Semuc Champey

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I have got very behind on this blog, so will need to go back in time a bit to bring it up to date! At the start of May I went on a great weekend trip to Semuc Champey with three friends. Semuc has a great natural limestone bridge 300m long over a river. On top of the bridge is a stepped series of pools, beautiful and good for swimming.

After a long trip in a minivan, we arrived in Lanquin, nearby Semuc, on Friday night, and were slightly disconcerted to find the 'hotel' the company had arranged for us was basically a shed in the wood with four rooms! Still, it could have been worse and we quickly headed out to the Grutas de Lanquin, a series of caves that go several kilometres deep. After exploring the caves, we returned to the mouth of the cave at sunset to see and be surrounded by thousands of bats flying out of the caves, which was an amazing experience!

The next day we got a pick-up truck to Semuc, and started with a hike to El Mirador, the look out point, for a great view over the pools of Semuc Champey. We then walked down to the pools and with the guide, and had fun swimming, sliding and jumping from pool to pool. This was followed by tubing, floating down the river in rubber rings which was really relaxing and over far too quickly! The last activity of this great day was caving. The caves were partly full of water, and we walked, waded and swam through them holding candles, which was both really cool and eerie at the same time. There was a jump which looked really scary once I got up there, as there were two rocks I could have hit my head on, but I couldn't back out once I was up there and made the jump safely!

The journey back to Antigua the next day was really hot and cramped as the mini van was overbooked, and we had to squeeze in one more person than there were seats! Luckily the Guatemalans are used to squeezing a lot of people into buses and keep a bucket and cushion handy for these occasions!

Back in Antigua, I started doing some volunteering in a hospital for malnourished babies. It's lovely to spend time with the babies, but it's very sad sometimes, there are cases like 3 year olds admitted weighing only 17lb. Sadly over 50% of the children of Guatemala are malnourished. However, the hospital is doing good work providing nutritional education for families from across the country.

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