Antigua – Hablas español?

Next on my journey through Guatemala was Antigua. Antigua is a small city surrounded by volcanoes in southern Guatemala. It’s renowned for its Spanish colonial buildings, many of them restored following a 1773 earthquake that ended Antigua’s 200-year reign as Guatemala’s colonial capital. I quickly fell in love with this town for multiple reasons.

1. I had my own room and it was affordable. You think that isn’t something to fall in love with, but if you are backpacking for months and months and you sleep in dorms for the majority of time, having your own room becomes quite special. It was so nice to be able to unpack all my belongings, close the door and be on my own. There is always limited space in dorms, so you pretty much live out of your backpack and privacy is a foreign concept.

2. The cobble stones, the squares and streets full of locals still dressed in traditional clothing. Even though Antigua is quite westernised, I loved walking through town every day seeing the locals in their colourful clothes. At every corner you can see vendors selling fruit or souvenirs.

3. The cute cafés with great food and coffee. It doesn’t come as a surprise that the coffee was great in Antigua. After all Guatemala is known for its fantastic coffee and one would say that it produces some of the best coffee worldwide. It is currently the 10th largest producer of coffee in the world. Coffee from Guatemala is known to be sweet with a medium to full body and lots of chocolate flavor notes. I spent a lot of my time in cafés, sipping on a coffee and writing my blogs or just researching my next steps.

4. Antigua is full of cheap but excellent language schools. Ever since starting my trip I had the plan to learn Spanish. However, the prices in the countries that I visited before were very steep. Thank good for Antigua. I ended up studying for a whole week, one-on-one, 4 hours a day for US$90. In hindsight, I should have stayed another week to practice some more. I learned a lot during that week, but I can already feel how I’m loosing a lot of what I learned and I still haven’t quite gotten over the fear of speaking Spanish. Nonetheless, the teacher was fantastic and it was great to finally be able to communicate a little in Spanish.

5. Seeing volcanoes wherever you look. Antigua’s location is quite unique. Antigua is surrounded by three gorgeous volcanoes (one which is VERY active and gives off smoke daily). I didn’t do too many excursions, because I did the Spanish course. However, I did decide to climb Volcano Acatenango. This trip deserves its own post, so more about this trip later, but let’s say it was a once in a lifetime experience. (read post here)

6. The chicken buses. Chicken buses are the local buses, that are converted US school buses. The special thing about them is that the owners take great pride in decorating them by painting them and also installing cool lights. It’s so much fun to see all these colourful buses drive through town with people yelling out of the open door ‘Guate, Guate, Guate’, which is short for Guatemala City. My accommodation was close to the exit of the town, so every night I could see and hear the buses leave town.

All in all I had a fantastic time in Antigua, so much so, that I came back for another few days after my stay at Lake Atitlán, which I will write about as well. Come back soon for my story about my trip up Volcano Acatenango. Until then, Sabine xxx

Check out the photos and videos below. Click on the thumbnail to enlarge images.

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