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Semuc Champey
View from the miradorOk ok, it´s official...we are horrible bloggers! Two weeks have gone by since we started our traveling side of our trip and I¨m going to attempt to summarize it a bit.
SO...after we were both deathly ill for 2 consecutive days (see the previous entry) we took a chance, hopped on a bus and headed to Rio Dulce. This proved to be a bit of a challenge for me - won´t go into too much detail, but I did ruin a good pair of drawers... This area of the country is great. Rio Dulce and Livingston have a carrribean vibe, which is incredibly distinct from the rest of the country. Everyone speaks jive talk and it takes you a while to realize it´s English. We were incredibly relieved to be out of the rain and into some hotter weather. In Livingston we had one of best days of our trip, which entailed hiking through villages, along the beach, through the jungle to a place called Siete Altares or Seven Altars. They´re naturally occurring pools that stem from a large pool at the beginning, big enough to swim in with a waterfall. Awesome. We finished the day by grabbing a beer
Caye Caulker
Ahhh...the life! and heading out to a bunglow on a pier, swaying in hammocks and loving life! Perhaps one of the best parts of Livingston were the giant crabs that lived in the yard of our hostel and you literally had to watch where you stepped at night because they´d cover the sidewalks. Or Boots having a nightmare and shooting up in bed yelling, ¨No!! Don´t do it!¨ I literally almost had a heart attack thinking someone had broken into our room! Oh Boots. Or the iguana running rampant in our room at night.
Next, we hit up a ferry and headed on over to Belize. Oh Belize. Seriously, what a dreamy place! I think we both secretly wished we´d been there on some romantic getaway with a hot guy, but we made due with eachother! Our original plan was to head straight to Caye Caulker but as often happens with traveling, we met a guy who told us about a sleepy little town along the way with a great beach and bars/restaurants right down on the beach. Se llama, Placencia. This was just lazy beach/book/gelato/cute restaurant named Rumfish time. After two nights there, we headed up to Caye Caulker. Caye
7 Altares
Hammocks and beer! Caulker is a tiny little island with something like a 1000 inhabitants. It´s adorable. I think it took us about 20-25 minutes to run around it in the mornings. Our first day there, we were walking to the end of the island to check out this bar when all the sudden we hear: ¨Hey guys!¨ Two guys that we know from Jackson happened to be there at the same time! Pretty random. So, the four of us, Boots, Andy, Morris and I, set up a snorkeling trip the next day with Juni. Let me tell you a bit about Juni. Juni is a 70 year old man who has lived on the island his entire life. And his family has lived there for as long as he can remember. The guy has stories to tell and makes the history of the island come alive. He was born on a boat at sea, builds his own wooden sailboats (which we went out on the next day) and has the oldest standing building/house on the island after the hurricane in 1980ish. The guy is like Yoda of Caye Caulker. The second Juni jumped in the water, he had schools of fish surrounding
La Isla Bonita
Our island for the day! him and he was immediately doing flips around 3 stingrays and no joke, these stingrays were literally playing with him. God of the Sea. Juni would put his hands under the stingrays and make us lay on our backs while he put the stingray on our stomaches and they´d glide over the top of us and over our heads so we could feel the softness of their skin. Amazing. We were also swimming with sharks that day...pretty cool. So, the next day the guys wanted to go on a fishing trip and the guide invited Boots and I to come along for free and he would just drop us off on an island to hang out. The island - seriously contained one house (some lucky bloke scored the job of being Islandkeeper - imagine putting that one on your resume!). We could walk around this island in 5 minutes or less. Just Boots and I for about 4 hours, in the middle of nowhere ocean. Bliss. Or as Madonna would say, ¨La isla bonita¨. The rest of our time in Belize was spent pilfering the pool from another hotel and sipping daquiris with a group of girlfriends we met.
Flores
View from the terrace of our hostel After Belize we headed back into Guatemala and felt like we were back in the real Central America. (Everyone speaks English in Belize and it´s incredibly easy to travel there). We headed to the town of Flores and set up our tour to Tikal, the major Mayan ruins of Guatemala. This was Boot´s birthday so she can say that she scaled many a temples for the big 26! Tikal is pretty impressive and listening to and seeing the howler monkies was probably one of the highlights. We went out to dinner that night but because of the extreme heat, we weren´t sleeping well and seriously spent the next 3 nights taking drugs to make us pass out and forget our misery. Next, we headed down to Semuc Champey. This was the exact moment when Boots and I realized how far our friendship has come from the beginning of this trip! Like I said, it was miserably hot (my sunglasses were cracking from the heat) and the hostel we chose to stay at, Las Marias, only had a private room with one bed in it free. So, we took it. Imagine: 100 degree heat, a tiny room with no screens on
Livingston
Bungalow for a couple of nights the windows (bugs crawled freely - especially at night over our bodies), Boots and I half naked (seriously, no other way to sleep), a large crack under the door big enough to let in a moutain rat during the night to rummage through our belongings, electricity from only 6pm-10pm (resulted to using the light from our cell phones to try to find the rat in the middle of the night), me flinging beetles and hairy worms off of me during the night, and trying to go to bed with the sound of our neighbor attempting the smash the fist size spider in her room. Good times!! All was so worth it though as we were there to see and experience Semuc Champey. We both agree that this was the best day of the trip so far. Semuc is set in the jungle and they´re natural pools of turquoise color and it´s just amazingly beautiful. We spent most of the day with our Holland friends swimming in these pools and bathing in the sun like goddesses. Next, when we didn´t think it could possibly get any better, we went caving. First, Boots and I were the only ones daring enough to
sit on this giant swing that swung you out over the river and you just jump and hope to survive. Good stuff. Then we spent the next 2 hours with Rojo leading us through this cave with only candles to light the way. We were seriously swimming the majority of the time, laughing as we tried our best to hold up one arm to keep the candle alight. Oh yeah, and we danced a bit in the cave. And jumped off cliffs into the murky, who knows what´s swimming around in there, water below us. We definitely deserved the beer that night.
Now, we´re back in Antigua and we´re both pretty happy to be here. Antigua has a safe feeling to it (no, we´re not naive and we know plenty of bad things happen here as well) It´s touristy and such a fun, colorful town. Last night, while eating at this adorable little restaurant with no name, we witnessed a religious ceremony of sorts, which entailed people slowly walking around the block of this gorgeous yellow church, burning incense, carrying purple velvet banners and crosses of Christ, and chanting some sort of song. Pretty cool to see. This morning
I experienced another highlight of my trip - Boots and I went out running and some dude on his motorcycle slowed down, grabbed my ass and proceeded to drive off! Who does that?? So, I´ll leave the list of profanities I yelled after him up to your imagination! Then, today we hiked Pacaya, an active volcano just outside of Antigua. We seriously stood right next to a river of flowing, 2,000 degree lava. Just this giant blob, slowly oozing out of the side of the volcano. Again, cool stuff.
All right...sorry for the mouthful and the neglect! If you made it this far to be reading this, serious kudos. The next week we´ll spend at Lago Atitlan at a place called Casa del Mundo and might take another week of Spanish classes. Until then...
Ciao!! Besitos!!
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