Day Tripping to Rabinal

My buddy Shane decided to stop into Guatemala for 5 days on his way to Belize so I decided to take him and my family to Rabinal for the day yesterday. I had never been there before.



Salamá is on the way, so we stopped in and walked around the central park.



We got to shop around a book sale where we picked up some sweet deals (all in Spanish): A Hundred Years of Solitude, Guatemalan Mayan Dress cards (61 in total), Guatemalan Cooking, Never Again (about the Guatemalan Civil War), and My Clinical Observations on the Lemon, Garlic, and Onion.



On our way from Salamá to Rabinal (30 km), we were stopped by a roadblock put up by people who were upset by an incident between two bussing companies in San Miguel Chicaj.



Because of inflating fuel prices, one company wants to increase fare prices while the other doesn't. So one guy flipped another guy's van over. With people inside (no one seriously hurt from what I was told).

The delay was about 2.5 hours. We returned to Salamá for lunch and eventually got through.



Rabinal is on the other side of a mountain from Salamá. The road is very windy (not air windy, lots of turns windy).



I visited with these two guys on the right in the central square. The told me about the peanut farms of Rabinal and how rich the soil is. I would have liked to have visited a peanut farm, but our traffic delay prohibited that. There are also some nice pools that we were thinking of swimming in too, but alas, it was not meant to be.



Then we visited the market where we bought some of the famous native pottery and some local fruits (grenadinas, coconuts and mangos).



I thought this skinny puppy was dead, but it was only sleeping.



We stopped into a couple pottery factories and Edgar gave us a neat demo of the wheel and explained how their kiln works.



Our trusty car got us there and back unscathed (except for a little nausea. . . ).

thanks to Shane for photos 4, 8, 11.