Chichi and its amazing technicolour market

Travelling around Guatemala is pretty easy, but involves a makeshift networked alchemy in which a variety of tiny hotpotch agencies all offering the same tours and dealing only in cash and handwritten tickets (always worth negotiating the price!) somehow manage to despatch trucks, buses and vans to the right hostels and hotels where drivers shout your name from scribbled down scraps of paper and notebooks to make sure you get on the right one.

For our trip from Antigua to the world famous market of Chichicastenango and on to lake Atitlán this system almost comes unravelled when