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Published: June 14th 2010
Me
Hi!Hi! Welcome to my blog! I’m Gorf (did you know that’s “frog” backwards?). I’m from Tauranga, New Zealand, and I’m travelling the world! It’s very exciting!
I hope all sorts of people will read my blog, including our friends and family back home, and their children, and maybe even new friends we meet in various parts of the world. Feel free to pass on the link to your friends if you think they’d be interested.
It is winter in New Zealand at the moment and its cold, so it was difficult to pack for warm weather. I decided to save space in my luggage and take no clothes - if I find some cool clothes that fit me on my travels, then I will have plenty of space for them in my bag. Unlike my travelling companions, Tessa and Keith, who packed all sorts of things including thick socks and thermals in their luggage and now are stuck with heavy bags and no space for cool stuff! What were they thinking?
I’m writing this first blog entry from Guatemala, Central America. We flew into Guatemala City and got a shuttle to Antigua, which is a cute town with
Antigua
A busker on the streets of Antigua lots of character. We walked around the streets checking out all sorts of stalls and shops and buskers.
So we’re now in “Monterrico” (“Monte Rico” if you’re local), a village on the West coast of Guatemala. The village is next to what they a canal, but really it’s like an estuary, a large area with lots of mangroves. In Guatemala last week before we arrived there was a tropical storm (“la tormenta” - tropical storm Hagitha) and lots of flooding and landslides. Over a hundred thousand people had to evacuate their houses. Oh and a volcano erupted as well - its living on the edge over here!
We met a guy on the flight here whose village took 100 years to build a bridge to allow access across the river to schools and other facilities. He says it transformed the village and improved the way of life for the villagers. The storm last week destroyed that bridge. He was very sad and was visiting his home from the United States to bring money to help the people.
We organised a shuttle to get to Monterrico from Antigua, a trip from the mountainous area with active volcanos down
Our Spanish School
Proyecto Linguistico Monterrico to the coast. The shuttle got a great flatty on the way, the tyre going with a big bang, but our trusty driver set to changing it in the searing heat. Then we couldn’t take the usual road into Monterrico because the water was still too high, so we finished the trip with a ferry trip in a small boat on the canal. We bought barbecued corn from a woman on the boat, a yummy snack to keep us going. At the Monterrico end we had a short wade through the water to get to the shore, but since then we the water has receded.
The main reason I’m in Monterrico is to study Spanish. Tessa, Keith and I are studying at a school called “Proyecto Linguistico Monterrico”. We had organized to stay with a host family and learn Spanish at the school, but our host family’s house was flooded in the storm, so instead we are staying in the student residence at the school. It’s very nice and although it’s on the main street that doesn’t mean it’s noisy here!
We learn Spanish in the mornings for 4 hours, then we’re free to hang out. It’s very
In class
With my Spanish teacher, Bayron hot here, so despite Keith’s usual behavior at home, he manages to do a bit of sitting around here. We have a wee siesta and do our homework, go for a walk to the beach and buy some local food to prepare for meals.
Yesterday afternoon Keith got very excited when some pescadores (fishermen) turned up at the gate selling fresh fish! They had caught so many fish and the fish were so big that they couldn’t deal with them all themselves. We bought a huge trevally for 40 quetzales - about NZ$6! Keith filleted it out the back and we attempted to fit the rest of the fish in a huge pot to make sopa (soup) for dinner. We cooked in our casa with one of our tutors, Jorge, who had some camerones (prawns) to throw in the soup pot and some Guatemalan rum to wash it down. We had a huge feed of sopa. Muy bien!
My Spanish is improving slowly, so now I can usually get an idea of what people are talking about, but I still feel like a bit of a dummy when I have to speak it myself. I’m doing lots of
Studying in our casa
Hard at work on Spanish homework homework so I can spend more time talking with my new friends. I tried my Spanish on some nice men in a truck the other day. They seemed a bit puzzled but let me have my photo taken with them.
They say this is the wet season now, but every day has been almost perfect. Sometimes there’s a little bit of rain at night and it’s so warm (35 deg C?) and humid that you can walk around at any time of the day or night wearing no clothes - that’s fine if you’re a frog, but a bit dodgey if you’re human! We’re hoping this weather continues, because if we arrived a week earlier we’d have been in the middle of “la tormenta”.
