Guatemala

As Semana Santa was still going on there weren't too many public buses anywhere, so when I nice taxi driver offered to drive us all the 3 hours to the beach we jumped on it. However being told we had to take the boat across to the other side of the lake where he would meet us, to avoid being held up by the banditos the other side of the mountain, reminds you that this places isn't quite as safe as it seems...

Tempted to try out the small bit of beach and the few waves that Guatemala has, we arrived in Sipicate (El Paridon surf camp) via a cute little cruise across the mangrove swamp, in one of the hottest places I have ever been to!

Black sand beaches stretched for miles in each direction, but were inaccessible from 7am-7pm unless you wanted 3rd degree burns on your feet. And when the slight breeze during the day died off at night time it turned the whole place into one giant sauna.
The surf rolling in in the morning and evening sets was pretty monstrous beach break

which if you managed to make it out through the nasty rips provided some pretty exhilarating surfing, but usually a lot more painful wipe outs when the thing closed out on you, much to the amusement of the locals. And I certainly kept them very amused...
The sun sets, (and a good helping of local run) bringing on some sort of Martian glow to the place, made it all worthwhile though

It really is too hot to stay down there for too long so after one too many beatings, it was quite a relief to get back to the more climatic highlands of Antigua; which after 3 weeks chilling in more isolated places was quite a shock to find what was billed as a 'beautiful quite little colonial town' was little more than one giant Covent Garden market. Every other shop was either a travel agent, a super expensive restaurant, or one of the thousands of tourists tat shops selling exactly the same things at whatever price they could con out of you.

ok, it did look actually look quite nice, have some good mountains surrounding it some good churches

and some even better graffiti

and of course like the proverbial magpie to the shiny thing I was eventually lured into getting one of their amazingly colourful blankets for Daver (cos I know he likes rainbows)

and a guitar for me (case, pick etc included) for a whacking GBP20!! woop! gives me another excuse not to study my Spanish and just wait, by the end of the year I might actually be able to play something other than yellow submarine...

The main reason to go to Antigua is to check out the local volcanoes; as, with Guatemalan health and safety standards being what they are, you can actually climb up an active volcano and toast marshmallows on the river of lava flowing down right next to you. (remember to wear trousers as it really is surprisingly hot up there!)

Seems like my sunrise luck also applies to volcanoes too, and all there was that day were winging American tourists complaining that they actually had to climb a volcano and go near lava on a volcano climb to see lava, and one red glowing rock. The scenery was the nicest thing up there with some weird kind of Dartmoor landscape interspersed with rivers of cooled black lava.

A lot better tour was with Outdoor outfitters up the local volcano Agua on bikes.

luckily seeing as I gave up going uphill on bikes a long time ago, we got shuttled up and were guided down the insane single track by some crazy local on a 1950's Garry Fisher!

It was great to get back on a bike again flying downhill, until at one particularly gnarly section I forgot that American brakes are set up opposite to English and grabbed a handful of front by mistake, ending up 15ft down the trail with half the hill embedded in my leg.

luckily at the end of the trail you can get tours round a Macadamia plantation, get to see Herby

and even a facial if you ask nice which made everything better.

It was time to leave tourist town for some proper jungle action in Rio Dulce, staying in the rather pleasant Casa Pelicio jungle lodge for the night just off the main lake

we got a little closer to nature than intended having to remove scorpions and tarantulas from the beds before we could shelter beneath the mosquito nets afraid for our lives.
The main lake itself is pretty much an inland sea, and a proper yachty haven for those seeking shelter with boats ranging from nice cruisers to super gin-palaces waiting for their super-rich owners to fly in for the week.

People don't seem too keen to take on crew here (probably cos every single backpacker is looking for the same ride out of town) so had to take a taxi boat down river. The journey itself down the river is worth all the money, travelling through jungled valleys

checking out the local fishing communities

before arriving in the colourful Garifuna beach town of Livingston for the first Caribbean vibe of the trip.

Rustys Iguana is the hostel to find here, certainly will be when he gets the swimming pool sorted out and that alcoholic barman out of there so people can go to bed before 4am...
The beaches in town still aren't that much to write home about, though a short boat ride up the coast to the 7 alters waterfalls (where Tarzan was filmed)
(see the resemblance?) and playa blanca for some serious chillin, gives a nice alternative to drinking.

