life in the big city

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i´m apparently no good at this blog thing....can´t believe a month has already gone by.

as far as i can tell right this second, the only thing i have been doing for the last month has been offering a buffet for biting insects. i counted them...i have exactly 32 million mosquito bites. not used to this at christmas time.

speaking of christmas time...all the strung lights in the world (and believe me, most of them are here) doesn´t make xela in december feel like christmas. my only homesick moment so far was thinking about snowy, cold, magical christmases of yesteryear. maybe that´s more childhoodsick than anything. no se.

still, it is a fun time to be here. nativity scenes alone make guatemalan christmas spectacular. at the family house where we stay one night on the lago trek the scene includes dinosaurs, reindeer, and tropical plants. on the streets of xela there is a gigantic scene with stuffed figures all in bright, shiny clothing. i´ll have to get pictures. it´s incredible.

us quetzaltrekkers will be spending christmas with the kids that don´t have any other family.

not a whole lot to speak of otherwise. work work work. not that any of it feels too much like work. we have a great team, with folks from all over the world (ireland, germany, scotland, australia, the states, england). we all get along (usually). we spend a lot of time with the kids, and of course a lot of time on amazing treks. typically i guide the lago trek on the weekends. it´s still an amazing trek, but there are certainly parts i tire of. thankfully there are unique moments to spice things up...an angry bull charging another guide and me, and then headbutting the tree we found to hide behind.... evacuating a miserable, vomitting client from the middle of nowhere...someone getting stuck on the zipline, etc...the little things.

ben guides ascents of volcan tajumulco, the highest point in central america. i should put pictures up, even though i haven´t gone yet. stunning. on one recent trip he ripped his hand open with a machete. apparently you could see his knuckles. he says it didn´t really hurt or bleed....he continued the trek as normal. fortunately he was all stitched up by the time i got back from lago. even that was hard for me to look at. guatemalans seem to love that he has this wound, as any one of them that has ever worked the fields have similar scars.

ben and i did finally get a weekend off last weekend. it was amazing. we went to this town on the coast called tilapa, and then hired a boat to take us over the the neighboring island tilapita (little tilapa). the island has no roads or cars, just wide sandy lanes for strolling down. there was one hotel (where we were the only guests) and a handful of places to eat, all offering the exact same thing: grilled fish, fried fish, fried shrimp, fish soup, and ceviche...we tried them all, they were all amazing (in xela we eat beans and eggs for nearly every meal). there was a gorgeous black sand beach which was clean and mostly deserted. the water was the perfect temperature and we pretty much spent the entire weekend just playing in the waves. at one point we did hire a guy with a boat to take us through the maze of mangroves. saw lots of birds and crabs (sadly no crocs). it was really the perfect weekend, so nice to do absolutely nothing after 8 weeks of always doing something.

i´m putting some random photos up. some from lago treks, some from a guide hike we took through the countryside and to the hotsprings, some from the beach. i´m working on getting more of xela, the kids, day to day life.

hope all is well in all the places you all are.

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