We started out by flying into Guatemala City. We were met there by a driver who had been arranged in advance for the ride to San Pedro La Laguna on Lake Atitlan. The ride was supposed to take three hours but somehow ended up taking five and we arrived well after dark. Fortunately, The Kid was work out from a day of traveling and slept at least half the drive. We were brought to the homestay we would be living in for the following three weeks. We briefly met some of the members of the household, then went to sleep.
For three weeks, I walked to a Spanish language school for four hours in the morning. A few minutes before arriving at my school, I would drop off The Kid (who was 4 years old at the time) at a small local preschool. The preschool was Spanish immersion for The Kid simply by way of no one there speaking any other language. After school I would pick her up and we would do the walk up the ridiculously steep hill to the homestay.
After a couple days of preschool, The Kid was expressing a lot of frustration. She already knew the basics in Spanish, but the rapid speaking pace and not being able to switch to English was taking its toll. This was when I realized that the survival skills that came more naturally to me had to be explicitly explained to her. When she didn't know how to say something well in Spanish, she didn't even know where to start. If she wanted to play on the slide, but didn't know the word for slide, I taught her that she could point, refer to its color, and use me gusta (I like) or quiero (I want). To this day, The Kid swears she learned no Spanish at the preschool because there was no direct Spanish instruction. But by the end of the three weeks of homestay and preschool, she was regularly correcting me and supplying me with vocabulary.
There were a couple things I hadn't taken into consideration before going. The first one to become apparent was a difference in safety standards. The bathroom in the homestay was up a set of stairs - very steep, uneven, stone stairs with no railing. Those stairs made me nervous, but for The Kid they were simply impossible. We quickly came up with her being able to walk up them but needing to go down by sitting on them and scooting down on her butt - something she hadn't done since she was a year old at home. There are no sidewalks, no shoulder to the roads, and drivers are... unpredictable.
But worst of all for The Kid was the lack of parks - there was one teeny playground, but no green spaces. No where other than stone floors or the street to practice cartwheels. Technically, there was a "park" in front of the church, but the actual green spaces were all roped off to keep them pretty and people were only allowed on the stone paths. There were none of the child-friendly spaces that we are so accustomed to at home - no children's museum, no library, no public pools. Our afternoons consisted of taking a walk to get ice cream or go to a restaurant for an afternoon snack and maybe a bit of wifi. We could watch the boats on the lake, but the lake was not really safe for swimming. The area was very polluted in general and The Kid developed a cough she couldn't fully shake until we left San Pedro.
The homestay was fantastic. They were helpful, they all doted on The Kid, they patiently helped us along with our Spanish. Maria was a great cook. The Kid is an adventurous eater and found a lot of new foods to enjoy (and a few she didn't care for so much). Really, the people in general for fantastic. The teachers were very helpful. Random strangers on the street would stop to talk. The people made this trip fantastic.
For the next part of the trip, we took a shuttle van to the airport and flew to Flores. Flores is a really neat little town in the middle of a lake. It's a bit more touristy, and therefore somewhat less good for immersion because many people would just switch to English when they heard me struggling along in Spanish. But the lake was clean and easily swimmable, the weather was a bit warmer, there was a bit more to see and do... Unfortunately for us, The Kid took sick the last day in San Pedro and was pretty worn out, so we were limited. But we enjoyed what we could.
Then another shuttle van to Tikal. We stayed in a hotel just outside the ruins. The first day we took a guided tour and then the next two days we just paid our entrance fee and hiked around. Tikal is a fantastic Mayan ruin site situated in a tropical forest. Climbing one of the temples was a highlight of the entire trip for The Kid - you could see the entirety of the Gran Plaza from up there!
The Kid just reminded me: Though Lake Atitlan is high elevation with no malaria risk, Tikal was lowland tropical forest. There were definitely mosquitos! And the malaria risk meant she had to swallow malaria pills; this was the first she had ever had pills that needed swallowed. It was a bit of a trick to get them down at first.
After Tikal, we returned to Flores for one night and caught an early shuttle to Belize City - five hours in a van with the oddest border crossing setup I've ever seen. In Belize City, we met up with The Husband in the airport, took a short hop over to Ambergris Caye, and enjoyed a week of fun and sun.
I love travel - getting to stay in a place long enough to get to know it. This trip was successful enough that we're planning to do a similar one next year.
