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Published: February 19th 2016
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What a little gem! Flores is a town in the northern part of Guatemala. We took a chicken bus from Belize City, which with a stop off at immigration (where you need to pay 15dollars to enter Guatemala) took about 3/3.5 hours and it was a scenic route with the scenery changing from the carribean style Belize to the mountains and greenery of Guatemala.
We were staying on Flores Peten which is a little island connected to Flores and it so small you could walk around it in about 15 minutes. I felt like I'd stepped back into Europe with the all the little cobbled streets, colourful houses and the beautiful lake. Such a gorgeous, relaxing place. Checked into our hostel, called Green World Hotel, which was just on the water front then went out exploring. There are lots of little traditional shops with souvenirs etc, nice little cafés, restaurants and rooftop bars. The only thing that spoils it a bit is that are lots of huge cars that seemed to parked everywhere. Another transport option is going on a little Tuk Tuk. We were hank margin after our bus journey - all we'd ate were plantain crisps! We found
a place where we actually ate the whole time whilst we were here called San Telmo. It's owned by two Argentinian girls and the food/smoothies were all so good, on a health kick now! I had a juice with beet root, ginger, cucumber, garlic, lime and orange! I over did it on the garlic a bit as I'd read that garlic can repel mosquitoes and we hadn't bought any repellent yet or are we taking malaria tablets. Would rather eat garlic than splash out on that!
After here we had a wander along to the street food markets and got some cake. Again I was blown away! So easily pleased with my food. I had a coconut cake and Nikki had a pineapple one. They also have chocolate, banana (again amazing! ) and the best that I tried was the tres leches (3 milks). I would definitely be a fattie if I lived here, couldn't resist.
The next morning we had a 4 am wake up to go the Mayan Ruins at Tikal, which is what most people do when they come here. You can go at 3am to watch the sunrise which is 10quid more
and we debated for a while whether to do this but we just went for the other early one which we thought was great anyways. It took about an hour and a half to get there. The sun was just rising which was still nice, sure it would have been an experience though to watch it from the top of one of the temples. We had a guide with us who was brilliant and so passionate about his history and ancestors - the Mayans. They have only recovered about 20% of the temples and villages so far! Unbelievable that is still so much to be discovered. The temples were huge! The best one to climb was temple 4 where you could see over the whole of the jungle and also the other temples. There were also loads of monkeys. We mainly saw spider monkeys and you could hear the howler monkeys the whole time, which sounded a bit scary! People we met also said they managed to hold a tarantula that some guy who worked there just picked out of the jungle!!!
We got the bus back at 11am and back to Flores for midday. We couldn't
believe it was only this time, felt like about 6pm! Such an adventurous morning. We went back to San Telmo for lunch and had a chilled afternoon about the town. People were swimming in the lake or sunbathing by it! Just love how chilled it is. Don't think I could ever feel stressed again or go back to normality again, especially being over in Central America. For sunset we watched it on the roof terrace of our hostel then went to meet some people that we have met on buses etc along the way so far at a rooftop terrace bar. That's the thing when backpacking you just keep seeing the same faces which is really nice. We had a few drinks, back to street food market for more cakes then called it a night.
Nikki had a bus at 8am the following day to Semuc Champney which sounds incredible. She has hostel work there, and I need to go to Lake Atitlan for my hostel work. So after 5 months of being together almost every day we said our goodbyes. So emotional but we will definitely see each other again at some point in Guatemala. It's
not adios, it's hasta luego!
I then had a day to myself in Flores, relaxing by the lake in the sun and one last munch at San Telmo, as I was getting the night bus to Guatemala City, which would take 12 hours! Bit nervous, but there's a few people here doing the same route so should be fine! Famous last words......
My phone also decided to break on my last day in Flores so I can't access my photos of Flores and can only upload my Tikal pictures.
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