Dock at panajachel on lake Atitlan

After a 4 hour shuttle bus ride through some of the most arduous roads I have been on this trip including a river crossing we arrived at panajachel right on sunset and boarded a ferry to the lakeside town of Santa Cruz. As our boat went accross the lake I was blown away by the natural beauty of this amazing place and knew that I had made the right decision to come here.

The hostel I stayed at in Santa Cruz was called Iguana Peradia and is right on the waterfront and its main appeal is that they have sit down family style dinners every night. So I spent  the next two days relaxing in hammocks and eating way too much delicious food.

Awesome view from front lounge at Iguana

I also got to do my second ever Yoga session followed by my first ever meditation at 8am in the morning. I was surprised at how relaxing and how invigorated and full of energy I felt afterwards.

Me Yoga’ing it up in Santa Cruz

After a couple of days of relaxing we decided that it was time to liven things up a bit and head over to the main party town on the lake San Pedro.

In San Pedro we stayed at an Israeli ran hostel called Zoola. It had a pool and a big open area with cushions and was one of the coolest hostels I have stayed on in my trip.

Zoola cushion area 😀

San Pedro really is a cool little town. Everything is just a short walk away and we all had a great time drinking and hanging out 😛

Omg that scarf just puts things over the edge

Upon arriving in San Marcos I decided I wanted to get more in touch with my spiritual side and experience some new things.over the two days I was there I did an evenning meditation. where we all went into a pyramid type building and sat on the floor in silence and meditated for an hour. This was my first real experience with meditation. I have to say that I really enjoyed it. Just being able to sit and  think was great. The medidation instructor also got us to ponder the one greatest lesson that we learnt from 2012 and meditate on it.  for me it was

Your life can be anything you want it to be!

It was really great to come to this realization that I had learnt that. Here I was sitting in a meditation room in San Marcos Guatemala a country I barely knew existed 6 months previous all because I wanted to be there. It was really empowering and I left the meditation feeling full of energy.

Me playing flute with a Guatemalan man and my friend

The next morning I got up early for a  yoga session. This was only the third yoga session that i’d ever done and was by far the most intense I have ever done. At one stage we were even doing headstands. Something I didnt even know I could physically do. I definitively think that I will be continuing to do Yoga in the future when ever I get the chance.

Lake Atitlan

The third and best experience I had at San Marcos was doing a 5.5 hour meditation session with a guy on the island that calls himself the chocolate shamen. The ritual basically involves drinking a cacoa based drink and then meditating for an extended period of time. He even went around to every single person and helped talk people through it. I have to admit there was a lot of people talking about energy and really spiritual stuff that was a bit beyond me. But I entered with an open mind and it was one of the best experiences I have had.

Another view of the lake

It helped me come to realization that one of the main things in this world that makes me happy is sharing my positive energy with everyone and I realized that to do that better I need to work through all of my own issues. It was a lot more spiritual and philosophical than that buts thats it roughly.

If you want to find more about cacoa shamen check out his link

I apologize for how many mistakes are in this blog post. I really have been struggling to get these blog posts out in the last couple of weeks I’ve been stuck on this one alone for the past week. It’s gotten to the point now where I just have to submit it as is and come back to it in the future and fix it up when I have more time. I need to start blogging about the present instead of being stuck in the past.

As a reward for getting to the end of this post you get to see this awesome video of me and my friend failing at playing Guatemalan flutes