Stuck in San Pedro

Okay, not so much stuck as just too lazy to move on.

I spent two weeks raising my Spanish fluency level from horrid to really bad.

And then I dropped my laptop about six inches onto a cement floor.

Dead hard drive, had Win7 installed on the new hard drive and went off in quest of drivers to run everything on the damn machine.  Three days later, I have full functionality back.  It is no fun tracking down drivers for NIC and wireless.  Once I got the wired connection working, it was only about another four hours to get the wireless running.

Next step is to see if there is any way of recovering the data from the dead drive.  If not I see a lot of downloading in my near future.  The old drive was 750 GB and was well over half full.......

In other tempting news, there are a number of businesses for sale around this area.  Three hostels and one resort hotel.

A brief look at the hotel scratched it off the buy list.  Lake Atitlan is slowly rising, there is no surface exit for the water, it makes its way out through fissures in the rock and the lake is now approaching levels last seen in 1974, the last time there was a major earthquake in the region.  The level of the lake fell fifteen meters in under 6 months but has since slowly crept back up.  The Hotel has several of it's buildings right on the water's current edge.

If the lake continues to rise at its current rate, one of the other hostels will lose it's cafe/bar in under 3 years.

That leaves two viable hostels to look closer at.  Both of them are doing solid business, the owners are selling for personal reasons, not financial .  It would be fun to run one for a while, but I can see myself getting tired of it in under five years and it turning into a giant drag.  It is very hard to backpack with a full hostel in your pack.

On the other hand if anybody reading this blog want to own their own business, having a steady proven income and live in a Spanish speaking country with a thriving tourist trade, send me a note.

All for now, back to filling the new hard drive.