Day to Panejachel.

The lake surrounded by volcanoes and Mayan villages. The town away from it all. I forgot - rainy season, and it all seems very much like some distant idea. If there's so much cloud cover that virtually everything is impossible to see, it becomes a very different place. I took one of the tourist buses there to Panajachal and the shots I took while I was waiting for the bus tended to be better than those I took in Panejachel or on the way there. I wasn't blessed with good conditions today but I guess a good photographer would always aim at using the conditions to the best advantage. There was a strong and sudden downpour as soon as I got to Panajachel which made working very difficult though I don't know if there was a lot that I could do that I just didn't really attempt to do.

I don't wish to engage in self-beating to the extent that I could do over the lack of success I've had photographically since I've been here but I do feel that the best is yet to come. I haven't managed to capture the essence of the chicken bus, overcrowded, the fare-boy hanging out of the buses' folding door with all manner of individual trying to get through the crowd to get off at their stop. Today was so wet it was quite shocking. It did make me think about Romancing the Stone which I went to see when I was about 15 on an extremely damp day. It was a Sunday, mid-afternoon and I was sat soggy in the Odeon Queensway almost soaked to the skin as I was today watching a film about the escapades of Michael Douglas in a rainy season Guatemala. Some people may get unjustly romantic about tropical storms but I don't think they're that different in Plymouth, Manchester or in Birmingham.

The time I arrived in Panajachel was just after four and although I'd had a brief wander down to the edge of the lake I don't think that I spent longer than about thirty minutes there. The miscalculation that I'd made was that I could get back in the evening without any problems. The journey there was about two hours in a very nippily driven tourist van, which only had one accident on the way there with us knocking into a cyclist who seemed to indicate that the accident was his fault as he pulled at his cycle jammed under the van. Weaving in and out of traffic on half finished roads constantly speeding up and slowing down to overtake as much en route as was possible was just about as much as I could recall from the driving there. There does tend to be some onus on getting tourists off the chicken buses, the american school buses which have been bought up, painted lavishly and then put on the most local of local routes around Guatemala and to me there is not only little reason for this, it actually cuts out much of the more enjoyable aspects of life in Guatemala. While getting tourists off the chicken buses may be a priority (and for whatever reason the home office has elected to inform british subjects that chicken buses may not be safe, the tourist buses are driven by idiots who think that time is the only factor in a journey) getting them back on them should be a priority too. It was vaguely reminiscent of being on a happy bus at about 12.45 at night on the way home from Birmingham city centre to Hall Green in the late 1980's. There would occasionally be a driver who was keen to finish his shift and would burn the rubber of the double decker tyres like there was no tomorrow. Sometimes you would wonder if Nigel Mansell's part time job was to drive drunk people home to suburban Birmingham from the city centre.

Anyway, after a rather threatening journey there which involved scrapes and death defying stunts, I found myself in what felt like the wettest place on earth. It was only coming down at the rate of about an inch an hour or so and I didn't really think too long about staying the night in the town on the off chance of better weather the next day when I was as likely to find the day soggy again. The tour agencies I came into contact with tended to deny that there were any buses back, largely because the wanted to get me on one of the dangerous tourist buses back to Antigua the next morning at twice the cost of the local buses and I managed to get to a chicken but which took me via Solore to Los Chichuanos and then onto Chichatuanita. It was only about a four hour journey on the chicken bus at about half of the cost of the tourist bus.

It didn't take me long to get back to the house and get a few beers on the way. The fridges in the house are full at present largely because of the celebration taking place tomorrow for Lorena's birthday. She's the 'landlady' whose birthday it is tomorrow. Then out to find a place with internet connection and somewhere I can plug in the laptop which has a battery life of about twenty minutes at present. I'm sat in one of Antigua's trendier cafe's with film soundtrack blaring away behind the screen I sit and write on.

Today was as a result a day when I didn't manage to get on youtube and was spent trying to take in as much of the local culture as possible. Generally, I would imagine that Panajachel is somewhere this can happen but I guess that my mind was unfortunately very closed and the cliche of riding the chicken bus was all I was going to achieve today.