Seven Altars and White Beach

Six o'clock found me awake in my room at Gil's Hotel. The hot shower wasn't. The internet was still flaky. I walked down to a restaurant and had a small breakfast and couple of cups of coffee and returned to my room, packed my gear, went downstairs and asked them to lock it up while I went out on a tour. The people are so nice at Gil's that it bothers me to write a review for TripAdvisor with my issues regarding the shower and the internet but I have to write what I would like to know were I to choose the place.

I showed up at Happy Fish a restaurant and tour company at 9:00 hoping that they would have put together people for a Sieta Alteres y Playa Blanca tour. An Israeli couple on their honeymoon and I made up the tour group. We took off a few minutes past the scheduled departure time and in 15 minutes we arrived at Sieta Alteres, paid our Q15 entrance fee and proceeded down the path.. The walk up the river and back took just about an hour easy walking, no bugs, temperature in the high seventies; it was very pleasant. Back at the palapa I looked at a turtle conservation poster and a bunch of shells of turtles that had been captured and eaten. One or the other guy. The owner was a Garifuna who inherited the land from his Grandfather. He spoke English, but many of the blacks in Livingstone do not, a rarity in the Caribbean, speaking Garifuna only or Garifuna and Spanish.


The blacks in Livingston are the only blacks in Guatemala. They pride themselves on their culture.

We got back in the boat and proceeded to Playa Blanca, a 200 meter stretch of white sand that extends about 50 meters from the shore. At the edge of the sand is a long garbage pile of plastic bottles. No food was available and the only beverages listed were water and beer. Fortunately for me the water was carbonated, my favorite drink. I started with a cold green coconut, which wasn't listed as being available. It was deftly opened and pierced and I drank the contents through a straw. Later I had it halved and ate the meat. The water was warm and none too clear, shallow for as far I could bother to walk. One exceptionally worn hammock provided the only "activity". Eight men sat around and talked. I engaged one of them in conversation and found that they do in fact fish in the morning and sit around the rest of the day and shoot the shit.


At two thirty Barack, the Israeli guy on the tour asked if I had had enough. I was ready to go. We returned to town and I had a wonderful Garifuno traditional soup of crab, shrimp and plantain in coconut milk at Lucky Fish. I wandered through the town and found another hotel, Posada El Dolfin, walked back to Gil's grabbed my bags and returned in the rain to kill some time on the internet and try to download something my son sent me ten days ago.