I’m sipping a lime margarita while sitting on a floor cushion at a low table fashioned out of an old skinny door. All of the doors, doorways, etc in Guatemala seem to be designed for really short people. So this hostel is on the waters of Lake Atitlan, and boasts a pretty “crackah” view as my Australian friend Ryan would say. The vibe here is pretty chill and besides a little workout on the dock I have done essentially nothing all day but hang out with people in the common area on the water and enjoy the view. Last night was a big one, and a weird one…kind of like a Panda Bear.
Ryan, Alex, and I went to the much anticipated Wizard’s Collective ‘festival’ on Lake Atitlan which was celebrating its fifth anniversary. I decided to make the trip up to ‘the lake’ from Antigua yesterday to catch this two day festival at its onset and re-connect with Ryan and Alex. I mulled over doing a one-way motorcycle rental and ripping the 2.5 hours down from Antigua to the lake but ended up opting to take a 12:30 PM shuttle so I could do some work along the way. I immediately regretted this once I jumped in the mini-bus and saw all the beautiful views.
The shuttle brought me from Selina Hostel, Antigua to the largest settlement on the lake–Panajachel. From here I jumped in a ‘lancha’ which literally just means ‘boat’ in Spanish but here seems to describe the vessels that make up the whole intra-lake transportation network…in other words—it’s a boat with seats on it. It was a pretty fucking scenic ride. This place is like a tropical Lake Tahoe. A high altitude lake ringed by mountains. The lancha brought me from Panajachel to Free Cerveza Hostel which has its own dock in the town of Santa Cruz la Laguna. I would soon learn that theres a dock for everything here…more on that later.
I rolled up the dock in my lancha, lounging on the bow of the vessel and wearing a black felt ‘Indiana hat’ as it was so described as by the vendor I got it from in Oaxaca de Juarez. The captain was bumping some tunes, and the sun was shining. It felt pretty iconic. I was greeted by my friends Ryan and Alex
Everyone was eager to get to this festival that started at 2 PM. I checked in to my room–I booked a ‘casita’ after doing a dorm room for the last week. It was a pretty nice treat after that, and it only cost $45 a night and had a view of the lake. I dropped my shit and tried to organize it neatly in an attempt to get this weekend started off on the left foot.
We made more and more friends, and swelled up a bit of a crew to go out and get dinner and then hit the festival from there. Everything is a lancha ride away. The crew ended up being me, Ryan, Alex, a Belgian girl named Amber, a Swedish guy with boundless energy named Simon, his also energetic Danish friend (?) and two french girls named Sara and…I forget. We also met a guy from Philly who owned a Philly cheesesteak restaurant named Matt–so of course we had to just call him Philly…
We got out of Free Cerveza around 5.30 PM and headed down to the dock to catch a lancha to the town of San Pedro–apparently a lawless party town with no police according to a friend of mine who sort of lives in Lake Atitlan. We were all headed to get dinner at this Israeli hummus / falafel place called Pita Sabij. We had a group size of eight and were definitely lightly herding cats to get anywhere. It took some doing but we got down to the Free Cerveza dock and were waiting for a passing lancha to come and get us. There’s some black and red striped flag you can wave if you’re bored trying to flag down a boat, but I don’t think it really makes a difference. We caught a lancha after about 20 minutes.
We piled in the lancha which was nearly full of about 35-40 people. Q25 ($3.50) per person to ride. The sun had already set and we were in twilight hours. We cruised over slowly toward San Pedro. We first stopped at the large double dock in San Marcos and deposited some pax, and then the next stop was this skinny little piece of shit of a dock which apparently was the festival. It was about 6:30 PM at this point maybe 7:00 PM and we didn’t hear any music. Some revelers got off, but we decided we definitely made the right choice to continue on and get some dinner. We continued to San Pedro and we finally reached San Pedro.
Our eightsome disembarked at the largeish dock in San Pedro. There was a proper doorway / seating area that could close off the pier from the town which was kind of neat. From the pier it was a pretty steep dusty cobblestone hill up into San Pedro. First impressions of the place–it was dusty, dirty and some sort of construction was happening in the middle of the road up from the pier. Once we hit the main street, it was a narrow kind of alley with 3-4 story skinny concrete buildings with bars and shops and businesses hanging off and lots of big signage. Rows of tuk-tuks that were pretty much half as wide as the entire alley were waiting for passengers. It reminded me of a dirty Bangkok alley, kind of like Soi Cowboy. Not super nice looking.
People were milling around and trying to use this one bathroom that was in a coffee shop. We had to herd cats, and then we all were off to the falafel restaurant. Eight of us piled in there and slapped a couple tables together. Small kitchen, fun vibe. This was going to take awhile. We played this fun table game the Scandinavians taught us where you slap your hands and point them towards someone and say their name and then they have to clap back and say someone else’s name, or your name back. But the fun part if you can totally fuck up and invent nicknames for people. The nicknames big dick rick, cunt destroyer, slutty sarah, and other mature conjurations appeared quickly.
