Blogs from Petén Region, Guatemala, Central America Caribbean - page 8

We really lucked out with our hostel. It was only Q100 ($12) a night, and it was right on the lake! Flores is a small island with lots of cool shops and restaurants. We heard that it was okay to sim in the lake, and saw a local jump off the dock, so we decided to go for a swim to beat the heat. The view from the water is amazing- this is such a beautiful place! It truly felt like paradise. We took a break from swimming to try out a waterfront restaurant owned by some German brothers. On the menu, they said that the second the saw the beautiful island, they knew they would never leave. They also gave us each a worry doll with our bill. Legend says you put a Guatemalan worry ... read more

It was an early morning for us today. Our sunrise tour started at 4:15 AM. At about 4 AM the howler monkeys started roring. We put on our head lamps and walked to the main lodge where we met our guide Chino. The lodge was suppose to make us breakfast to go but something got lost in translation and they weren't made. We walked into the jungle in the dark to temple IV. This temple had a set of wooden stairs going to a platform near the top. We sat there for about an hour and watched the sun come up. Then we followed our guide to a bunch more temples. We went back to the lodge for breakfast. We went swimming and took a nap before packing up and going to San Ignagco, Belize. We ... read more

Today we slept in late and then walked to Santa Elena for breakfast which is the town on the other end of the bridge to Flores island. We bought some water at the grocery store and caught a taxi to Ixpanpajul National Park. The cab was basically a motorcycle with a back seat. It seems most of the cab drivers have never been to Ixpanpajul and don't know exactly where to go. We arrived and paid and it turned out we were the only customers there. We spent about an hour and a half walking the path with the hanging bridges. Part of the way through we saw some monkeys sleeping in a tree. They were just flopped over the branches and one of them had a baby clinging to it. We went up to a ... read more

After a day of recovery on Tuesday in Playa following the blue parrot beach club me and the boys went to cenote cristalino, another fresh water pool. We spent the day throwing ourselves off the rocks into the water, I was the only one man enough to go for the dive, nailed it, got a call from the GB dive team in the afternoon asking if I was about for London in the summer, they reckon I am more talented than Tom Daly. Not surprised!!! We met a couple of Belgian lads back at the hostel and went out to the blue parrot beach club with them on Thursday. They were good lads, one of them was freaking mental and spent most of the night trying to convince us to go to a Mexican strip club. ... read more

The 4am wakeup call to catch our flight to Flores came around much too soon. It didn't help that we had stayed up dancing to a live salsa band the night before at our hotel the Westin Guatemala. Luckily the flight to Flores was under an hour and we were picked up from the airport by 9am. We were soon on our way to Tikal one of the most important archaeological sites of the Mayan World, Tikal, means “Place of Voices," was built during the Maya Classic Period. Tikal is considered the second largest city in the Maya world. Tikal has the distinction of being the first site in Guatemala declared as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. We walked the complex of Temples and Acropolis for around 4 hours in the hot sun, the humidity ... read more