We are staying at Hotel Atitlan on a beautiful crater lake. (Another post!) In the morning the tour officially went to a nearby town for shopping with the suggestion of the local nature reserve in the afternoon. Some of us didn't care about shopping and figured it would be cooler in the morning, so we took off up the road after breakfast.
The nature reserve was only a couple hundred yards up the road. It has a butterfly pavilion. Ana was our naturalist. She raises butterflies at home on the monarch migration, and gets really excited about 'the ba-a-abies!'
They fluttered all around us, and it was hard to get them to hold still for pictures.
Steve decided not to join us because of the bridges. Admittedly, there was almost as much space between as there was wood to walk on. They didn't swing too badly if we walked carefully.
The destination was this waterfall, the lower sectiion of one we had seen when we entered on the main road. (I started to say 'highway' but it could not be called that. At times the bus was inches from the concrete balconies of the buildings on either side.) It was Ana's idea to take the picture with the shadow below. That's me down there on the rocks! (Note the proportiion of wood and space in the bridge shadow.)
Thanks to our experience at the coffee museum, we recognized wild coffee along the way, well picked over by the birds.
When we got back to the visitor center, some of us decided to take the trail to the lake shore. It went steeply up over a ridge, across a couple more swinging bridges, and plunged down to this beautiful beach.
Look at the roots of this tree! There was another further along where the roots cascaded over the cliff for maybe 25 feet, but the height made it harder to photograph.
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