Viva Guatemala

  Antigua Guatemala, Western Highlands, Guatemala
Friday, July 18, 2008

Flores

My Central American adventure continued with a 6 hour bus ride through Belize and into Guatemala via an official border crossing in Belize where I had to pay 7 quid to leave Belize and got a receipt and a rather dodgy crossing in Guatemala where i had to pay a quid thirty to enter Guatemala but they refused to issue receipts for their border tax - hmnn, v.dodgy.  We arrived in the city of Flores mid afternoon and checked into our hostel called Los Amigoes which ended up being a really cool place, even though their menu was 100% vegetarian.  There isn't a great deal to Flores and didn't take long to walk round the entire place.  The main reason for going to Flores though was its easy access to Tikal (which we would pronounce wrongly as Tickle at every stage) and it's national park and Mayan ruins.  So the following morning I was up at 3 a.m. for the early morning sun rise tour.  The national park is in a jungle (not the official definition but it was jungle enough for me) and it was really eerie walking through the dark to the first temple as the howler monkeys were all out in force and shouting their heads of, which really did make it sound like dinosaurs were roaming the place. 

I Climbed This One

We reached and climbed up the first temple to the view of dense fog, but we were assured by our tour guide Louis that the view was magnificent.  After 2 hours of hiking around the park and looking at a few other temples we arrived back at the first temple and climbed it again, and Louis was right the view was great with various other temples in the distance.  For the next few hours we walked around the rest of the park and its various other temples, spotting more wildlife including spider monkeys, coaties, ant-eaters and all sorts of bugs.  The Tikal temples were my last and final temples I'd see on this trip and these were different again from all the other temples I had seen previously due to its surroundings.  I now feel I don't need to see another ancient temple until the year 2017.

Tikal at 5.23am

Tikal at 7.28am

Tikal Temple

The next day we'd take another 5 hour shuttle bus journey to get to the city of Coban, which was only livened up by a young girl who suffered from motion sickness and was sick out of the window while the bus was moving, and unfortunately for the guys behind her, their windows were open too and they got covered.  The driver was great and hammered the route even though their were what seemed like hundreds of speed bumps on the way.  This was something I'd noticed about Mexico and now Central America that their answer to speeding traffic was to put speed bumps literally everywhere - think the government missed a trick here, they could have made a fortune from speeding cameras like every other developed country.  Coban is a medium sized town and I define it as that because it has a McDonalds and a Dominoes Pizza.  The most popular pastime for blokes in Coban appears to be wazzing in the street, public toilets obviously isn't high on the local councils priorities.  Other than wazzing in public there isn't a great deal to do in Coban but once again it is a base city for if you want to go to other nearby places.  The main destination is some waterfalls and caves at Semuc Champey but I didn't fancy seeing more waterfalls so I opted for a tour of an organic coffee plantation instead. 

School Bus

And so I took an absolutely rammed collectivo (mini van packed with people) to the very small village of Chicoj where the plantation was.   The two main forms of public transport in Central America are the colectivo or the massive range of US school buses, I'm guessing at some stage the US has had a bit of a school bus garage sale and the Central Americans were first in attendence.  The van dropped me off at a place that was as dead as a doornail and I had a horrible feeling that after a 40 minute journey that the place was closed and I was stranded until the next unscheduled bus.  After about 5 minutes some bloke turned up on a motor bike just to inform me that the place opened up at 2pm and someone would be with me shortly, and then he disappeared again - very nice of someone to come up and tell me though.  In fact all the staff at the place were great when they eventually turned up and were really friendly. 

Canopy Zip Lining

The tour was really good for several reasons, one, I like my coffee so it was really interesting to see how it's made, even better to see how it's produced organically.  Two, midway through the tour there was a canopy ride, which consisted of 4 zip lines across the plantations and 2 lagoons.  I've always wanted to do a zip line ever since I watched the zip line at the end of the assault course on the Krypton Factor so this was like a mini dream come true (I'm easily pleased!).  And three, the whole tour was in Spanish, forcing me to understand and ask questions in Spanish which was great for my language skills which had started to wain a little since the English speaking Belize and American speaking Mexico.

Antigua Streets

I ended the tour with some freshly fresh (like just picked fresh) brewed coffee and I gave a little marketing consultancy to the guy who owned the place.  On the colectivo on the way back my Spanish lessons continued as several of the people on board took a keen interest in who I was and where I came from - I made a mental note that I should do this kinda thing more often.  Next day we took another shuttle south, through Guatemala and onto the city of Antigua.  Antigua is another one of those colonial feel cities that I'd now got very familiar with.  The first night we spent getting very drunk with an Aussie girl who was a good laugh and insisted she could hold her beer better than us, even after obscure rushes to the toilet during the night.  Fair play to her though as she was up at 6am the next day to do the sunrise volcano tour, but we were cleverer and opted for the sunset version which didn't leave till 2pm and offering us sufficient hangover recovery time. 

Antigua

Antigua Church

Antigua Main Plaza

The Pacaya volcano tour was really good and consisted of us hiking for over an hour up the vegetative area at the bottom of the still active volcano, before actually reaching the volcano proper and climbing part of this.  The further we hiked up the volcano the hotter it got and eventually we hit the lava flowing down the volcano where the heat was pretty unbearable after a bit.  Rich had wore shorts and the heat was even burning the hair off his legs.  Some people were even toasting marshmallows next to the lava.  It was a really great experience and knocked the socks of hiking up other non-active volcanoes. 

Atop The Volcano

Pacaya Sunset 1

Pacaya Sunset 2

Sliding Lava

Toasting Marshmallows

Volcan Pacaya

Back in Antigua we did some more drinking and chatting with a couple of English girls who were in our dorm.  In fact that had been another thing that I'd noticed in Mexico and Central America, lots and lots of 18-24 English girls (usually from the south) spending their summers traveling around this area - a good thing I thought.   

Mr Lava Lava

The next day we'd leave for other parts of Central America.  I'd heard lots of stories along the way of thefts and robberies and hold-ups in Guatemala but we didn't experience anything like that, so maybe we got lucky or we look like a pair of double hard muthers.  Guatemala though is a good to place to visit, so good I bought the T-shirt.