Last stop in Guatemala (via a 6 hour chicken bus ride standing up) was up to Flores in the north, to see one of the biggest Mayan ruins in central America - Tikal. Thinking that my sunrise luck must surely of run itself out by now I booked onto the 3am trip into the park; which, despite the guide book saying was impossible cos the guards would shoot you on site, turned out to be a group of 30 people walking straight past them. Of course nothing but the good old greyness was there to welcome us as we waited for a glimpse of the day

but it cleared off later so we were able to get a proper view of the scale of what these guys made thousands of years ago!

The reason they left is still unknown to this day, why put all this effort in to what was a massively advanced civilisation, only to leave to build another one and never return? Incest and mercury paint poisoning is rumourd, but maybe the Mayan game of Ball where you got sacrificed if you won and sacrificed if you lost kind of put most people off?

After one slightly dangerous night using nods, smiles and broken spanish chatting to the locals I nearly got myself a new special friend, so it was time to cruise into the relative safety of Belize where at least an ignorant nod to the wrong question wouldn't be quite so painfull...

well its been a while since I've updated this thing, for some reason the hammock based distractions always managed to win.

School has taken a bit of a downturn since I last wrote, things seemed to be going so well in the first week, but then as the crew grew and discovered a few more bars there seemed to be more reasons to leave the homework until the morning. Looking back on it now I have learned hell of a lot thanks to Julio, 5 tenses dialed (even learning the English names for some of them was a first!) but now just need a bit more practice as I go along to get all the vocab down, so shouldn't feel too bad really; but its concerning when your teacher laughs at you every time you rock in to school in the morning...

the kids have really been growing on me, despite stealing all our shoes we had a great game of marbles even though it seemed like the rules changed each turn and this little dude preferred eating them rather than playing with them


After much bad Spanish I eventually persuaded Julio to be our guide up the local volcano, with promised spectacular sunrise views over the entire lake. Official permits are never a problem when your brother/ cousin/ grandfather works in the relevant office, so running slightly late and some far more prepared (strangely preferring beer and guitars rather than tents or sleeping bags) for a night on a mountain than others we set off for one of the toughest climbs yet.


getting to the top of the hill and realising that not much firewood grows on the tops of mountains at 3800m Julio had an inspired idea

which was lucky as it managed to keep us warm all night and despite a good helping of local cake we managed to rustle up a pretty decent BBQ whilst team B-rad provided the entertainment.

A night somehow came and went without any of us developing hypothermia or falling off the cliff, and keeping in running with my sunrise luck we were provided with the 'spectacular' view we had trekked all that way for...

oh well. sod the views tho, overrated, the party is where its at. And getting down is far more painful than going up!

The next week was the start of Semana Santa (or Easter as its known elsewhere) so despite Granny's expert tortilla tuition

it was time to leave the 24hr happy-clappy-evangelical world of the family and move into one of the pimpest penthouses in the whole of San Pedro with complete lake views without even having to move from the bed

and with all the partying in full swing I was the time to step outside San Pedro for the first time in three weeks for Maximons (a sort of saint deity worshiped in Guatemala, usually chilling in someones house smoking a cigar and drinking whiskey, yes, they do actually believe he drinks it) procession across Santiago town. The procession is quite a big deal as having Maximon visit your house brings you luck, money, power, dancing girls and pretty much anything else you could want for.

Luckily the tropical storms that have rolled in for the last few evenings held off for one of the most important nights of semana santa; the laying of the alfombra. Over night teams worked until the morning laying coloured sawdust, flowers, fruit and leaves to literally pave the streets in one giant patchwork quilt.

then later on when the procession gets in full swing, giant shoulder carried jesus'/ jesuses/ jessi?, and his accompaniment of rather morbid looking angles, make their very slow wobbling way around them.



The rest of the weekend was spent on a traditional Easter beach outing with my teacher and his family, it was sad to say goodbye to them all as they have been great help (anyone going to San Pedro in a few months time should definately go and check out Julio's new pimp hostel with fully equipped learning centre for 24hr spanish imersion!)

before eventually managing to resist the lure of the lake and moving on down in to bandit country...

