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Published: February 7th 2007
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So, it has been a while since I blogged.... It has been an incredibly busy month of relaxing on Lago de Atitlan, taking it easy at Semuc Champey, seeing Tikal at our leisure, chilling in Antigua, and hanging out in Coban.
After the last installment, we booked down to San Cristobal in Mexico, where Aden got sick, and then we moved on to San Pedro on the Lago and met Morgan. San Pedro was pretty cool.
However, we found ourselves going over to San Marcos everyday to go swimming at these really cool cliffs. Aden and I were working on our dives off the 5 m cliff, and all of us were jumping the 10 m one. It was sweet. There was this naked dude there named Chard -- this really BIG hippie from California. Dear god! Eventually, we realized that we should just move over there. We ended up staying at a wicked hostel called Unicornio. It has all these cool unicorn murals, mosaics and memorabilia. There were really good people there too, and we made tons of friends. We spent almost two weeks there... it is like a vortex, I swear.
We went to a few
parties, one of which was a "dress up party" at the behest of this really funny Brit guy named Richard. Morgan was the first to "dress up" (ie in drag...) then I fell to his persuation next. But it turns out skirts are really comfortable...
There was a really crazy old Brit guy named John staying there too. He had the funniest glasses held together with string, with one lens missing (he was pretty much blind). He was prone to extreme drinking followed by nationalistic rants against the French, the Germans -- pretty much anybody. The thing was, he would drunkenly accost guests of these nationalities. He like Canadians, luckily, or should I say "Canoodles". He would always apologize in the morning: "I was only kidding... They know I was only kidding". He was determined to have the lago declared a national park, and he decided that the best place to achieve this was at the European Commision in Strasbourg. He tried to get the confused girl running the hotel to sew a red and purple snake across the shirt he is going to wear when he gives his speech there.
Then, at one point, he took a
turn for the worst. He decided he was the law in San Marcos, and then he started speaking into his cane and ordering helicopters to come. Good fun. He accosted a Yankee guy who was doing some building across the street, saying "Don't you know that this is going to be a national park!" What a partier!
Eventually he sobered up, and then things got a lot more tranquil. He had withdrawal really bad, but he became about 100% more sane.
After our much, much too long stay in San Marcos, we finally made it out of there over to Antigua. I climbed the volcano Pecaya -- that was really impressive and fun. There was a stream of lava not far away! Man was it hot...
On the way from Antigua to Semuc Champey, we had a stop over in Coban, which was really fun. We spent a night there and played a lot of songs for the locals (yes... we bought a guitar!!!). They bought all this really gross liquor called Barellito (though not as gross as the Quetzalteca that we drank at the Lago -- picture Aden's moonshine pre-carbon filtering....) and insisted that we drink
The 10 m cliff
Aden and I jumping simultaneously. it. It was all local guys, us and Eva, a Danish girl we met in San Marcos... needless to say they loved Eva hahaha.
The next day we booked over to Semuc Champey. It is spectacular. The hostel in Lanquin where we stayed was really cool. It is called El Retiro, and it is like a really wicked summer camp with a lot more drinking. My favourite councellor was Frank "the tank". He said that I am camper of the year. We let them rip all of our CDs, and so they loved us, and that gave us leverage so that we got to play DJ a couple of nights. Sadly, Morgan got repeatedly partied out. We innertubed down the river repeatedly, which was really fun.
We just saw Tikal today. What a place! We woke up at 3:00 am to catch the "sunrise". Sadly, it was far too misty. We saw some spider monkeys, though, and the ruins are spectacular.
So, thanks to Guatemala's awesomeness, we now we have only a week in each country we want to visit. Next up, Belize, then Honduras.
Ciao until then...
Mike
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Gringo
Michael
frm yr mm
I love the photos of the two of you - the one of you jumping into the water together, for example. beautiful. (hats?) course I want to see more photos of both of you - lve lve Mm in rainy and cold Victoria British Columbia still 'moving in'