At Lago, where all began and ended.

Before we began planning this trip, our original plan was to go to Mount Roraima in Venezuela. We were saving money really aggressively because flights were expensive, the Venezuelan Bolivar's exchange rate was 2.15 to our $1, and I really couldn't tell online how much things were going to cost there. Eric was having serious doubts we'd be able to do it (surprise, he doubts everything) and I was desperately determined we would (surprise, I'm very stubborn), when it came time for my Spanish class to give presentations on their favorite places in the Spanish-speaking world. One of my friends, Parker, gave a talk on Guatemala; he and his wife had adopted a little girl from there two years ago and fell in love with the country in the process. He showed us this website during his presentation, of a beautiful place where his family stayed when they went to pick up little Maria, and then it was all over for me:

Posada de Santiago

The photographs on this website are astounding. After grilling Parker after class for more information on this place, I thought about it all day and leaped on Eric as soon as he came home.

"Look at this gorgeous place! These stone cottages by the lake only cost $65 a night!" I still didn't have any idea where we'd be staying in Venezuela.



After goggling at the site for a few more minutes, that was literally all it took. Eric said "Let's go here instead," Venezuela was brushed aside, and I dove headlong into planning a new trip to Guatemala, ending at Lago de Atitlan and the Posada de Santiago. So here are some more pictures of our beautiful cottage, Casa Luna.

The awesome carved door


Inside




Looking out the door


And down here a little ways is the restaurant/reception, pool, sauna and hot tub.


I will return with tales of the restaurant, our tiny tiny show, eating, shopping and Maximon. :)

The Story of the Swindle

So I apologize for not finishing up as soon as we got home. I was just tired. Tired of being alert and on-point every day, tired of condensing everything into blog-format. In fact, we were both so tired that we voluntarily missed the only Hall and Oates show that will likely ever again grace the Midwest. And being Eric's favorite cheesy 80s band, that's saying a lot. Now...onward!

In my last post, I said we'd been swindled out of around $20 but it actually was around $40; and when we got home, everyone asked how that happened. It's stupid, and the dialogue is lengthy. But I've repeated it so many times, I may as well tell it anyway and frankly, I'm still kind of mad.

When you arrive at a destination in a colectivo, it's pretty clear you're a tourist. And since we had been cautioned to avoid the general public buses for safety reasons, we took only colectivos if we were going any significant distance from our current location. Okay, so when we arrived at the shore of Lago de Atitlan, in a little hippie town called Panajachel, everyone knew we were tourist and thus everyone with something to sell mobbed our van. "Pulseras! Bracelets!" "Manteles! Shawls!" "Lanchas! Boats!" Oooh there we go--we needed to get to Santiago, on the other side of Lago de Atitlan.

Nodding at the first man who asked if we were going to Santiago, we grabbed our bags and followed him down the street. He and I made idle chat, the usual stuff: "Where you from?" "The US." (I didn't see any point in saying we were from Canada, since probably all paranoid US tourists do that and I think our accents are different anyway.) "I'm pure chapín (Guatemalan, roughly) and I run boats, obviously. What do you guys do?" "We're musicians (NOT RICH AMERICANS)." "Do you want to take a public boat or a private one?" "Public is fine." "Oh, why? You don't want to sit next to someone you don't know, or someone dirty. Take a private boat with me." "That's okay, we've been traveling this whole time next to people we don't know. It's fine." "But here, the public boats will take over two hours to get to Santiago. I can take you in thirty minutes. They stop at San Pedro first, and another place, and see here how big the lake is?" He showed me a little laminated card and made a big show of tracing the routes the public boats supposedly took. At this point I was really confused, because dammit, I'm NOT fluent and I was only catching about half of what he was telling me. "And then when you get to Santiago after two hours, you have to take a tuk-tuk up to your posada, and it's far away. I'll take you right up to the private dock." Eventually, I let him convince me, and he made another big show of haggling the price. "It's only 450Q." "That's way too expensive. We'll take a public boat." "The public boats are $25 per person. I am only asking my price because there are no tourists in Santiago, and I won't make any money on the way back. I have to buy gas, you know." "We only have quetzales, and that doesn't make sense. Why is the cost in dollars when we're in Guatemala?" "It's a tourist town, that's just what they do here." I felt weird, and suspicious. But did I listen to my niggling feeling? No. Instead, I secured the ride for a whopping 350Q, and if I'd done the math and realized that equaled $43.75 total or $21.88 each, I HOPEFULLY would have realized this guy was pulling one over on me. He had told me a total of eight lies so far.

