Mo{s Tikal Experience

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Hello Friends,

Sorry for the long absence. Russ, Nicole, David (Nicole´s boyfriend), and I had a GREAT time together on Ambergris Caye. We rented a beautiful condo with A/C and basically never left the place. We cooked, made jugo de sandia and pina, and played cribbage for hours. Russ leaving was about one of the saddest things I´ve ever seen. You all know how much I used to enjoy traveling alone, but things are completely different now that I¨m carrying around a little piece of Russ with my everywhere I go.

The biggest sadness of this trip was my loss of Russ´ camera, including all of his memories of Tikal and Flores. We sent e-mails, filed a police report, and put an add in the San Pedro paper, but to no avail. We even offered a $400 reward for the return of the camera with no questions asked. What happened was I left the camera in a restroom at a nice resort, and returned 10 minutes later to find the camera had been taken. A financially and emotionally costly mistake.

On Sunday David, Nicole, and I returned to Belize City on the water taxi. From there we boarded a crowded chicken bus for the 3 hour ride to San Ignacio. This town wasn´t just sleepy...it was comatose. It turns out all sensible people find cool places to be during the hottest part of the day (which we weren´t smart enough to do). We made arrangements to go on a tour the next day of Actun Tunichil Muknal (simply referred to as ATM), a crazy fun and interesting cave. We drove for an hour, hike through the jungle canopy for an hour crossing 3 rivers, then arrived to the cave opening, a huge mouth surrounded by the jungle. We put on our helmets and headlamps, plunged into the cool, clean water, then swam, hiked, climbed, and twisted our way into the cave. We saw stallactites, stallagmites, columns, bats, amazing crystal structures, pottery, and bodies that had been sacrificed to the gods. It was exhausting, but an exhilirating experience.

After returning to San Ignacio we boarded a mini-bus headed to Tikal. At the border Nicole bared her teeth and refused to pay the Guatemalan ¨entrance fee¨unless the cochino could give us a receipt (there is no such thing as an entrance fee as you can guess). He told us the woman who could give us the receipt was out to lunch and would return in an hour. Her voice got louder and we were on our way to Tikal. Go Nicole!

We arrived at the Tikal Inn around 7 P.M. and got to see the most spectacular sky ever. We could even see the Milky Way (Russ, you would have loved it).

At 4:30 A.M. we awoke and prepared for our sunset guided tour of Tikal. Things went very wrong. At 5:15 A.M. we had been waiting for 15 minutes for our guide. When he arrived he told us to start running as the mini-bus had broken down. 30 minutes later we arrived sweating and huffing at the top of Temple 4, and of course we had missed sunrise. It turned out our ¨guide¨was giving the tour in Spanish, and Dave´s college German just wasn´t going to cut it, so another guide offered to let us join his group, an intimate affair with 50 of our closest friends. However, as gloomy as this all sounds, Luis was an amazingly kind, smart, and funny guide, and we tipped him well at the end of the tour. Tikal is truly an amazing place, but here I must make a confession...I think I have seen all of the ruins I need to see in this lifetime (Machu Pichu, Tulum, Copan,Tenotichuacan, Palenque, and at least 6 others in the Yucatan). I´m not complaining, mind you, but I just think I¨ve seen enough.

I now write you from a sweltering internet cafe in Flores. The only place I´ve found A/C is in my hotel room, where I gladly forked out $16 for a room that is truly glacial. 😊

Dave flies home tomorrow, and the next part of our journey is to Semuc Champey which I¨m told is a 7 hour bus ride away. I wish I could click my sandals together and just be there.

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