Tuesday 31 May 2011

Hitting the three month mark

This was going to be a nice blog full of pictures, sadly, Blogger is not playing ball, so you will get my ramblings instead.

We've just got back from spending a weekend at Lake Atitlán. On the surface of things it was lovely to get away from the 'city' for a weekend, meet some new people and take a walk in the hills.
I can never quite switch off though... Like so many tourist places on different continents it is a place of stark contrasts. Hotels sprawl along the waterfront charging hundreds of dollars a night to tourists who want to get 'back to nature' whilst enjoying a five course gourmet dinner and silk sheets in their ensuite bedroom.
A hundred metres or so up the hill there will often be a village, a settlement developed after years of observing the variation in water levels year in and year out, rather than the inate desire to have a private dock directly from the French doors of your apartment.
And somewhere above the village there is a rubbish dump. A big ass ticking time bomb rubbish dump. A mass of the detiretus of two communities consuming with little thought of the consequences. Each community feeds the other, in a manner of speaking, their lives are so different, yet the result is the same.
I'm starting to sound a bit like a nutter aren't I? Don't get me wrong, I can hardly talk. My credentials are probably not that green, and I'm sure I played my small part in damaging the environment as much as the next person. And there are people who are trying to solve these problems, people like the Friends of Lake Atitlan
The lake is a stunningly beautiful destination, unlike anything I have ever seen, somehow I just hate to think that my experiencing it will go some small way to it's demise. Here-in lies the crux of the issue of being a perenial traveller I guess, we get to experience so many wonderful sights and sounds, but how far does the ripple effect go?

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