MarkandLara

We made a very short visit to Guatemala today, on a day trip to Tikal, a UNESCO world heritage site with Mayan ruins in the middle of the jungle. Tikal was once a huge city of a few hundred thousand people, but now only a few buildings are visible above the jungle, with more buried beneath it. The site is huge, with only a small proportion excavated. In addition to the ruins, we walked through lots of jungle, seeing spider monkeys, leafcutter ants and the national bird!... read more

We went to see the Mayan ruins at Caracol. It's pretty well off the beaten track, and there were only an handful of other people there. It was a 3 hour drive from San Ignacio, time consuming not because of the distance, but the unpaved road. We stopped on the way at the Rio Frio cave which was impressively large. At Caracol, we explored the site with our guide, who explained the various buildings that have been excavated in the last couple of decades. The site was quite large, and surrounded by jungle, and we stopped to watch some howler monkeys for a while. We climbed up the tallest building, thought to have been home to the Mayan nobility in the heat - it felt like a long way up, and there was a good view ... read more

We arrived in Caye Caulker yesterday on the water taxi, after a half hour trip from San Pedro and an early morning of sea kayaking before it got too hot. We ate lunch in a little place by the ferry pier before finding our hotel. In the afternoon, we swam off our hotel pier (there's lots of sea grass right next to the shore) and found lost of interesting fish under the pier when we snorkelled. We wandered into the village and had a beer at the split, a channel through the island, sorted our laundry and located the bank. Dinner was delicious fish at the Rainbow Grill. Today we went on a snorkelling trip - we enjoyed the last one so much that we thought we'd splash out (sorry, bad pun...) on a second one! ... read more

We got an ADO bus from Tulum to Chetumal. The journey took just over three hours, with very similar scenery (mostly trees, with the odd pineapple stand and a couple of small towns) with a bizarre selection of films on the bus. Sadly not Paddington this time, which we watched in Spanish on the journey from Playa to Tulum! Chetumal was a fairly sizeable place, but we only had to walk a few blocks from the shiny bus station to the market to catch our next bus. The buses to Belize are old US school buses that have been colourfully painted and a luggage rack hung inside. We managed to pay in Mexican pesos ($150 each) although for anyone reading this and planning the same trip, we realised as the bus pulled out that there was ... read more

After our very long day yesterday, we woke up in Mexico on the first proper day of our honeymoon. We found a nice little place for breakfast - eggs, spinach and retried beans, plus some very welcome coffee. We then headed to the beach, which was nice and quiet first thing and had lovely white sand a view over to Cozumel. We swam, bobbing in some really big waves - it looked like we were going to get some rain, but the clouds passed over and the sun returned. We ate lunch (Mexican, obviously) in a lovely restaurant, before heading to the hotel pool. Lara practiced snorkelling whilst looking a bit daft... the eBay £20 dive mask does indeed seem to have precisely the right prescription and doesn't leak, so thanks to the person who spent ... read more