Day Trip to San Juan

Yesterday, 12 of us visited San Juan on the west side of Lake Atitlan.  We took a boat with our guide, Domingo Juan Solis, who is with www.tours-atitlan.com.  He was very knowledgeable and friendly.  Everyone in our group really liked him.

We all enjoyed San Juan more than Panajachel or Santa Cruz.   San Juan was much less busy and less commercialized than Panajachel and had more cultural attractions than Santa Cruz.  The people were very friendly and there were murals on the walls everywhere.  Also, unlike Panajachel, in San Juan it is illegal for vendors to approach you on the street so you are not constantly hassled about buying something.  It really stands out as a charming village.    I asked Domingo how long they had been doing murals on the walls and he said only about 15 years, "since the tourists have been coming here."  He also said they change the murals every year and some of them are quite extraordinary.

There were a lot of interesting street scenes.

One of the highlights was our stop at Casa Flor Ixcaco, the Tejedoras Mayas Weaving Cooperative, which has 22 women weavers who all work indepently at home and return finished products to the store to be sold.  The women are provided with cotton and they work together to naturally make and dye all their materials, including the spinning of natural cotton thread.  At the store they demonstrated that process from spinning to dyeing to weaving with a back strap loom.

This is Mona, who weaves at home, trying her hand at the back strap loom.

After the demonstration I took some pictures of women and some children from the Co-op and then gave them Instax prints.

After that, while most of the group ate their boxed lunch, Mona, Cindy and I went with Domingo to a coffee plantation because Mona wanted to buy unroasted coffee beans for her husband.

This is a picture of a man bringing in some beans in from the hills above the plantation.

These are some pictures of the beans drying and being raked to help the drying.

When we got back to the rest of the group they were playing with four little girls and Krisan said, "You're just in time.  Can you take some pictures of these kids?" So I took a couple, including this one of them holding the prints I gave them.

On the way back we stopped to see a church, the front part of which was built in 1640.  The church was damaged in an earthquake some years ago and they are still working on construction of the back part which which shows a different stone structure.

Shortly after we left the church these two little kids, brother and sister, ran up to me and said "Photograph" and pointed to my camera.  As I was trying to figure out why they were asking me, the little girl on the right in the blue dress in the previous picture came running up waving the picture I gave her.  It turns out the boy and girl are cousins of the girl in the blue dress and she told them to ask me for a picture. 

On the way back to the boat I stopped at an art studio that we had visited when we first arrived in San Juan and bought a painting that really struck me.  Here is a picture of the artist with the painting.

And here is a picture of the artist, Felipe Mendozo. He was working on another painting when I came in his studio and put the paint brush behind his ear.

After I bought the painting he told me that he has painted a large mural in Philadelphia and another one in New York and taught at Rutgers University in New Jersey.