Tikal your fancy?

I'm allowing myself one dodgy pun heading a month.

I don't know how it's happened, but I've got a few absolutely blinding days to add to my blog!

Upon arrival in San Ignacio we were immediately set upon by a series of full on tour guides, each more aggressive and determined than the last! Whilst I was busy attempting to fend them off with my typically British reserve, one particularly wrinkly rastafarian sexagenarian (say that 4 times after a cuba libre) managed to drop his card into my hand.

Anyway, this particular chap (going by the exotic name of David Simpson) happened to be a bit of a dude! He turned out to be a half Mayan (half Jamaican?) guy, whose family have been living on the remains of a major Mayan town for some time.

We arranged to turn up at his home at 9 in the morning. Following a very sketchy episode in the back of a ute with a self confessed convicted burglarizer (and apparent sex pest, from his general hollering at women that we passed) with two canoes, we eventually arrived at David's home in the middle of a jungle, across a fairly rapid river. In rather splendid fashion, young-at-heart David was sharing his humble abode with two young swedish ladies that he'd chanced upon, leather skinned lothario that he was. And they were paying him

Following a very cool tour of an un-excavated Mayan city, we set forth in a couple of canoes to explore the Macal river. Despite a lack of actual tour-guidage (David being otherwise occupied entertaining his floating harem, and smoking his way to nirvana), we had an awesome day. Lots of animals were observed, including (in very un literary list like fashion) iguanas, kingfishers, night walker monkeys (who have such a cool name they should have their own 80's cop show), kiskadie fly catchers, small bats that eat fruit (name escapes me), <fantasy> otters, voles, sumatran rat monkeys, bengal tigers, and komodo dragons </fantasy>

Wow, it ruled. Downsides: Scook fell in the drink. Was ducking branch. Blah blah clumsy, WHATEVER. You're just going to bang on about this bit, and ignore the cool stuff we've done, aren't you? You are so PREDICTABLE. Go on, laugh it up, we've got a lot to get through, OK?

Anyway, following this, much fun in San Ignacio, and lots of tasty dinners at Hannah's AMAZING Indian/Belizian restaurant. Belizian people are the nicest in the world so far (this encompassing the 3 countries we've been to so far).

OK keep up, as I referred to earlier, there's a lot to get through.

The next day took us to Caracol. These are some particularly amazing Mayan ruins in the Mount Pine Ridge forest reserve. Lots and lots of jungle, some rivers, caves etc, and one particularly grumpy tour guide called King Tut. Anyway, I shan't dwell on him, as he did improve with time.

But basically Caracol is STUNNING, and well underrated in the Mayan ruins stakes. It used to be one of the 3 most important cities in the Mayan world, and it really shows. The view from the top of the Sky Palace (still the tallest building in Belize) was just breath taking. It had me speechless for once! The whole site is just incredible, and populated with literally hundreds of Mayan buildings which they haven't had time to excavate as yet. Brilliant, and if any of you make it this way, you have to come here.

That's two very excitable days, and I've yet to blog the last and best so far, so get ready for an excess of punctuation.

We left Belize this morning to cross the Guatemalan border. After being nearly torn apart by transportation touts, we managed to secure a taxi driver to drive us to Tikal. Things looked dodgy at first, but despite his rather raggedy car held together by staples and faith, he turned out to be a blinding chap named Franklin. His English being rather better than our Spanish, he did a fab job as a tour guide, stopping for photos of neighbouring pigs, lakes, and pigs in lakes.

We arrived at Tikal around 4pm, and checked in to a lovely hotel with a nice big pool. We had the good fortune to bump into a couple of cool Dutch folks, who organised a dawn tour around the site. I'll leave the hyperbole to young Natston following tomorrow's tour, but sufficed to say we walked round tonight as well, and it's probably the best so far - even better than Caracol. The amount of wildlife is just incredible, and the noise of the birds and beasts as the sun was setting was almost deafening.

Anyway, we need to rise at 04:30 tomorrow to see the sun come up, so I shall leave it here.

Look after yourselves folks!
Si xxx

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