from the "San Pedro Chronicles" dept.

It's the rainy season here in San Pedro la Laguna, Guatemala and that means there's a lot of adjusting to do.

Back in Vancouver the rainy season is essentially just that. Rain, for a season. Day after day after day after day. Nothing really changes, except that you wear a raincoat from November until July. Sometimes August.

But San Pedro is different. The rainy season here – roughly April to November – is a half-day kind of deal. Sunny mornings. Cloudy middays. Rainy afternoons. Ark-building evenings.

San Pedro's dependable climate allows one to plan for the daily deluge. And Lord knows that we North Americans need to plan everything – even while on holiday, which, if my mother asks, I am definitely not.

Each day the good citizens of this lakeside town have about six hours of beautiful warm sunshine with which to accomplish all their chores. It sounds like a lot, but the morning can fly by. Despite good intentions, I'm not super motivated to run off to the market at the crack of dawn. Maybe after a pot of coffee, a download of CBC's World Report, a check of the email, and, of course, breakfast.

Looking out my window while chuckling at the latest world news, I can see that the tourists haven't quite got the hang of our little micro-climate. They waste their days kayaking or hiking and those of us in-the-know hit the market to load up on the finest local fruits and veggies before the skies open up. The result: they're fit and hungry. We're not.

Speaking of fitness, I have started a new regime designed to transform me into a 30-year-old mountain biking fanatic (as I once was). With my new focus on fitness™, my personal shopping window slams shut around 10:30am – leaving just enough time to walk the considerable distance from my house to the local swimming hole.

The pool is run by an affable French Canadian named Daniel. La Piscina opens at 11am and I spend roughly 90 minutes a day trying to turn a lifetime of poor eating habits, excessive booze consumption and slovenly living into a rock hard body. By the time I finish, it's raining and the lightning is threatening to blast my not-so-rock hard body back to the Stone Age.

This daily exercise is not the spash-fest you might envision, likely because San Pedro sits nearly a mile above sea level. My shredded lungs are proof of that. After six weeks recently in the sea level lowlands of Vancouver, the smallest San Pedro staircase can still transform me into a pile of quivering blubber that can't catch its breath.

Add to this the fact that many of San Pedro's streets are really small-scale reproductions of Mount Everest. This is because San Pedro is built on the side of a (hopefully) dormant volcano that, by sheer coincidence has the exact same name as the town (San Pedro). More to the point, I have learned I am no Sherpa.

But we're getting off track here. And I need to pack up and get home before rain begins. I've had enough swimming for one day.

[ to be continued ]

Cheers!