Small Mayan village of San Pedro as we are leaving San Marcos

Bags of coffee beans alongside the road waiting to be weighed on makeshift scales hung between two poles (unable to photo weighing process, as coffee pickers all wielded machetes!)

Coffee bushes growing alongside the road

A close-up. I could have picked some if only Juan Valdez wasn't carrying a machete!

This is the narrow road of continuous switch-backs that we had to climb after leaving San Marcos by the lake.

View of the road below and the lake behind us as we climbed over the mountain ridge surrounding the lake.

Snapped this photo from the car window of a woman doing her laundry in front of her concrete home.

Taken through the blurry windshield, but still priceless. A child carrying a bouquet of flowers riding a donkey hauling a load up the mountain, while the Senor chats on his cell phone. "Can you hear me now?"

The facial expressions say it all...

And I complain about sitting at a computer all day!!

The clouds move through this high mountain pass as we leave the lake region.

We have now arrived in Quetzeltenango, called "Xela" ("SHAY-la" by the locals,) Guatemala's second largest city.