This is wierd, I haven´t studied to this extent for many many years, but after the last year of stagnating at work it really is quite refreshing to be challenged again and learn some new things. I guess its even easier when your classroom looks like this:

I am currently enroled for 3 weeks at http://www.sanpedrospanishschool.org with a brilliant maestro called Julio, and living with a family up the hill in town for complete imersion style learning. His style of teaching of chatting all day then remembering that we should maybe write a verb or two on the board suits me down to the ground, as you learn so much by speaking constantly without the parrot style memorisation normally associated with learning.

Normal day is up at 7 for breakfast with the family, then in school from 8-12, quick lunch with the family then back to school to teach (well, ish, was meant to be teaching them long division today but do you know how to do that?! my answer was ´adults use calculators´) in a volunteer project for proper poor kids from 2-5, despùes another hour of class followed by either a lecture on Guatemalan culture or salsa classes, dinner with the family at 7 leaves my brain like jelly but I´ve learnt more in a day than I would in months of classes in london! Its not all dossing around on beaches out here you know...

A little tangent back to the world of work seems apropriate now to explain where I´m at with my study: a wise women once explained a kind of learning curve graph to me, but for the life of me I can´t remember what the axis´s were, think it was something like ability/ knowledge or vice versa. But in essence the red area where I am now can be sumorised to ´a little knowledge is a dangerous thing´.

Today it really applied as after a week or so of study I have got a vague grasp of the language and lost my initial inhibitions of keeping to simple things like ´hello´, and got some rather strange looks when I supposidly asked if I could sleep with my neighbors cat.

p.s. if you´re reading this then please remind me what it was all about, I was listening honest ;-)

At last I managed to leave the Mohitos behind and actually get on a plane, for a short hop across the carribean to a landing skimming the roofs of Guatemala City, and it only got more sketchy from there on in...

Guatemala City is hyped in the guide books as being a a bit of a nasty place, but the book of lies always said that so I wasn´t too fazed with all the shotgun toting guards out side EVERY shop (ok it was a little wierd to see a shoe shop protected by a 12 bore) however getting my first chicken bus of the trip out of their was quite an experience.
There were only 10 of us on the bus from the main bus station, all locals and myself so was a little confused when I was told (in pictionary style gestures cos my spanish couldn´t quite cope) when they motioned to lay down. I didn´t really need to sleep and wanted to see the city on the way out so stayed sitting up, only when the driver floored it out of the bus station and screamed something at me which even with the lack of vocabulary I could pretty much guess at ´get your f*cking head down´ I actually complied. Only being able to see the roofs of buildings from where I was lying I can only guess at why we needed to boost it out of the city in such a manor, but after 20 mins of jumping trafic lights we stop to pick the rest of the passengers sensibly waiting outside the danger zone on the outskirts of the city.

When I could eventually raise my head I was in for quite a shock change from the stunted growth of Cuba, this place was just a more crazy baby brother of America. McDs on every corner, giant Explorers and Escalades, and even a Hooters! (am going to have to go back to check that out for research purposes).
Leaving the city 4 hours of climbing into the highlands with the temperature dropping rapidly, I wished that the rest of my clothes weren´t on the roof, but the body heat from the 5 other people crammed onto the same seat kept the hypothermia at bay. Eventually dropping down out of the mist I had my first glimse of Lago Atitilan

Rather enthusiatically after a 15 hour travel day already I signed up for school then checked in to the friendlyest looking hostel going as after the drout of travellers in cuba it was nice to chat to someone in english for a bit. Luckily the next day the school was running an excursion up to the ´indians nose´ (i´ve found in my travels most will make any mountain look like a face/ nose/ camel just to get stupid tourists to climb it) but the views from the top were certainly worthwhile

dropping down off the hill into the local market town for some locals snacks was a dangerous experience, but not the sort mentioned in the guide books. Guatemalan people are generally of quite short stature and thats coming from me... and they tend to make the roofs of their stalls only just big enough for them, so most of us returned from the market sporting a nice array of roof shaped injuries...

the dress of the local people is massively colourful as they are desended from the original Mayan culture, with the patterns and styles indicating which tribe they belong to in the same was as tartan.

with even the children getting into the act from an early age

there were so many more photo opportunities around, but without asking and most times paying first, these people don´t really appreciate the intrusion.