Santa Cruz la Laguna

Lake Atitlan is another of those incredibly special places on Earth.  We mentioned in our Terraza de la Tierra post that one of the guests was a Norwegian aristocrat who lives in Guatemala.  He’d invited us to come rent an apartment on his huge and gorgeous estate Villa Eggedel.  We’d decided this is where we’d spend Christmas and booked a whole week there.

Santa Cruz la Laguna is one of only 2 places left on Lake Atitlan that can only be accessed by boat.  That lends to its charm and seclusion and we really love that element of it.

We were pretty lazy this week, celebrating our success in getting into Guatemala and being in such a delightful location.  We did yoga several mornings on our deck overlooking the volcanos, we did short but steep and strenuous hikes up to the town of Santa Cruz, and we swam in the frigid pool (OK, Dmitri and Nina swam and I waded and squealed like a princess).

Our biggest accomplishment was pulling off Christmas in a reasonably respectable fashion for our daughter.   We bought Christmas ornaments and made paper snowflakes, and pulled in a little jade tree from the deck and decorated it with both.  We made Christmas cookies.  We roasted a Christmas turkey.  We e-mailed Santa Nina’s Christmas list.  We set out cookies for Santa and carrots for the reindeer.  In short, we nailed it.

We booked ourselves for an overnight volcano climb on December 30th out of Antigua which is a couple hour drive away and will be our next stop.  We are all very excited to climb Volcan Acatenago and camp at the top while viewing the active volcano next door, Volcan Fuego.  If we’re lucky we will see the O.G. fireworks…..from a safe distance.