When I borrowed a guidebook to check out Spanish schools around Lago Atitlan, I also wrote some notes down about an interesting-sounding meditation and metaphysical centre located in the lakeside town of San Marcos. I took advantage of a day off of school and took a public launch over to check it out.
Wow, it's a lot quieter and more peaceful over here. I hadn't realized how noisy San Pedro was until I got out of it. San Pedro has a lot of traffic, really, and the tuc tucs and big buses are the noisiest. The lakeshore area of San Marcos, by comparison, doesn't even have streets that vehicles can drive on! Yaaah!
There's a wide, paved sidewalk heading uphill toward the main part of town and the road, as well as narrow pathways winding around various hotel and restaurant properties lining the lakeshore for hundreds of metres in both directions from the boat docks. Many of the properties advertised alternative healing therapies, sweatlodges/temazcals (bottom photo), and some offered courses training people in various practices like reiki, massage, cranial sacral therapy...
Many of the hotel and restaurant properties were cob structures and/or utilized broken glass or bottle bottoms in their windows, creating art and functionality out of garbage. This town was also the only place around Lago Atitlan where I noticed a recycling centre. A portion of the schoolyard wall was exposed to reveal that the interior of the wall is made up of plastic bottles, then it's covered over and painted with pictures of birds and plants and animals. It's nice to be in a place where people care about being gentle on the earth and are aware of the energetic level of being human. I feel at home here.
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