Nebaj to Todos Santos: All Saints' Day Special Offer

High season is about to begin and we are kicking it off with an Old Town Outfitters special! We have been hiking and biking out in the Cuchumatanes in the past, but now we have finally wrapped our heads around a unique trek and made it work. “Nebaj to Todos Santos, Hut-to-Hut” is a 6-day, 5-night hike across a roughly 70km stretch of the Sierra de los Cuchumatanes, heading west from the center of the Ixil triangle in Quiché all the way to Todos Santos Cuchumatán, Huehuetenango. 

Not only are you hiking through one of Guatemala’s most serene and remote regions, rich in culturally and historically significant references – you have the chance to do so in time for one of the most important holidays of the year: Día de Todos Los Santos, or All Saints’ Day. Every year on November 1^st, Todos Santos hosts some of the more remarkable and memorable All Saints’ Day festivities you can experience. 

This predominantly Maya Mam town is known throughout Guatemala for the distinctive traditional garb that the locals wear year round. And for All Saints’ Day, they bring out their Sunday best, so to speak. Topping off the festivities is the horse race, an adrenaline-inducing spectacle fueled by the fact that most of the riders are drinking and have been doing so since All Hallows’ Eve, i.e. the night before. 

After the relative craziness of All Saints’ Day, things calm down somewhat on the following day, when people gather to honor the deceased on Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). You don’t have to participate in the race, just being there to watch and take it all in will make for an incomparable adventure and an unforgettable experience.

Would you like to know more about this trip? Here is the summary from our Adventure Guatemala website: 6 days of “out there” trekking across the remote departments of Quiché and Huehuetenango. This trek traverses areas only accessible by foot. We’ll walk through small, seemingly forgotten Mayan villages of people that were displaced by nearly 35 years of civil war. Along the way we stay in small community run hostels and/or hotels and break bread with local families.  Much of the route is above 10,000 ft. across the Guatemalan altiplano.  

We offer 2 options along this classic route; both treks start in the Ixil Mayan stronghold of Nebaj and finish in the remote mountain village of Todos Santos, famous for its “Day of the Dead” festivities. On our hut-to-hut option we rely each night on the hospitality of the local communities we pass through. We will spend 4 nights in community hostels that are set up across the highlands.  We’ll sit around the hearth of a local home and break bread with a local family.  

Our hut and hotel route plies much of the same route with a couple detours to visit 2 boutique hotels nestled in the area.  This is the perfect mix between the more rustic hut to hut and full luxury.  We’ll spend two nights in community hostels and 2 nights in beautiful unique boutique hotels; one a working artisanal cheese farm and the other a horseback riding center.

Can you think of a better way to spend Halloween this year? Thought so. Get in touch with us at adventureguatemala.com, and do so sooner rather than later! We only have 4 spots left on this trip, and Todos Santos is a popular destination this time of the year.

Nebaj to Todos Santos Trek

So we went and got ourselves back on the road to Quiché, one of Guatemala’s most populous departments. The work at hand was to scout out the “Nebaj to Todos Santos trek”, a trip that is essentially a traverse of part of the Sierra de los Cuchumatanes. This mountain range runs for 400km in west-east direction through the neighboring departments of Huehuetenango and Quiché. With peaks clearing 3800m, it is considered the highest non-volcanic sierra in all of Central America. The name “Cuchumatán” btw is derived from the Maya Mam words “cuchuj” (=to join) and “matán” (=with great force), and thus means “what has been joined with great force”.

When crossing the Sierra de los Cuchumatanes, we set out from Nebaj, one of the villages that form part of the so-called Ixil Triangle. This is the first hint as to the historic cross references that come into play on this trek. The hike entails clearing roughly 70km of trail in 6 days, most of which while crossing the flats of the “altiplano”, the Guatemalan highlands. The initial climb onto the plateau contains most of the elevation gain (ca. 1300m/5600ft.), with the rest coming as part of the ascent to La Torre, one of the highest points of the sierra (3832m/12.646ft.) 

The trail on this hike comes in all kinds of terrain, from pine-needle strewn forest floor, to limestone scattered over dirt roads, to grass-covered flats. The occasional mudfest is also not unlikely, as we learned this time around: After some torrential downpour in the night, descending through Pajuil País became somewhat of a unexpected challenge. As we were going downhill, our boots, caked in mud, were about as useful as soaped up cement blocks on our feet.

The Cuchumatanes are something else. I still can’t quite put my finger on it, even after two visits it’s hard to describe. Hiking there is not a spectacle, not a show as, say, hiking up Acatenango to see Fuego erupt. Some of the most gifted turns of phrase (and most of the lesser gifted; this very piece here not excluded) about Guatemala revolve around its beautiful landscapes, so I wonder if it bears repeating: but there really is no way around acknowledging the views, and to a great degree, it is the remoteness of the area and the vastness of the views that make up the lasting impression. They give the hike an even more contemplative quality than usual, especially when you happen to walk flat, green pastures in a soft rain with sheep in distant sight.

But it’s really when you’re walking through the villages that the slower pace of life becomes strikingly apparent. In so many cases, you get sensory overload from all the sensations around you before you can really get a sense of place, and by the time you’re leaving, you’ve forgotten half of them. Hiking the Cuchumatanes provides a good balance between perceptive details and ample time to process them. Here you have distinct notions of architecture, clothing, and pastoral lifestyle that you can observe and grasp in order to get this area’s unique geographic and cultural identity.

Would you like to know more abut this trip.  Check out the 5 day Nebaj to Todos Santos hut to hut trip on our website. See ya on the trail.

Eventually useful bit of random trail advice: when you come across a sheep that's tied to a tree trunk and effectively stretching the rope across the trail, don't step over the rope. Because once you spook the sheep, which you will, it will try to cut across into the field while still ahead of you and, with the rope, take your feet right out from under you. See the sheep understands the implications of being tied to a tree just about as much as the courtesy behind trying not to spook it. And since you're going to do that anyway, there is no sense in trying to be polite about it.