Taking the Plunge

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Taking the Plunge
How a lucky real estate dabbler became an overseas landlord.

We never did get the melted glue off the sidewalk. But still they lined up on open-house day, more eager renters than we could accommodate.

The tenants moved in the next weekend, a young couple fresh from grad school. And we started planning a much-needed break in some soothing tropical haven, far from anything to do with real estate.

Guatemala's Lake Atitlan has been drawing gringo tourists and expatriates for decades. As every hotel brochure proclaims, English novelist Aldous Huxley dubbed the place the most beautiful lake in the world after he visited in the 1930s. That's a bit of hyperbole that fades into understatement the moment you crest the surrounding ridge and look down on a body of water that could be the gods' own bathtub. On a sunny day, the most common kind, the waters wink like a blot of turquoise ink, spreading 81 square miles among steep, green mountain slopes. The lake is 5,100 feet above sea level, where lofty altitude combines with tropical latitude to generate breezy year-round temperatures in the mid-70s.

But it's the three surrounding volcanoes that make the whole package "really too much of a good thing," in Huxley's words. They stand in silent vigil above the southern shore, Toliman, Atitlan and San Pedro, so perfectly triangular they could be a background set from "The Flintstones." It's a first impression that not only attracts visitors but keeps them. Many a gringo resident talks reverently of his first look at the lake as the moment that a drop-by turned into a change of life.

A wave of hippie travelers settled around Atitlan in the 1970s, lured from their wandering by the hypnotizing views, the laid-back vibe and, not least, the cheap and potent marijuana. Panajachel, the largest town, became known as a good-time outpost amid a ring of placid, traditional Maya villages. Even during Guatemala's vicious civil war, Lake Atitlan remained largely isolated from the worst of the paramilitary campaigns that killed hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans before peace arrived in 1996. One community on the lake, Santiago Atitlan, still takes great pride in having kicked the army out of town after a massacre of 13 Maya villagers in 1990.

Nowadays, postwar Guatemala has opened up to tourists with a basic three-stop itinerary that includes the Maya ruins of Tikal, the colonial capital of Antigua and a few kick-back days at Lake Atitlan.

The southern shore, accessible by road, is lined with the homes of weekenders from the capital, Guatemala City. Instead, we headed for the quieter northern shore. That one is reachable only by boat and attracts a mellower class of visitor, namely artists, New Age seekers and one-time backpackers (like us), traveling with kids now but who still like their tropical getaways with a side of local culture.

Our group consisted of Ann and me and our two daughters, Isabel, then 7, and Tyrie, 5, along with our neighborhood friends Katie and Jim Sebastian and their son, Cole, 4, and daughter, Dillon, 7. Online, we'd found two adjacent lakefront houses to rent near the village of Santa Cruz. The fellow who managed them, an expatriate Frenchman named Armand Boissy, met our tourist van at the dock in Panajachel. We pitched a week's worth of groceries into a 21-foot boat and motored 15 minutes to Santa Cruz . . . and destiny.

We adored it. Every fresh banana, lime from the garden, handmade tortilla and spellbinding sunset of that week was a beaming pleasure. We loved the public boats that plied the shore, which we would hail from the dock for dining or sightseeing runs into Panajachel. We squeezed in between Maya women in traditional embroidered blouses and the bags of avocadoes or papaya they hauled to market. We loved the generous, patient manner of the village folks who helped untangle our endless knots of Spanish and pantomime as we asked about local history and traditions. (After all, Spanish wasn't their first language either; they spoke Kaqchikel at home.) We loved the cool swims, the subtly rich food and the cheap, spa-class massages at the holistic studios of San Marcos, the village down the shore that has become a sort of New Age jamboree. Mostly we loved the beauty of the view, where volcanoes bask in the shifting mountain light.

It is one of those settings that provokes not only admiration but also longing. Looking doesn't seem enough. You want, somehow, to possess it.

"I wonder what houses go for around here?"

Armand Boissy was happy to show us. Suave and boyishly handsome in his late thirties (he swims in Atitlan every day and jogs on the steep mountain paths), he'd lived on the lake for 15 years. He had been through two marriages there, had two daughters, had built a well-regarded hotel with his second wife. And he'd generally seized the small-but-growing market of gringo tourists who aren't satisfied with tasting the papaya but who have to own a papaya tree. (Norwegians are his biggest clients; he was just breaking ground on a sizable house for an Oslo chiropractor when we arrived.)