Early in the morning today, I left Antigua to visit Lago Atitlán. Panajachel is the biggest of a handful of villages around the lake, and the most easily accessible - which also makes it the most touristy, apparently. The road leading up to the lake consisted entirely of restaurants, handicraft shops, travel agencies, and hotels. And it wasn't a short road, either.
Anyway, besides shopping for handicrafts and arranging lake tours, there is one more thing to see in Panajachel: the museum for sub-aquatic archaeology. Throughout the years, divers have pulled a variety of Mayan objects out of the lake. This, for example, was used as an incense burner - wait, another incense burner? I get the feeling that the Maya were quite keen on burning incense ;-)
And then there was this huge vase designed as a human with a slightly oversized belly - amazing that it survived years underwater almost intact.
A second part of the museum presented the underwater city Samabaj. Originally, Samabaj was located on an island in the lake - but then the water level rose, and now the city is about 20 meters underwater. The excavation of Samabaj was (or is?) a slow process - to make sure the divers don't suffer negative impacts on their health, they only do two thirty-minute dives a day. Just imagine regular archaeologists spending only an hour a day on their excavation site...
Nevertheless, the items and photos from the site were very impressive, for example this standing stone and the altar in front of it:
