New Years in Nebaj

Nebaj was our (somewhat hastily selected based on the malaria map) stop between Lake Atitlan and Cobán.  And that one night stopover just happened to be on New Year’s Eve.

The drive to Nebaj was super gorgeous – winding mountain roads through quaint Mayan villages.  Enroute, we were certain we’d made the right choice in selecting Nebaj.  Driving into town, our certainty faded.  It is just a dusty, regular, non-touristy Guatemalan town.   It’s pretty high altitude at 6200′ – it was chilly but not super cold.

We quickly found our hotel for the night, the Hotel Ilebal, which had secure parking and acceptable beds but that’s about it.  No wifi, but of course there was the ever-present-in-Guatemala sewage stench from the shower drain.

We hopped in a tuk-tuk in search of a dinner joint we’d read about online, but found it closed.  The tuk-tuk driver brought us to his recommended restaurant at the town square, also closed.  We walked to a third option we’d read about online and it was closed.  So!  Back to the town square which was pretty bustling with townspeople but had nothing interesting going on.  We found a pizza stall and sat down for a decent-tasting slice.  Dmitri scoured the surrounding tiendas in search of beer to no avail, and finally found a large bottle at a bar to bring over to the table and chase down the pizza.  We wandered around a bit afterwards, but it was boring.  The only interesting thing was the stares we got from every single person we passed.  Clearly white people with big yellow dogs don’t frequent Najab.  We were still a bit hungry so bought a “super taco” from a street side stand.  Still bored, we headed back to our room to pop a bottle of champagne and put on the Univision countdown on the ancient CRT TV in our room.

Ted was still feeling poorly – drinking water but not eating, and having diarrhea.  He passed out in the room and didn’t even get too bothered by the fireworks.

The fireworks.  Of course there had been fireworks going off all day but what happened starting at about 11:30pm was other-worldly.  We got some good video but didn’t capture the very best of it – it sounded like a war zone and looked like the 4th of July in some small town USA.  It seemed like one set of people would launch their personal little fireworks show, small pause perhaps, then another group, and another and it didn’t end until well past 1am.  These were REAL fireworks, with the stars and the showers and the multiple-timed layers.  It was insane.

The next day seemed to be the real celebration with a parade and music in the square but we only briefly got to enjoy it (video below) before packing the truck back up and heading towards Cobán.   We knew we had a real slog ahead of us including the infamous highway 7W, a 27 km stretch of steep, loose, rocky, nasty dirt.  Second video below highlights the drudgery of agonizingly slowly bobbing and swaying and squeaking while carefully picking our line up the road.