Spotting the Swiss in Guate

I was camped out at La Esquina completely absorbed in working on my new project, www.arteantigua.com, when Yves Maurer‘s remarks could no longer be ignored. I’m glad I pulled myself out of the computer/internet swamp to engage the young Swiss traveler as he proved to be most interesting.

Yves was delighting in the wonderful pleasures of charmingly colonial La Antigua Guatemala for the first time. He had about a week before he had to skip back to Guatemala City to start organizing a huge new project: geographical mapping and training in Guatemala (sponsored by The Swiss Confederation). Yves is a part of the team that is leading the new project which includes setting up technical training for young Guatemalans. Thus, Yves (pronounced Eve) will be traveling between Switzerland and Guatemala for the next couple years. He also happens to be a fellow photographer.

He clued me into the Pix-Mix event he’s involved with in Switzerland: 20 people presenting 20 photos with 20 seconds per photo. It’s a project I’d like to start here in La Antigua.

For the next few days I decided to be Yves unofficial tour guide as much as I could manage it amidst all my work and projects. In just a couple days we managed to hit many of LAG’s highlights: La Esquina, Hector’s, Reily’s, Mono Loco, Panza Verde, Cafe Sky, Parque Central, Cafe No Se. He also made it to Casa Santo Domingo, Volcan Pacaya and El Pilar (thanks to my article in Revue!). The hotel where Yves stayed, Hotel Quinta de las Flores, was gorgeous. For just $60 he had a fireplace in his room and a massive, expertly manicured garden to wander night and day compete with a pool.

Below a photo Yves took of me:

A photo I took of Yves at Panza Verde:

Yves seems to be falling in love with Guatemala and La Antigua. He’ll be passing back through LAG when he heads to Lake Atitlan later this week. I’m kind of tempted to go and show him a few highlights there as well…

Yves blog

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 12:57 am. It is filed under Guatemala, Honduras, Inspirational, Latin America, Travel and tagged with features, Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.