Kuala Lumpur

On Tuesday, December 30, we left the Oberoi Hotel in Lombok and returned back to Kuala Lumpur.  We had a wonderful stay at the Oberoi.  The Ocean View villas are fantastic, the food in the restaurant was excellent and the staff throughout the hotel was among the best I have ever seen.  The public areas and grounds are immaculate, the rooms are amazing, and the views gorgeous.  It seemed to us that the ratio of staff to guests was almost 1-to-1 and all the staff were very friendly.  The only downside to the hotel was that the beach area was not the best in that it was very shallow water for quite some distance out into the water and there were a lot of rocks and coral in the water.  However, in light of all the other superlative features of the hotel I rank it among the very top hotels I've stayed at.

The hour and a half drive back to the Lombok airport was exotic, for a Midwesterner: motorbikes and horse carts everywhere on the roads with our driver passing the vehicle ahead of us on the right while another motorbike (and sometimes another car, truck or horse cart) was coming at us in the other lane.  I flinched on more than a few of the passes On this drive we saw a lot of farmers working in the rice fields; some plowing with water buffalos and some plowing with motorized hand plows similar to the one pictured below.






 There were also a lot of people stooped over planting rice by hand.  I would have liked to have stopped and taken pictures but with no shoulder and heavy traffic it would have been hard to pull over and we didn't want to risk not getting to the airport on time.  When we did get to the airport, one of the Oberoi drivers came in with us and got us in the right line at the Air Asia counter before heading back to the hotel.

Our three hour Air Asia flight back to Kuala Lumpur was on time and without incident.  I confess that when I took my seat  I did a close read of the safety placard (which I normally never do) and verified that there was in fact a life vest under my seat.  I decided to do that because they announced that taking them from the plane was a criminal offense punishable by three years in prison and a large fine.  I figured if they felt the need to make such an announcement it must happen with some regularity.  In any event, our flight was uneventful.  However, Justin said he thought people would break out clapping when the plane safely landed.

Even though we had only been in Lombok for four nights, the contrast when we returned to Kuala Lumpur was startling.  From two lanes with hordes of motorbikes and horsecarts in Lombok to six lane freeways in Kuala Lumpur back to Amy's house.  At one point I thought our driver in KL was going particularly fast and when I looked over his shoulder at the speedometer I saw that he was going 180 km/hour (108 mph)!