Time Travel 1977 Panajachel, Guatemala: Life Sweet, Whiskey Sour…
Continued from previous…
If the drive from Guat City into the highlands is exhilarating, then the drive down to Lake Atitlan is nothing but spectacular. Imagine a mile-high lake ringed by three volcanoes and a dozen Indian villages with some of the most colorfully dressed people you could ever imagine. It’s easy to fall in love with beauty like that, and many people have already. Hippiedom is alive and well here in 1977, so that’s why they made me cut my hair.
These are some hard-core hippies, sleeping on the beach and playing songs for tips in restaurants. The restaurants are good, too, with real live vegetables on offer, which is something almost unheard of in Mexico, where food is meat and beans and corn and rice, and vitamins are something to be extracted from fruit, especially jugos y licuados, aka ‘vitaminicos’ and zumos in other versions of the vernacular. It’s cheap, too, dollar a meal, much less than pre-devaluation Mexico a hundred miles away, a devaluation still weeks away. (More …)
Philip Melnick 8:23 am on December 22, 2016 Permalink |
Hi Hardie…I owned Roger’s Pub (Risian) from January 1979 to 1981. I leased it from Rudy, a Guatemalan guy who was married to a woman from Quebec. (Her father was a famous Canadian country music singer). The minute I first walked into the pub in 1977 I wanted to run the place. It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. We used to greet the tourists coming into Panajachel and tell them the other bars had live music, but we had live bartenders!
hardie karges 8:28 am on December 22, 2016 Permalink |
Wow! Small world! We had some good times there…