Day 58 - I said goodbye to Paul this morning. He is taking a shuttle bus back to Lake Atitlan, before leaving for home later in the week. I'm planning to head out of the country, hoping to be in San Cristobal, Mexico, by tonight. I'm going to make a small loop to the north, and hope to see some more mountains on my way. There are some 250 meter waterfalls on the way that I'll try to hike to, named Pepajau.

The guidebook describing how to get to the Pepajau waterfalls turned out to be pretty inaccurate on distances. In fact, the town it mentions starting the hike from, is many miles off the main road on a rough dirt track, at the bottom of a big valley.

I got to the bottom towards dark in advance of a large rainstorm, to find nothing else around but a few buildings. It was a good 45 minutes back out to the nearest town. A local guy VERY kindly offered me a bed in his house for the night! He is older, with a bunch of grandkids running around, so I felt safe. He actually kicked his father off the bed into another room for the night. The bed is absolutely filthy and there's no pillow, so I slept in my clothes on top of the covers. But it's better than the alternative, which is nothing. He said it's very dangerous here out of doors at night -- there are a lot of local guys who cause trouble, every single night. Hmmm...

In the morning he said I can hike out to the Pepajau waterfalls, which are a couple hours from here.

Thanks to the Cipro antibiotics (I think), the swelling on my elbow is gone, and it's now just red where the infection is. I'm not quite as worried about it as yesterday!