Yel Kaye – Travel Blog, Writing and Photography

For what is supposed to be a happy hippie paradise, a “backpacker’s Shangri-La,” sometimes I feel like a sadness hans over San Pedro la Laguna. Although this is a lovely place to visit, I am glad I don’t live here long-term… I sort of feel that it would be like that part of the Neverending Story when Atreyu is going through the Swamps of Sadness or whats-it-called, and it was so hard not to get dragged under that he lost his horse to the melancholy. Artaaaax!

Except here, the Swamps would also be filled with alcohol, marijuana and cocaine.

Anyways, I digress.

I think I should clarify – I’m really talking about the foreigner community here in San Pedro. In fact, walking through the “real Guatemalan” part of town, I notice a lot of cheer. In fact, maybe the most cheerful town I have been to in Guatemala. Children skipping hand in hand, women chatting and laughing, old men watching the world go by. Of course, like anywhere I’m sure the place has its share of problems, but the local community here certainly doesn’t seem gloomy.

But in any case, for someone who has been quite uncharacteristically quiet this week, I have absorbed a lot of information about this place. Residents here – both locals and foreigners – have for some reason opened up to me and told me a lot.

A lot of the foreigners who work here just seem tired. Tired, and drained. Of course, this observation is based on just 9 days here, but I have still been struck with that overwhelming impression.

I asked the Guatemalan woman who owns my hotel about her life here. She shared a lot, including stories of the many foreigners she has known here. Unfortunately, a lot of them seem to have met untimely deaths. For what reasons, she didn’t really say.

“How many foreigners here are escaping their lives at home, because they were unhappy there?” I asked her.

“Many. The majority,” she said.

But you know, I have met some lovely people here who do break away from my overall impression of sadness. In fact, I think I have learned a lot and even gained quite a bit of “lightness” in the last week because of some of the people I have met. I think I will write about some of these encounters in the next few days. So anyways – I can’t really making sweeping generalizations about all the foreigners here. But I can note the overall atmosphere, and it certainly is one that differs from what I had initially expected from San Pedro.