Lake Atitlan

This weekend was the first free weekend we have had yet; we decided as a group that we wanted to go to Guatemala’s famously gorgeous Lake Atitlan.  Lake Atitlan is actually where I say that I fell in love with Guatemala two years ago on my first trip to Central America. It is this beautiful lake surrounded by volcanoes, mountains and beautiful artisan markets.  Because of the lakes beauty, the majority of the property directly surrounding the lake has been bought up by wealthy foreigners. The houses and hostels surrounding the lake are just extravagant mansions.   This weekend we stayed at a very nice hostel  on the lake front, with a sauna, massages and fancy three course meals that all seem very expense in relative to how we have been living in Xela (but still cheap relative to the States).

                The contrast here is hard for me to swallow. While I have undoubtedly had a wonderful relaxing weekend here, it is hard to know that only a few kilometers up the mountains there are communities that are living very impoverished.  Some of these fancy hotels have indigenous people as their staff but I feel like it’s just a front. Look we will hire the locals, even though they only speak Spanish and 95% of our customers do not speak Spanish, or care to because they are simply vacationing here. For example the hostel we are staying at has indigenous women working in the kitchen. As I am sitting here right now writing this the women from the kitchen keep coming out to serve the food to customers, and because they only speak Spanish they have to keep going and getting the rest of the staff who are white foreigners to help  because they cannot read the names on the tickets for the food.            

Something just doesn’t sit well with me. While we sit here and drink our fancy drinks and eat our three course meals, there are people nearby barely surviving. Yesterday we took a boat to a couple towns over and hiked back. We saw more white people than we did locals. I guess whenever a developing county becomes established as a tourist spot, there is always going to be a divide between the locals and the tourist. I am not sure how to reconcile the two.