Someone went on a mission to get drugs for the festival, after about 15 minutes of confusing accounting, indecision, requests, and half-requests. Cash was collected and the order was set and our brave soldier went to get the goods. He wanted some company, the tiniest girl in our girl decided to be the muscle. We were all really confused as to why she was the muscle. The big Danish guy went after them after like a minute since we realized this was a dubious plan.
The owner kept offering us rounds of tequila shots for Q10 ($1.25) a shot and we did a couple rounds and got a little loose. The drug party returned eventually and was unscathed. The food actually slapped big time. I got a falafel and it was great. The bill was like Q775 we threw Q100 in each…Guatemala is definitely more expensive, that’s like $13 a person in a developing country. Definitely slapped though.
We all got the fuck outta there to reach the festival. We got down to the docks eventually, and tried to organize a private lancha. We were waiting for a dude to pick us up for Q150, but got hustled at the dock by his brother while we waited when they realized there was eight people and they could charge us Q25 each.
It took us a hot minute but we finally got to the ‘festival’ at 8:30 PM. We pull up to this little skinny ass dock, about 3 2x4s wide. Here we are again. We heard a little music playing in the distance. We disembarked, and then walked down the 40ft long dock and onto the grassy shore. We walked up in to the makeshift festival gate for the Wizard’s Collective and I paid Q300 for a 2 day pass. The music actually sounded kind of cool. I was enjoying poking fun at it, but so far was pleasantly surprised.
The setup was cool, so it was a narrow lot that touched the water, and there was thick foliage/woods with barbed wire. So a long rectangle that was nice and grassy and had 10ft trees bordering it. You walked in deeper to the rectangle and passed a firepit with some people chilling around it, and then a merch stall set up in the trees on the left. Onwards and there was a pretty big makeshift bar with roof and lighting etc set up on the left–nice–and some standing table stuff set up on the right. Further in there was an open-ish area with some trees that had mats set up around them for people to hang out on and chill. And of course–beyond this was a really impressive main stage. Pretty well done.
The bathrooms were further on behind the stage. There was a concrete house on the left side, and then 4 makeshift ‘composting toilets’ (pretty much latrines) constructed out of tin siding on the right along with a little trench thing men could piss in. Further beyond this was another little concrete house, and then the gate to reach the street/edge of the property.
There was probably only like 50 people there. We all ran into tons of people we met around Mexico and in other hostels. I ran into this guy Kwame I met at Blue Monday at Cactus in Puerto Escondido who was super cool. I also ran into this Dutch girl who works for Dutch Television who I have ran into about 3 times since I met her in Oaxaca in November. Ran into this Irish guy from Puerta Vieja hostel in San Cristobal.
The festival continued to get better and better. I had some good conversations and good times. Suddenly it was 1 AM and the main stage closed down and the party was moving into that little concrete house. I mentally prepared to transition into the sweat box rave part of the night. I found out that one of my Burning Man camp-mates knows the guy who organizes this festival, so I asked around and was trying to find him. The first person I asked knew the organizer and also seemed to co-own Free Cerveza hostel. That was easy. He pointed out the organizer, and I was about to introduce myself to him when he went off into a side room…And then things got weird.
Suddenly there was Guatemalan police rolling into the room, 2, 3, now 10 of them and they had flashlights and were looking around and grabbed this one Guatemalan guy. Everyone immediately dropped all their drugs. I was in denial that the party was now fucked. I was hoping they would leave, and so people were kind of lingering and not leaving the sweatbox stage. After they were sort of roughing up the guy getting detained who was resisting them, I figured ok time to leave. I walked past a bunch of cops with really big assault rifles and was like oh shit this just got real.
I rallied up my friends and we all were joining this mass exodus to this tiny dock. About 150 – 200 people were now queued up on this narrow little dock waiting to get picked up. I felt like a refugee on the run. Not really how I pictured this night going.
We waited over an hour to get on a boat, and five of our crew got on one boat and then they told us there was only room for two more…I stayed behind with Alex and Amber and we waited another 30 minutes to get out of there. We had to sit on another boat for awhile while they filled it up. It was truly an extreme exercise in patience. I’m not religious but I actually said Lord give me strength while sitting there crammed in the back of this boat sweating my ass off waiting and waiting to leave. In total, the exodus took us about 1.5-2 hours to make it back to Free Cerveza.
I hung out with some of the other fellow refugees for about 30 minutes in one of their casitas back at the hostel, but was so tired I ended up going to bed around 4.