After a bit of a fiasco with buses, we made it out of Flores a day later than we'd planned. There was no direct bus to Lake Atitlan, where we meant to go to next so we decided to go to Antigua first instead. As we had to go through Guatemala city, it was a chance to get a good look at the place from a mini bus window; once we changed bused in the main terminal. Guatemala city has a bad rep, and everyone I spoke to who had been there said not to bother with it, so I was [View Full Entry]

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Getting up at the ungodly hour of 4am was actually OK. Reason being we had though that the minibus taking us to Tikal was going to get us there in time to climb a temple to watch teh sun rise. Of course no such thing happened - or could have happened - as we found out while watching the sun rise from the minibus seats that the gate of the site didn´t even open till 6am, well after sun rise. So feeling a little disappointed at this, we arrived at the site. Tikal was the thing I was looking forward to [View Full Entry]

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Leaving San Pedro was extremely hard, none of us wanted to go at all as we´d had such a wicked time there. But as it was pretty expensive we decided it was for the best to move on so on Tuesday morning we headed for the boat with tears in our eyes. The scenery from the boat as you wizz down between the Cayes and the coast is amazing, dense forest vegetation on the mainland side, the trees hugging the shore line. The country seems so untouched, we were traveling for miles without seeing a house at all, giving an amazing [View Full Entry]

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Wow! Wow! Wow! is all I can say!! Absolutely loving where we are, on the island of Ambergris, in the town of San Pedro in the Belize Barrier Reef. The Barrier Reef here is the 2nd largest in the world after the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. We arrived here on the 7am ferry from Corozal after staying there for our first night in Belize. It's exactly what I imagined a tropical paradise to be like; crystal clear blue-green waters, white sand, coconut trees everywhere. But it's much more than that, it's the great food, relaxed, laidback atmosphere and most importantly [View Full Entry]

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After Palenque, we boarded another bus to Merida (the worst thing about traveling is the actual traveling- have packing and unpacked my bag to death at this point). Merida is the capital of the Yuactan state and we had read that it is famous for its street parties at the weekend. We were arriving on a Friday so we thought that this would be great. Unfortunately the Mexican elections were happening on the Sunday, so there wasn't much happening at all at all in the place. It was a nice enough town but after an afternoon strolling around and getting our [View Full Entry]

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Yesterday we spent the day wandering round the ruins of Palenque. This time we were guideless so it was just the information on the plaques that informed us. It's truly breathtaking there, so I'm just going to let the photos rather than me do most of the talking for this one. Some of the murals were from 600BC and extremely well preserved, it's amazing to think of the difference in artistic and architectural development of the Mayan people when compared to that of the Bronze age Celts who were just producing simple geometric patterns at the same time. Only downside was [View Full Entry]

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Travel blog is starting to annoy me as there is always a problem with uploading the photos, so photos for this to follow. I wasn't looking forward ro the 12 hour bus journey from Oaxaca to San Cristobal de Las Casa as I never sleep on moving vehicles and it wasn't ro disappoint any of us on that score. Agter plonking myself beside Aoife on the bus, we settled down to try and sleep but this wasn't going to happen, particularily as the bus raced round hairpin bends as we winded our way further up mountains. The weather had put on [View Full Entry]

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So, it was with a heavy heart that we spent our last day saying good bye to Mexico City. We all really loved it. There's so much to do there, we were tempted to extend our stay some more, but you could spend 6 months there and still have loads to do. Our last day was spent having a lazy morning (much needed after pyramid climbing!!) and then heading to the Mercado. This is the largest covered maket in latin America apparently and it is absolutely massive. We had heard there was great food stalls there and we weren't disappointed! Lots [View Full Entry]

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So yesterday we booked a trip with the hostel to visit the pyramids of Teotihuacan. We thought it would be nice to visit them this way as we would also get a chance to meet some other people from the hostel. There were 6 of us going on the trip, so after breakfast we got on our minibus with a French couple and the lovely Michelle from Switzerland. Our guide for the day was Alex who turned out to be really informative and friendly and our driver Oscar who multi tasked doing other things throughout the day such as working in [View Full Entry]

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So, after a fab dinner in the Condesa neighbourhood last night, in an extremely veggie friendly restaurant (in a working book shop, very funky and the fact that it was mine and Dara's first experience of mole - delicious) we again headed back for an early night (it's tiring work sitting on a tour bus all day long I'll have you know!) So bright and early this morning, up I got to find another fabulous day's weather (the BBC weather forecast really need sorting out, it's torrential rain according to them). Once ready, we sauntered off to the metro (first time [View Full Entry]

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