In my last post, I said we'd been swindled out of around $20 but it actually was around $40; and when we got home, everyone asked how that happened. It's stupid, and the dialogue is lengthy. But I've repeated it so many times, I may as well tell it anyway and frankly, I'm still kind of mad.
When you arrive at a destination in a colectivo, it's pretty clear you're a tourist. And since we had been cautioned to avoid the general public buses for safety reasons, we took only colectivos if we were going any significant distance from our current location. Okay, so when we arrived at the shore of Lago de Atitlan, in a little hippie town called Panajachel, everyone knew we were tourist and thus everyone with something to sell mobbed our van. "Pulseras! Bracelets!" "Manteles! Shawls!" "Lanchas! Boats!" Oooh there we go--we needed to get to Santiago, on the other side of Lago de Atitlan.
Nodding at the first man who asked if we were going to Santiago, we grabbed our bags and followed him down the street. He and I made idle chat, the usual stuff: "Where you from?" "The US." (I didn't see any point in saying we were from Canada, since probably all paranoid US tourists do that and I think our accents are different anyway.) "I'm pure chapín (Guatemalan, roughly) and I run boats, obviously. What do you guys do?" "We're musicians (NOT RICH AMERICANS)." "Do you want to take a public boat or a private one?" "Public is fine." "Oh, why? You don't want to sit next to someone you don't know, or someone dirty. Take a private boat with me." "That's okay, we've been traveling this whole time next to people we don't know. It's fine." "But here, the public boats will take over two hours to get to Santiago. I can take you in thirty minutes. They stop at San Pedro first, and another place, and see here how big the lake is?" He showed me a little laminated card and made a big show of tracing the routes the public boats supposedly took. At this point I was really confused, because dammit, I'm NOT fluent and I was only catching about half of what he was telling me. "And then when you get to Santiago after two hours, you have to take a tuk-tuk up to your posada, and it's far away. I'll take you right up to the private dock." Eventually, I let him convince me, and he made another big show of haggling the price. "It's only 450Q." "That's way too expensive. We'll take a public boat." "The public boats are $25 per person. I am only asking my price because there are no tourists in Santiago, and I won't make any money on the way back. I have to buy gas, you know." "We only have quetzales, and that doesn't make sense. Why is the cost in dollars when we're in Guatemala?" "It's a tourist town, that's just what they do here." I felt weird, and suspicious. But did I listen to my niggling feeling? No. Instead, I secured the ride for a whopping 350Q, and if I'd done the math and realized that equaled $43.75 total or $21.88 each, I HOPEFULLY would have realized this guy was pulling one over on me. He had told me a total of eight lies so far.
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| From BelizeGuate09 |
We hauled our stuff into his empty boat and sat down. Then I paid him. He started the engine a couple of times, fooled around in the back, and then another boat drifted by, holding around 15 people. Our guy and the other driver chatted back and forth a minute, and then our driver turned to me and said "You guys get in this boat." "I'm confused. Why?" "It's okay, this is the same service, get you to the dock in 30 minutes." "I've already paid YOU." "I know, this is my dad. You can ride with him." "I paid for a private boat and that boat is not private." "Yes, but...I don't have very much gas." More lies. At that point, I should have yelled/throttled him/demanded my money back, or at the very least shrewdly announced that we'd wait while he went to buy gas with the wad of money I'd just given him. Because I'm DENSE, and STILL DIDN'T GET that he was cheating us! And poor Eric didn't understand our conversation at all, otherwise he probably would have spotted the scam far earlier. Instead, we pulled all our stuff into the other guy's boat and the driver of the now-empty boat gave us a cheerful wave as we pulled away. CHEERFUL INDEED! I spent the whole ride confronting the growing dread that I had been stupid and gullible and screwed up and been too loose with our money, and now we had to find an ATM and what if Santiago didn't have one, then we'd have to come BACK to Panajachel, and why was I so conceited as to think we needed a private frickin boat, and what if I was too dumb to figure out when we were getting scammed again? And until a few minutes into the ride, Eric still didn't really know my suspicions.
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| From BelizeGuate09 |
I'd filled him in by the time we pulled up to the dock of our absolutely beautiful hotel. We had arrived a little early, so we relaxed in the restaurant and had a snack of blue corn pancakes (delicious, by the way) while the the maids finished up with our cottage. It was an absolutely awesome cottage too-- clean, rustic, roomy, with a tap dedicated to drinking water, a small writing desk and fireplace you're practically ordered to use, plenty of candles and matches, and a very informational binder of things to do--and prices--in Santiago and the surrounding area. Eric actually tried to keep me from reading it. It turned out the public boats cost 25Q per person, or $3.13 each. And I know I hadn't misunderstood the guy when he said 25 DOLLARS.
Welcome to Lago de Atitlan! SUCK
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