Guatemala + Belice

Hola a todos!

I think just after my last email we climbed Tajumulco, which was pretty amazing. We went with a trekking "company" called Quetzaltrekkers, which is completely run by the volunteer guides, and gives all their profits to a school and home for disadvantaged kids they´re associated with, which is kinda cool. We had a huge group, which worried the guides as it´d probably usually be slower, but we made really good time. The first day we got a couple buses to the base and walked for maybe 5-6 hours to the camping spot. We stopped enough that it wasn´t terribly taxing, but still a bit of a mission with all our gear and the altitude (we started at about 3000m and ascended to about 4000m that day). The view was absolutely amazing the whole way up, or at least when it wasn´t too cloudy, looking over the Guatemalan highlands, which´re hella green at this time of year. We mostly slept the afternoon away, with a break for dinner, as it was super cold. Also we got up at 3am the next morning... Callum was too sick to summit, which was pretty stink, but the rest of us half-climbed/half-walked the rest of the way in the pitch black (my headlamp batteries were almost dead, made it fun..). Then we waited around in our sleeping bags for the sunrise, though I couldn´t sleep so just mucked around with my camera. The sunrise itself was mostly covered by fog, although that was pretty beautiful in its own way. When we could actually see the sun it was well above the horizon, and everything looked spectacular. We spent maybe an hour after that on the summit, before going back to breakfast and break camp, then walked back down and bussed back to Xela.

The next day we got in some well-deserved rest, before starting another trek for 2.5 days to Lago Atitlan. This group was much smaller, which was a bit better I think. The trek itself was also amazing, walking through the forest (there was a bit of cloud forest, but the weather was uncooperative in that respect, and it wasn´t actually cloudy) and a load of tiny Guatemalan villages. Some of the views were really stunning, whether of the forest/mountains, or at times the ocean very far away, and on the first day we could see the lake, which is apparently basically unheard of. We got pretty lucky with the weather, the only rain was during the night, and this is supposed to be the rainy season!

Basically around the lake there´s a whole load of villages/towns of different sizes and vibes. We came in in San Juan, which is pretty tiny but has some cool things, then went to San Pedro for a drink and a swim. San Pedro is much bigger and touristic, with loads of places owned by Americans/Israelis. We stayed near Santa Cruz, which is tiny and has basically nothing. The hostel was on the water, but you have to walk up a rather steep hill to get to the town itself. Cal stayed for 2 nights and I stayed one extra coz I wanted to kayak around and around midday it gets too choppy to bother. Had a pretty good time there but had to drag myself away as it´s so easy to get stuck there for a long time.

I then spent 2 nights in Antigua, staying in a tiny unknown hostel full of Latin Americans, so it was good to get forced to use Spanish a bit again, though it´s sometimes really hard to talk, especially when drunk/tired. Antigua is a nice little city, has been hit by a few earthquakes in the last couple hundred years, but it´s still really beautiful and was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so the whole centre is really old architecture and crappy cobblestone roads. 

After Antigua, we bussed up to a place called Lanquin, and stayed at an awesome hostel on a little river for 2 nights. In the intervening day we did a tour to Semuc Champey, which was totally amazing. We started off with candlelit caving for a couple of hours (it´s pretty tricky swimming with sandals and trying to keep a candle above the water!), which ended with jumping about 4m into the black water, and also included a little abseil down a waterfall. Too good. Then we used to biggest rope swing I´ve ever seen, which was rather painful to mess up, followed by jumping off a ~10m bridge into the river. After this, we actually went to Semuc Champey, first to a lookout overlooking the pools. Essentially Semuc Champey is a series of amazing blue limestone pools that go down a valley, with another river going underneath. So from above, you see this brown water that kind of dissapears under the blue-watered pools, then reappears at the bottom. Up close, the place where the water goes under looks pretty terrifying, and apparently a plastic bottle would take 3 days to come out the other side. We swam in the pools a bit, then went back to the hostel.

We then went to Flores for 2 days. Flores is a tiny colonial town on an island half-surrounded by a city called Santa Elena, which isn´t much to look at. On the first day we visited the ruins of Tikal, which were much better than those at Tulum. We spent the day walking around the city in the jungle, though all you could see was the temples and whatnot, obviously. Some of the temples were pretty amazing, and the view from the top of one of the temples was spectacular, looking over the top of the forest with other temples poking their heads up around the place. 

After Flores, we went straight to Belize City, which is a bit of a dump to be honest. Callum left the next day to go south and back to Guatemala, because Belize is 3-4 times as expensive as Guate/Mexico. I went to Caye Caulker for 4 days with a German guy we met in our hostel in Belize City. Caye Caulker is fantastic, a tiny island (actually 2, a hurricane broke it in half) with apparently far fewer tourists than it´s larger brother to the north, Ambergris Caye. We spent most of the time sitting in the sun and swimming at the split, where it broke in half and there´s a crazy strong current from one side to the other, and eating delicious cheap seafood. We also did a snorkelling tour on the reef for a day, which was also pretty amazing. I don´t think I´d ever been on a reef before, so it was cool to see all the fish and whatnot, and swim around maybe 50 nurse sharks and a bunch of rays which they were feeding, and later with some rather indifferent-looking sea turtles. 

I decided I had to leave Caye Caulker or also risk getting stuck there, so I went back towards Flores to San Ignacio. My first day there I went on a tour to a place called Actun Tunichil Muknal, the meaning of which I´ve forgotten. On it´s own, ATM was probably the most beautiful cave I´ve been in, with all sorts of crazy rock formations I´d never dreamed of before. But it was also used during Mayan times for offerings of food, blood, and people. Towards the end of the cave there was loads of old pottery, which would´ve been used for food and bloodletting, and then there were 5 skeletons in various states of disrepair (apparently there´s 9 more, but they don´t take tourists to them for whatever reason). This whole day was pretty surreal, seeing 1500 year old buildings is crazy enough to me, let alone peoples´ bones, which´re remarkably well-preserved (except where people had dropped their cameras on them. wtf.). I wanted to leave San Ignacio the next day, but that would´ve meant missing the football final, so I hung out another day before going to Punta Gorda. I just stayed in Punta Gorda for one night, before crossing to Livingston in Guatemala.

I spent a few days in Livingston hanging out with a French guy I met on the boat from PG. Livingston is a reasonably Guatemalan little town at the Carribean end of the Rio Dulce, with no outside road access as far as I know. There wasn´t too much to do there, but the hostel was good and it was a nice place to catch up on laundry and whatnot. After Livingston I spent a few nights at a place on the Rio Dulce called Finca Tatin. Finca was amazing, on the waterfront of a tributary to the Rio Dulce, made up of a cabins around the place in the jungle linked by cobble walkways. It was nice spending days just swimming in the river and reading, but again, I had to leave lest I get stuck. 

So yesterday I came back to Antigua, and tomorrow I´m hoping to cross into El Salvador, where I´ll stay for a week or so before meeting Cal again somewhere in Honduras for my birthday.