Blogs from Central America Caribbean - page 1873

Quick, name 3 ways to get your adrenaline rushing in Belize: 1)Dive amongst sting rays, green moral eels, barracudas, and nurse sharks, 2)Hear the sound of howler monkeys at dawn just yards from your tent, 3)Get a knife pulled on you in the streets of belize city. I have already blogged a bit about the first 2 and I'll put the last one off for later. Belize is set apart from the rest of central america in many ways... First, Belize is english-speaking, not spanish. It took me a while to adjust...the first couple of days I was ordering food and saying hello in spanish. The main language is english and creole, a unique hybrid form of english...you will be listening to it thinking you understand because there are familiar words but really you don't...it is ... read more

After a hasty escape from the cold, but very admirable streets of San Cristobal, we found ourselves in Quetzaltenango, the second biggest city in Guatemala (only 200,000...Guatemala City has 3 million!) We got off the bus, only to be sheparded into a hotel by the two 60-year-old Slovenians that rode in with us. We spent the first day in Chichicastenango (Guatemala loves their 'castenangos') which is one of the world's most famous markets. For some reason we decided to go at 5:30am, hey why not have another ridiculously early morning. It was really an experience. Chichi was a labyrinth of stalls, with bright handwoven Mayan tapestries walling you in on either side. At some points there were walls and walls of wooden masks, others there were stalls selling completely random appliance parts and childrens clothes. In ... read more

Today I went to the volcano with my dad (sorry this time Vlad isn't around) and our driver. It was spectacular, the view, the smoke jejejeje! well I finally went to the top...though my asthma was kicking in..psttttttt! I won...I was at the top with my photographer (Ivan) our driver. Check out the picks!... read more

Well, something really funny just happened, so I figured I'd try to write about it. I just met this dude Bern who is a rapper from LA, but he grew up in Belize, and went to LA first when he was younger, and got deported back to Belize. But then he made it back to America again, got lawyers and got legal. Now he is livin his dream of being a rap star, he does dance hall reggea, he calls it. It's really cool. Anyway, he came down here to san ignacio and that's where we're at. I met him, he was playing chess in a cafe. He and his two friends, Aaron and John, played games, then finally I got a game. I won! But we had a rematch for the bill, and he won, ... read more

So we took a quick side-trip to Guatemala to visit Tikal, the Maya ruins in the jungle. After handing over our (ripoff) US$18 just to leave the lovely country of Belize, and avoiding the hassles of the locals trying to charge us US$50 for a bus journey, we got on the local Collectivo bus for $4 and bumped our way to Flores. After being so long in Australia and NZ, I had forgotten the trials and tribulations of a bargaining culture (for bargaining read: ripping off the tourists) and at this stage of the trip, I was just too jaded to deal with it when we arrived in Guatemala, difficult enough as it was dealing in Spanish, after having English for so long to lean on! Tikal itself was.....good. It is supposedly one of the best ... read more