Lago De Atitlan -- calmness amongst volcanoes

Main street - Santander
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Panajachel

The first stop of our Lago de Atitlan adventure was Panajachel.  This is the largest city around the lake.

There's not much in here but there's a lot to see out there.

It took us the entire 10 days of our vacation to learn how to say the name of this city, so we shorted it to be just "Pana" (Guatemalans use this shortened name too).    To get to Pana from Antigua, we had to take a 3 hour shuttle ride that packed us in like sardines.  Not to mention that the bus was 30 minutes late.  The tardiness of buses and drivers are very common in Guatemala, we will soon learn.  Sigh.

Ken by the taxis
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There's not much to see in this city folks -- you can move along.  ;-)  We were disappointed.

Unfortunately, Antigua set our expectations so high that we became disappointed with Pana when all we initially saw was the one dusty main street filled with merchants.  And we realized that Pana was not much more than that... ok, maybe there are two main street (both dusty and full of merchants).  To me, it was really like a beach town that centered on selling to tourists. But what is really amazing are the views of the lake the city resides by  -- Lago de Atitlan (Atitlan Lake) and the volcanoes that surround that lake. 

The view of the lake
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We didn't have a hotel reservation when we got there because we (ok,  Ken) wanted to "wing it".  I was fine with that (at least outwardly).  We found Posada de Los Volcanoes (Los Volcanoes Inn) after just our third hotel try.   It was peak season, so of course they charged twice as much as the travel book said it would but the renovated bathrooms were definitely worth it.

We walked around the town and took pictures the rest of the day.