Our casa (house) is very open and one night we had a fantastic display of thunder and lightning, with almost constant flashes of lightning and some deafening booms of thunder. It was very exciting and I wasn’t scared at all. After that came some heavy rain and lots of visitors came in to join us. I made some new friends - there is Greg the cangrejo (crab), who initially checked us out from the
Fresh fish for cena
Keith filleting the pescado grande corner, but we discovered he prefers to hang out in the sink, and also a froggy relative of mine who hopped in. He was cute but very shy. Another night one of Greg’s cousins visited. He must have been very hungry, because we found him scrabbling around in the rubbish bin. We have no idea how he got in there, and he got out later by himself too. Very clever!
One afternoon our instructors at our school (Bayron and Jorge) took us out on the canal in a small local boat (barco). Even before we got in the boat it was exciting because there were thousands of super cute wee tadpoles in the water around the boat! Bayron used the outboard motor and sometimes poles to navigate through the mangroves. We saw lot of birds including herons, a sea eagle and other colourful birds but we don’t know their English names.
There was even a fish with 4 eyes! Well, apparently it looks like it has 4 eyes, but really it has two eyes, each eye divided by a membrane. So as it swims along at the surface two “eyes” look above the water and two “eyes” look
Another new amigo
Me and Greg the cangrejo in our casa below the water. Brilliant! Keith says it’s a species of catfish. And to top it off we saw a real live snake! It was sleeping curled up in the branches as we passed through the mangroves. Jorge touched the branch and it leapt - luckily not into our boat, but into the water and it quickly swam away!
On the boat trip we visited a salt factory where the people from the islands in the estuary produce salt using an unusual process. When the water is low in the estuary, they take mud and wash it with water. The salt from the mud dissolves in the water, then they heat the water with fires to evaporate the water, leaving the salt. All this happens under a hut with a thatched roof (like the roof in our casa), very different to the usual process of drying the sea water in the sun to leave the salt.
One of the highlights of the trip so far for me happened during one of my Spanish lessons. We sit in the garden of the school for the lessons, and this day I noticed something moving in the tree behind my instructor. At
New amigos
Spot the frog... first I thought it was a leaf, but then it moved and I realized it was a hummingbird! My first ever sighting of a hummingbird! How exciting! They’re fascinating because their wings move so fast that you hardly see them and they hover in one place as they eat. Ingenious!
The beach here is very like Lake Ferry at home, with black sand and a steep profile, so it has dumpy waves. No good for surfing, but if you're careful of the waves you can cool down in the water, although only slightly - at a guess its about 29 deg C! Toasty!
At the weekend the three of us went for a little bike ride. That's a little bike ride for Keith - 40km! The road was rough with some large puddles across it after rain the night before, but we toddled along on our clapped out rusty bikes with dodgey brakes til we reached the mouth of the canal - where it meets the sea. Along with the pescadores ( fishermen) in their boats and the pelicans, there was all sorts of debris from the storm, including a city's worth of odd jandals. I suggested taking
Boat trip
On the canal at Monterrico them to Guatemala City and selling them back to the owners to complete their pair again, but for some reason Tessa and Keith weren't keen.
Some people gave us a a few strange looks when they saw me perched on the front of Tessa's bike. They have frogs around here, but I guess not so many green and yellow ones that ride bikes.
It was super hot and we lost litres of sweat along the way. We even stopped to help some men move and plant a huge coconut palm. Luckily there were a number of tiendas (little shops) along the way selling more cold water (agua). These aren't like the shops at home, they're more like a shack that is someone's house in the middle of nowhere, which has a window where they sell the goods.
And guess what? Its mango season so Keith is in heaven! You wouldn't believe the number of mangoes on the ground in one plantation we passed. Yum!
Before we leave Monterrico we are volunteering to teach at a local school. We're going to teach the students some English, and I think they'll like me lots.
Anyway, I’m off
A few drinks
Sampling the local Ron (rum) to the beach now. Catch you later! Hasta luego!
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