Nebaj day 1 – the waterfall day-hike

Since I wasn’t able to purchase the trekking guidebook, I did the only hike I knew anything about – the Cataracas (or waterfall) hike explained in the Lonely Planet book, and let me tell you that it was great!

It was certainly not exhausting, only being two hours long. And it certainly wasn’t hard, with less than 200 vertical meters. But man was it beautiful!

Hard to make the landscape justice in pictures, but you could do worse for yourself than being a cow right here...

Someone later likened the landscape to lowland Switzerland, and I guess there’s something to that. The hike was along a road winding along a small river at the bottom of a narrow valley, where cattle, sheep and horses were continually grazing along the riverbank, every now and then interrupted by a couple of waterfalls small and large.

25 meters may not exactly be gigantic, but compared to Swedish waterfalls it’s not shabby...

The hike was even shorter than I had expected however, so when I saw a narrow path leading off from the road a point, I immediately jumped at the chance. Even though I didn’t have a map, I DID have my compass (built into my trusty Techtrail watch), so I felt reasonably safe. And what do you know, when I got higher up on the mountain, lowland Switzerland DID turn into highland Switzerland. Except for the jungle vegetation I guess. :-)

And up on the mountain there was quite a lot of life. The mountain was full of criss-crossing paths where I met lot’s of people. I met a small family on their way to the market, I met sheep farmers at their small isolated farm, I met forestry workers on their way home from work, and I even got hunted by angry dogs!

Guatemalan cowboys – not as glamorous as the North American ones!

And when I very very tired returned to Nebaj, I was convinced that I had to work harder to get further up into the mountains somehow...