UNESCO Site: Antigua, Guatemala (3)

Asking at the hotel’s front desk produced directions (that we weren’t sure we understood) to the nearest travel agent. Surprisingly, we were standing outside the agent’s door ten minutes later. We walked in, feeling a bit more capable with our Spanish. We wanted to go somewhere warm, sandy and surfy. But close enough that we could be there and back in two days. Was there anything that fit the bill? Why yes, the agent knew just the place. And enough English that a conversation half in English and half in Spanish gave us everything we needed to get there, get back, have a place to stay and not feel like we were getting ripped off. It was perfect, we just needed to be back at the travel agent’s the next morning at eight o’clock to catch the van.
Excited to be in a foreign city, happy that our poor Spanish was enough to get us around, and feeling supremely confident that we were in an abundantly safe town, we wandered the streets taking in the atmosphere. Coming across a little café, the smells and positive vibes drew us inside. We sat, ordered we don’t know what (the menu’s Spanish went beyond our small vocabulary base), split a bottle of Chilean wine, and enjoyed every second of it. We were high from the experience of being on our own where we didn’t fit in, and yet surviving. We were also exhausted and made an early night of it.
Waking the next morning, we made it to the van just in time and settled down for the four hour ride to the ferry. Smooth as silk, we had a ten minute transition from the van to the waiting ‘ferry’, which was really a barge that took people and cars (two maximum) through the swamp to the wonderful paradise of Monterrico. We walked the ten minutes to our hotel and were overly pleased to see it was exactly what we wanted- a black sand beach on the Pacific complete with beach bar serving drinks in coconuts, no shoes and no clocks anywhere in sight. We quickly made friends with Tony, the bartender, and lounged for a day and a half. We knew when we left that we’d be seeing Tony again.