The HOT Springs - they really are.

Fuentes Georginas

A short distance from Xela by chicken bus is the relatively small town of Zunil, and roughly eight kilometers from Zunil - up the mountain - is a tropical valley which is home to one of Guatemalas most famous hot spring sites - Fuentas Georginas.

Having heard that it was an easy thing to do on your own, I headed out from Xela in a chicken bus at shortly after 10AM last Friday, and ariived in Zunil at about 11.

My intention was to hike up, since I had been told it was fairly easy, and thanks to my new vocabulary I am able to get communicate well enough in Spanish to make travelling around relatively simple. So after getting directions at a couple points in town I found myself on the road up and up towards the hot springs. The way is lined with farms, growing a wide variety of vegetables, I noted Broccoli, Cauliflower, Carrots, Radishes, Beets, Potatoes, Green Onions, Lettuce, and possibly cabbage. The hill is very steep, and the farms are planted along the side of the road at angles that would probably blow the minds of our Canadian prairy farmers - but those working them do so in jackets and sweaters, which I found pretty amazing since it was easily in the high 20's and getting hotter as I went.

So, that continued until I got about a third of the way up - at which point a Guatemalan Family in a pickup (three in front and one in the back) pulled over and asked if I'd like a ride with them, so I jumped in the back and chatted as best I could with the mother as we rode along munching on radishes that they stopped to pick up along the way. The family turned out to be from the coast of Guatemala, and were on their way to Fuentes Georginas for the day.

We arrived at the top, and thanks to the family I didn't have to pay the tourist price, which saved me 30Q. I helped to carry some of their stuff for their lunch to a picknick spot, and around that time I started to realize that they wanted me to stick with them - and so I ended up spending the rest of the day with them, and although I was an extra person, they insisted that I have lunch with them and served me an equal portion.

From talking with other travellers, I have found that that kind of hospitality is quite normal here. Check on the internet and it may tell you that Guatemala is a dangerous country filled with poverty, bandits, and theives - my experience has been that like any country there are dangers here, but the people are warm and welcoming in a way I have never experienced before and given the chance will treat you like family.

So I spent the day at the hotsprings with my adopted family - there are several pools of varying temperature - and if you get into the hottest one (picture 2) and swim over to the rocks, you can see where the water trickles out - it is heated volcanicly (is that a word?) and practically burned me when I tried to collect some in my hand. After we'd bathed, had lunch, and bathed again, we got back into the pickup and they drove me back down to Zunil, where I jumped back on a chicken bus and returned to Xela.

note- Three internet cafe´s and two power outages to get this written and posted. Never a dull moment here :)