Cheated

We were up at 5:45 AM to get ready for our 6:00 AM departure. Today, we were set to climb the Acatenango volcano. It takes about six hours to hike up and three hours to come back down. We waited. 6:15 rolled around, and no one had shown up yet. We had the guide's number, so we asked a girl at our hostel to give him a call. It sounded like he was still asleep. He said he was on his way to pick up some other people who were also joining the tour. That was fine; we didn’t know others were coming along, but it was okay. By 6:30, he still hadn’t arrived, so we called again. This time, no one picked up. At 6:45, he finally called us. He explained that the car had broken down. He promised he would come as soon as it was ready again. At 7:20, he finally showed up. He had mentioned picking up other people, but there was only one person in the car, and it turned out to be his girlfriend... Hmm, strange. We felt like we couldn’t trust him, so we decided not to go. It was getting too late to climb the volcano and make it back down before dark. We got all our money back! Instead, we took it easy and wandered around the city a bit more, since we hadn’t seen much of it yet. We strolled through the markets. The ATMs are still out of cash, so we had to go into the bank with our passports and VISA cards to get some money. It went fine, but it took a while. Since we had been up early, we got tired pretty quickly that evening. We managed to grab some dinner—nachos with guacamole and strawberry daiquiris, yum—before we fell asleep. I should mention that we had a late lunch, so our dinner wasn’t exactly the healthiest choice! :) By the way, it’s quite common to feel small earthquakes here. We felt one on one of our first days. It’s a strange sensation. It’s actually a good sign that there are often small earthquakes. If there’s a long period of quiet, you can expect a big earthquake to come. The tectonic plates are very active here. If there’s a long gap between quakes, it means the tectonic plates are stuck. When they finally release, a big earthquake will happen.