Where we're going we don't need roads.......

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No we weren't going back to the future, but Livingston does not have any roads connecting it with the rest of the country so we made our way by boat to the town of Rio Dulce. We travelled up the river of the same name which you enter through a steep jungle covered ravine spotted with tiny little Mayan villages where women were doing there washing on the riverbank and men in dori canoes tried to dodge the speedboats whilst doing their fishing. The river has a number of places to stop on route to the town. Our first stop was a Mayan Artisan Village which had beautiful paper mache bowls made from local natural materials like pulped banana leafs and corn husks. We could not afford to send anything else home so we restrained from making more craft purchases and settled with a home-made birthday card for Kev´s mum instead. It is actually her birthday as we write this, so hope you received the card and Happy Birthday! We've been trying to phone!!!!

Also along the way up to Rio Dulce town we stopped at a hot spring at the side of the river, which has turned out to be the only hot water we've had whilst being in Guatemala (hot water is a bit of a myth here, everyone says they have it but it never seems to materialise!!). Rio Dulce is now popular with Yachty crowd and there were lots of very posh looking houses along the river, Tash spotted a few that she quite liked! The river eventually opens out into a huge lake dotted with islands of mangroves, apparently manatee´s live in the lake but you´re not likely to see one if you travel in a speedboat!! Halfway across the huge lake our speedboat engine decided to stop and did not appear to want to restart. For a while we thought it may be a repeat of the Mexico Jeep pushing incident however it is not so easy to push a boat in the middle of a very deep lake and they did not appear to be oars in the boat either! Luckily the engine finally gave in and started up again. Just before arriving at Rio Dulce we passed a castle, or at least the Guatemalan version of one anyway!! It's actually an old fort that was there to protect the town back in the day.

We were not planning on staying in Rio Dulce so went straight to the bus station. The bus arrived and was so full that the conductor had to arrange all the people, jenga style, to fit us all in standing in the aisle. The trip was meant to be 4 hours so we thought we might be in for the "bus journey from hell" part 2 but luckily the police stopped the bus at a check point half an hour down the road because it was so full and ordered everybody off. The locals all went to have their ID checked and we were herded with the rest of the sardine-tourists to a minibus. We passed the rest of the journey in comfort, arrived well ahead of time, were dropped at our hotel and all for no extra cost. Wicked!!

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Photos

Ravine
This was the view up from our boat when we were going up river

Manatee food!
we didn´t see any but we saw their food! the lilly garden was huge!

Pretty Clouds
This is a view across the lake when the river opened out, we liked the clouds!!