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December 6th 2007

Published: January 16th 2008

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Around the world in 2 years

Flores from the plane

Our flight to Flores was at 10am but we had to be at the airport 2 hours before the flight. For some reason you can't get any busses from Antigua that would get you to Guatemala airport at 8am, so we were at the airport at 5:30am 😞 finding out that we would have made the flight at 7am easily. Ah well! The duty free area is a lot better stocked than the Miami airport when we went to Guatmala and Ed found out that Bushmills is the oldest Whiskey distillery in the world. There's some trivia for you.
Anyhow, we get to Flores alright and we're the only people getting off the flight to go to Tikal. As soon as we stepped out the airport there were around 10 taxi drivers running towards us saying: Follow me! Follow me! They all had the same price for a drive to Tikal, so we just went with one person. Not that the other drivers would stop following us then. Even when we were sitting down already they still tried to convince us to go with another one. Very strange!
We decided to treat ourselves and stay in Tikal in the Jaguar Inn.

El dia de diablo

Several piñatas lost their lifes to fire and fireworks that day ;)

All guide books don't really recommend any of the hotels in the Park as they are expensive and not good value. I really liked the Jaguar Inn though. The room was clean and the food in the restaurant was quite good as well. $50 a night is really a treat though. But because we stayed there we could enter the park in the afternoon (if you go after 3:30pm, your ticket is valid for the next day also) and watch the sunset, which was quite amazing. We saw a few monkeys and shitloads of spiders, quite scary actually. Especially in the dark, you can only see a lot of glittering in the grass on either side of the footpath and eventually we noticed that they were spider eyes! Ahhhh! I am pretty sure they were just waiting for one of us to slip and they would have jumped out and eaten us 😉
The next morning we went into the park at 5:30 for sunrise but unfortunately it was really misty and we couldn't see the sun at all. We payed some guide 100Q for the trip and let me tell you, it wasn't worth it. He was talking bullshit

Tree in Tikal

veery interesting but pretty, no?

most of the time. If you want a guide there, pay a proper one. It will cost you more but you might hear more about the history. He was telling us about chewing gum most of the time!

Tikal is amazing though. We spent time walking around to the different sites but even then we didn't see everything. It's great to climb up Temple IV and all you see is jungle and a few temples popping out here and there. I'll spare you the history part, you can read it up on the internet if you like.

After Tikal we stayed in Flores for a couple nights. Really to relax because Ed was feeling a bit ill. We have met a dutch couple (Toni and Marc) that we went to Pacaya with in Flores again. Flores is quite nice but there's not an awful lot to do around there. We went to the zoo one day and we were at the dodgiest (sp?) nightclub ever! 2 bouncers with shotguns, only Guatemalans in there and one guy walking around in the club with a cowboy hat and 2 guns!! Another guy was insisting to buy us beer all night.