Mejico, and the Tortilla Curtain

North America » Mexico
April 19th 2007

Published: April 19th 2007

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Buena Onda

Ramen in Guatemala

Ramen lunch at the hammock campsite outside of Semuc Champey

We, Graham and Gordo, spent some time in the cowboy town of Coban watching a firebreather before heading into Samuc Champey and Lanquin with hammocks. The security guard at the campground laughed when we told him we wanted to camp without a tent but told us to go through anyway. There, we swam in amazing aqua lagoons that waterfalled one from another through a wide gorge all the way to our campsite, beside a wooden bridge you can jump from. Gordo awoke one night to see Graham running down the hillside at 3 am taking his clothes off and "dancing." Graham had ants in his pants. A lot of them. Because he stepped out of his hammock to go pee by the river and soon realized that numbing feeling in his foot wasn't because it was asleep but because ants had infested the ground to the point that the ground itself was moving, and not in one place, but as far as the flashlight could reach in every dirrection and had crawled to his thigh and bit the you know what out of him. But we lived through the ant attack and rain, to the next day when we went

Semuc Champey, Guatemala

to Lanquin, Guatemala and explored some really really really big caves with a headlamp and then ate ice cream.
Then we went to Antigua, another cool colonial town stuck between some volcanos with cheap tacos and earthquake-shooken churches and flooded with tourists like ourselves.
Then we hiked up Volcano Pacaya which was amazing and scary because it is active.. very active. Lava literally was flowing beneath the rocks beneath our feet, and above us and beside us. You could toss stuff into the lava. Gordo roasted a marshmellow on it and said, and i quote, "It was incredible." Then we walked down the volcano and went to Antigua and caught a bus to Lake Atitlan where we ate cheap tacos and spent the night before catching a bus across the Mexican border - our home away from home, and the home to many kids in our middle school classes. However, contrary to popular belief, they don't eat chips and salsa in Mexico.
San Cristobal is a really cool town on the southern border. We spent two nights there and mingled with the laid back country folk, ate more cheap tacos and drank wine out of a box before going 13

Breath of Fire in Coban

Some do what they have to do in order to support a family

hours to Puerto Escondido, one of the surf capitals of the world. Radical waves. And a liberal study abroad group of Norweigan co-eds. Now we leave...
And the girls... still Elise and Emma, painfully parted ways as Emma took a bus to Mexico City and eventually made her way to LA to surprise Zeke. Elise headed to Cancun where she met her sister, Epsie. They promptly left town in their rental car and joined the hordes at the beaches of Tulum, officially participating in a Mexican family vacation. But, they stayed in a hut on the beach, successfully weasled their way onto a dive boat and Elise got to go diving for free, they ate cheap tacos and everything was just delicious. They crossed the Yucatan, visited Chichen Itza, another Mayan keepsake of ruins, hurried on to Merida, Elise bought a lot more hammocks and went to bed around 8 every night. They zipped back to the beach, spent most of the day trying to find a cheap hotel in Playa del Carmen, ate more cheap tacos and watched the tourists pretend that they were in Mexico. Their big hoorah was staying in the JW Marriott in Cancun, shopping

Ronald and Volcano Pacayo

The courtyard of the McDonalds in Antigua, Guatemala

at Zara, lounging over the infinity edged pool.... on to Guadalajara for Elise where she tasted a life of travelling alone in a world filled with scary men wandering around the streets. Finally, her friends, Michael and Chase, came and they bused over to San Blas, a perfectly Mexican town with the right amount of beer in the plaza and a perfect cabana on stilts right on the beach, plus bikes so they could pedal around. They passed a few days there, went to the town of Tequila and took a tour of the Sauza distillery.
Slowly but surely, our trip is coming to an end. Elise made it back home (rode the Greyhound a little ways) and is very happy to be at home again. Whew. Hurry home boys!!!

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