Tikal and Flores

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Flores, Guatemala. We left Palenque (Mexico) to begin on a trip I would possibly not considered unless it had been for my two energetic travelling companions - a trip to Guatemala to see the Mayan ruins at Tikal. It was a very obscure an loooooong journey to get to our destination Flores, from Palenque we were up at sunrise to catch a small minibus which would take us to the "lancha" (small, long, thin boat) at the border which skimmed across the mostly deserted river that runs between Mexico and Guatemala, a novel mode of transport and a great way to pass a Saturday morning! A long tedious wait at the other bank ensued whilst we waited for this totally ghetto minibus to get going and take us from the Guat border to Flores, this was a long long long dusty ride.

During the journey though Guatemala I was astounded by the miles of scorched, burnt land which surrounded us, it was terrible! All around the trees were stumps, the ground arid and charcoal coloured. I found out why on the tour of the ruins. It turns out that the jungle in these areas have only two feet of decent topsoil which for 2000yrs have only been good for two crops, after that they are abandoned and the new site is razed with fire to begin the cycle. How awful??!?!?! So massives swathes of dense jungle are destroyed, the impact on the environment is pronounced, there used to be 11 months of rain a year and now there are 7 - not enough trees to suck up moisture means the whole area is on a downward spiral.

So we arrived at the hotel, only 7 USD for all of us! Though the shower was a lethal weapon, you know they put an electrical coil in the shower head and then threw in the live wires just to dangle in the stream of water!! I had a cold shower.

We were up at 3am to see the sunrise from a Temple. Can you belive, the tour bus was late. We missed the sunrise by 5 mins. (Kez RIPPED into the guides, hahaha!) Anyway, it didn´t stop us from enjoying it. We climbed vertically to the top of the highest ruins, it gave us a breath-taking view over the canopy of the jungle, from our vantage point and in COMPLETE silence we watched nature live its daily life. We saw tucans popping from tree to tree, heard howler monkeys screech and spider monkey would bounce in and out of view!

The rest of the day we spent back at the hotel, there were loads of nice people to chat to, I swam out from our island in Flores to an even smaller island with only on house on it with Julie from Oz, we got out there but were trapped for an hour whilst a storm passed over! The next day was the trek over to Belize City, Belize. I felt as rough as a badger´s arse which we can only put down to inbibing too much lake water by accident, plus too much sun....gurgle.

Thought of the day. Today I have no thoughts.

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