The Bambu Guesthouse

You can tell a lot about a person and a place by looking at what kind of literature you find on the shelves. Here in The Bambu Guesthouse the top shelf is stocked with books cultivating, gardening, growing, building, bottling, preserving, raising, slaughtering, science, seeding ... all sorts and some of the best known permaculture bibles.

At the reception desk we have Shad who is the chief of Atitlan Organics. He organized investors and made his vision a reality with the help of a natural building master named Charlie. He's pictured here on the phone. I was super excited to have a chance to meet him but the man is in demand and didn't have time to tell me much about the place as he was doing a consultation and in the 'creative process'. Fair enough.

He was able to tell me that all the bamboo is treated with borax. Here is more informative video of the details and you can check out various bamboo preservation methods online as well. 




Large main support beams are made up of the biggest poles put together with steel straps and mounted on concrete foundation blocks. As you can see it can be done very tastefully.



Lower walls are made of natural stone held together with mortar. The upper walls are framed with bamboo and filled in with wire and plaster.



Essential additions are nice if made with local materials that blend in well. Here, the railing is simply made with some with local wood and unfinished branched.

There are some moderately complex joints along the roof and they look strong. Again, all held together with steel straps bolted on tight. Some of the straps are bent around the bamboo.



There is a main floor with a kitchen, bar and dinning/lecture/library/common area as well as a soon to be new front deck being added this week.

There are an additional 2 floors with 2 large rooms on each floor. The rooms all have their own bathroom and bunk beads as well as larger double beds. The top floor rooms are stunning with lots of skylights. Of course each room has a large balcony with proper good views of the lake and volcanoes. We saw Mt. Fuego exploding into plumes of glowing orange magma last night in the pitch dark. Amazing but sorry no pictures :(



I'd say it's a pretty nice place to take lunch.



Shad battled furiously with the investors to allow him to put in compost toilets as pooping in fresh water is one of the most barbaric rituals if you think about how many ecological problems that it causes and the ethical dilemmas brought about when you realize how much of the worlds population struggles to find fresh water. As you can see below, Shad lost that battle.



They do filter all their grey water into banana circles and use it to grow more bamboo! It also bears to mention that most of the bamboo used to build the lodge comes from the low land coasts of Guatemala where it's more of a wet jungle forest system which is where the largest species of bamboo grow best. 

We know bamboo grows fast, much faster than any other wooden building material. It's strong, flexible, easy to farm, light and easy to manipulate. Some say it's the perfect building material although you do hear that natural and chemical preservation methods are many and varied but preservation is about the only aspect that doesn't stand up to other wooden building material.

The busy builder Charlie also left me with encouragement to go off and build sustainably, naturally, and to learn whatever I can about it. Let's hope I get some more opportunities.

There are also cats.