Quetzaltenango is Guatemala's second largest city with around 200,000 inhabitants and the main city of the Western Highlands. I spent three nights in the city on my KE Adventure volcano hiking tour but saw rather little of the city outside of the hotel and a few restaurants since our days were filled with mountain activities. The only I returned was that I booked another trek with a company based in town, so Xela (Quetzaltenango’s Mayan name) was the trip’s start and end point.

Xela is nowhere near as pretty and harmonious as Antigua and not as big a tourist draw except for people into hiking in the area or those very interested in its Spanish schools and conservative indigenous culture in the region . There really isn’t that much to see or do in town, so I spent a lot of time in restaurants and cafes where I could access WiFi plan my trip over the weeks ahead. Contrary to what you might expect for a tropical latitude city in the Mayan heartland, Xela is quite a chilly place at nearly 8,000 feet altitude.

The one notable attraction I visited in town was a small museum of Mayan costumes, weaving, and traditional crafts called the Ixkik Museum. There are numerous Mayan groups in Guatemala who speak over twenty languages and have different customs and traditions, each town or region having its own style of dress. The museum exhibited traditional daily and fiesta clothing for both men and women from different regions and ancient as well as modern styles. Nowadays it’s mostly women who still wear the colorful textiles known as huipiles on a regular basis, men generally trying to fit into the market economy and downplay their indigenous origins to face less discrimination in Mestizo-dominated society, but men still sometimes don the traditional costumes for celebrations. I personally think the very colorful traditional skirts and blouses Mayan women wear are much more attractive than the jeans, spandex, and cotton t-shirts most Latinos squeeze themselves into. Now that I’ve seen the costumes for different parts of the country, I’ll have to take note of the differences between them in the regions I visit during my last ten days in the country.