The most beautiful place in guatemala

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After a quick overnight stop in Flores, near Tikal in northern Guatemala we made our way towards what I´d heard was the most beautiful place in Guatemala: Semuc Champey.

We were lucky enough to meet up with some others who were interested in doing the same thing at a hostel in Coban. So the next morning all eight of us piled into a minibus at 6am and set off. It was an interesting journey we were taken as far as Languin, where we had to get out because the roads were too bad for a minibus to continue. And so it was time for the reliable pick up. It was a bit of a tight squeeze for eight backpacks and their owners - not to mention that at this stage it had started rainging pretty heavily. The driver put a tarpe over the back of the pickup which meant that sitting on the floor our heads were touching the "roof". The next half hour was spent bumping around the back of this truck, with huge quantities of water coming through some badly placed holes in the tarpe.

However, the good news is - it definitely was worth it. Semuc Champey - even under water - is beautiful. Thanks to the rain (its the wettest part of the country) its a dramatic, green landscape of water and hills. Our accomodation was a rustic chalet divided into several rooms. The restaurant on the porch out front served three meals a day with snacks in between, the food was pretty good but the view sitting there looking out was the best part. We quickly got used to the cold showers (mainly cause we were washing in the river anyway!) and the fact there was only electricity between 6 and 8 and got used to walking around with a torch.

About ten minutes walk from the hostel are these unexplored water-filled caves, so considering the weather it was the perfect thing to do first. About twenty of us set of with the guide, each of us armed with a candle for light. The first cave was bright (bat-filled) with knee deep water and as we progressed further in it got darker, the water got deeper but the formations were all the more impressive. For the next two hours we found ourselves on a cave-themed assault course: swimming with one arm out of water to keep the candle lit, climbing up waterfalls to get to the next part of the path, scrambling down rocky surfaces and at the very end squeezing through a tiny space to jump into the water below (course you couldnt see below and none of us really had the Spanish to understand what it was we were jumping into but it all ended well!). All of this was interspersed with a few moments to appreciate the depths of the caves and other moments to worry about whether the guide was sure that we should jump the six feet into the water below . . . At the end of the tour we tubed back down the river to our hostel (stopping only to jump off the 30 foot bridge at the insistence of the guide) and got back just in time for a well-deserved, vegetarian lunch.

Most of group had decided to squeeze the caves and the tour of the national park into one day and leave on the bus the next morning at dawn (the only bus of the day). Steve and I decided it was worth staying a day more and when we woke up the next morning we had the whole place to ourselves and so chatted with the owners while we had breakfast on that fantastic porch. There was no noise, no cars, no tv - nothing.

Later in the afternoon we walked to the national park which blew us away. The park is famous for its pools and at first glance it looks like a man-made paradise commissioned by Disney. All the way down the river were these beautiful orangey steps in the rock, and each step a pool of beautiful blue water had collected. It went on forever. And of course, this being Guatemala - the country where they let you put sticks in lava and jump of bridges - you could walk out into the pools and see where some of them turned into waterfalls. It was the most beautiful, tranquil and interesting place. It was pretty sad to have to leave it and after celebrating Steve´s birthday the last night there, getting the dawn bus was almost more of a challenge than walking through a bat-filled cave.

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Comments

[Mark]

Indiana Helene
Anyone else have the theme tune to Indiana Jones running through their heads reading this?