Central America - Mexico to Guatemala

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How on Earth did it get to Christmas so quickly?! I can't believe i've been away for 6weeks, covered 3 countries, met up with a friend from uni who has joined our merry band for the rest of the C.America tour, said hi and bye to one of Jimmah's friends and waved farewell to my boyf after his 3 week visit...as you would expect it's been the usual mix of excitement, ooohing, ahhing, eyebrow raising, drunken behaviour and a fair few feck ups! So here is a quick synopsis of what i have been getting up to!

We arrived in Mexico City and after doing some ruin spotting headed down to Puerto Escondido on the Pacific coast.



Being on the coast you might think it would be fairly easy to find the beach. Jimmah and I after some how getting lost did managed to find a beach, as it turned out not the one that the rest of the hostel clearly had no problem finding and got stranded on there at midday, with no water and no shade and ended up having to scramble up some a cliff and vegetation to get off it. On emerging from the undergrowth we hauled ourselves, unsure whether it was mirage or not, into a small cafe which then turned out to be about 25m from the entrance to the shady little cove that we'd been looking for! D'oh!



After recovering from this with more than a few beverages we then headed off to Oaxaca to spend a week trying to learn Spanish where we stayed with a family in an effort to practise what we were learning. This cunning plan did actually work, partially at least. While by no means fluent i was now at least able find a beach without getting sunstroke and could actually understand what people were saying to me most of the time - Well that was for about 2 weeks after which we headed for the Caribbean coast where everyone spoke English and most of the towns had a resident yank proclaiming 'these are the best tacos in town' (I had a distinct feeling that their basis for this comparison was the McTaco) and hence we didn't get to practise much there and even less so in Belize where being a former colony of the Flag waving Brits the language is English albeit with a distinct Caribbean twang. That said some quick talking did avoid us all being hauled down the police station in Cozumel whilst bombing around in a green converted beetle named Olivia!



Other than scaling cliffs and not getting arrested I've had kite surfing lessons in the sleepy town of Tulum,



spent a couple of days diving the second largest reef in the world including the famed blue hole in Belize which we shared with half a dozen grey Caribbean Reef sharks (not to mention rather too many inept divers who luckily ran out of air and left us in some relative peace to spend some time playing chicken with the sharks), lounged in Hammocks in Caye Caulker where the local fuzz provided us with rum when we ran out...




...got p!ssed in the jungle in Palenque and some colonial towns, minced in market towns where the locals wore fetching goat skin ponchos,




and have seen more Mayan ruins than you can shake a stick at including Tikal - A complex of Mayan ruins famed for it's jungle setting and use in Return of the Jedi - sadly there were no Eewok sightings - so we made so with wearing santa hats and doing where’s wally on the ruins.




After an overnight bus from Tikal to Guatemala city and 3 of Guatemala's famous chicken buses where you are likely to get a family sleeping on you, a couple of people standing on your feet and several sweaty armpits in the face while the conductor navigates up and down the bus collecting fares by either squeezing through non existent gaps, climbing out of the window and over the roof and into the next window or by spidermanning across the ceiling of the bus, we arrived in San Pedro de laguna a small town on lake Antitilan surrounded by volcanoes...




...in time for much revelry and Christmas (I'm really not sure why every lake in Latin America seems to have to have some for of the word tit in it?)




We then returned to Antigua (another) colonial town in Guatemala where we spent the last day that Patsy was with us jumping over lava on a live volcano!



The next stop for the three of us left is El Salvador for some more jungle action and in an effort to find somewhere slightly less touristy - I'm starting to feel like a walking ATM and since El Salvador is relatively fresh out of Civil War we're hoping it's a bit of gem waiting to be discovered...finger's crossed!

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