Sunrise

Journal entry. 5:50 am

It’s my last morning in San Pedro La Laguna, my “Guatemalan hometown”. From my window, I see the lights of Panajachel and Sololá twinkling in the distance across the lake. The orange light of the sunrise is slowly rising behind the mountains, fading to yellow. The birds are waking up. The rooster crows, the dove hoots, the Star Trek bird beeps (I should really find out the name of that species).

Indian’s nose (a feature like a face on a mountain to the west) lies still and silent, but I know there are tourists standing on the nose and the upper lip, photographing the sunrise.

On the roof of a nearby hotel, a brunette sits cross legged and pulls her journal out of a bag to start writing, as she occasionally photographs the stages of the sunrise. I know my iPhone 4S can’t capture it, so I write about it and let it be.

The chicken bus honks its horn as the last few passengers board for Xela. That’s where I am going, on a later bus this morning.

This will be my last morning on the shores of Lago de Atitlán before I fly home to Canada at the end of March. I am sad to say goodbye, but I have every intent to return here some other year, on a future vacation.

I smell the fires of the neighbours’ kitchens burning, preparing to cook the day’s tortillas for many families in this pleasant pueblo.

My former host mother makes some mean panqueques, so I am off to enjoy one last breakfast with the family before I move on to Guatemala’s second city.