From BelizeGuate09

We hauled our stuff into his empty boat and sat down. Then I paid him. He started the engine a couple of times, fooled around in the back, and then another boat drifted by, holding around 15 people. Our guy and the other driver chatted back and forth a minute, and then our driver turned to me and said "You guys get in this boat." "I'm confused. Why?" "It's okay, this is the same service, get you to the dock in 30 minutes." "I've already paid YOU." "I know, this is my dad. You can ride with him." "I paid for a private boat and that boat is not private." "Yes, but...I don't have very much gas." More lies. At that point, I should have yelled/throttled him/demanded my money back, or at the very least shrewdly announced that we'd wait while he went to buy gas with the wad of money I'd just given him. Because I'm DENSE, and STILL DIDN'T GET that he was cheating us! And poor Eric didn't understand our conversation at all, otherwise he probably would have spotted the scam far earlier. Instead, we pulled all our stuff into the other guy's boat and the driver of the now-empty boat gave us a cheerful wave as we pulled away. CHEERFUL INDEED! I spent the whole ride confronting the growing dread that I had been stupid and gullible and screwed up and been too loose with our money, and now we had to find an ATM and what if Santiago didn't have one, then we'd have to come BACK to Panajachel, and why was I so conceited as to think we needed a private frickin boat, and what if I was too dumb to figure out when we were getting scammed again? And until a few minutes into the ride, Eric still didn't really know my suspicions.

From BelizeGuate09

You can even see the brow furrow. I am PISSED.

I'd filled him in by the time we pulled up to the dock of our absolutely beautiful hotel. We had arrived a little early, so we relaxed in the restaurant and had a snack of blue corn pancakes (delicious, by the way) while the the maids finished up with our cottage. It was an absolutely awesome cottage too-- clean, rustic, roomy, with a tap dedicated to drinking water, a small writing desk and fireplace you're practically ordered to use, plenty of candles and matches, and a very informational binder of things to do--and prices--in Santiago and the surrounding area. Eric actually tried to keep me from reading it. It turned out the public boats cost 25Q per person, or $3.13 each. And I know I hadn't misunderstood the guy when he said 25 DOLLARS.

Welcome to Lago de Atitlan! SUCK

Y Antigua tambien

After a hearty breakfast of french toast a la Kate (thanks for cooking for us!), Eric and I helped plug a hole in the fence through which little Mapache kept squeezing to eat random things in the grass. That was a little bit of an adventure in itself, because Mapache is VERY persistent! Then we grabbed our bags and Kate walked us to where the bus would pick us up for Guatemala City. A few sleepless, jolty hours later, we arrived in Guate and immediately hailed another bus, this on a painted up school bus, for Guate's older, cooler and prettier twin, Antigua.

I guess Antigua was okay. It kind of sucks when you're unfamiliar to a city and don't know your way around or where to hang out. Also, it's entirely possible our "upscale" room had bedbugs, because we both woke up with really itchy bites that have yet to heal. But that aside, I think we had fun there. On the second day, we decided to go out and take pictures of all the beautiful, ancient architecture, and an INGUAT guide (kind of like the tourism protection agency) approached us and said he'd give us a tour of as many churches as we could stomach for $20. Sweet! I don't really know how many we hit that day...12? 9? All I know is that we walked from 9 am to 1:30, when we returned to our hotel to catch a 2 pm van to the Pacaya volcano. The guide was very gregarious and entertaining, with detailed answers for every question. Have a look here at all the beautiful churches!

We grabbed a lunch and got on our van to Mount Pacaya, which was maybe an hour and a half away. More bumpy, windy roads. We arrived in a tiny hamlet called San Francisco, where we were mobbed (still in the van) by throngs of children brandishing walking sticks, begging us to buy them for 5 quetzales. I had heard they were helpful on the way down Pacaya, so we got a couple, as well as a flashlight. The hike up the mountain took forever-- at least two hours. And when we got to the top, there wasn't any active magma oozing out, just deep crevices with red at the bottom. I poked my stick in one and the bottom caught fire! The breezes from there were so hot they took your breath away and in some places, the hardened volcanic rock (which I realize is incredibly hard and durable) sounded hollow under our feet. It made me really nervous...it was definitely NOT something you'd be allowed to do in the states without signing a waiver! And there would've been fences EVERYWHERE, nobody would have been allowed to get so close. A couple of people were roasting marshmallows, putting their marshmallow-adorned sticks all the way into the crevices. I won't lie-- I was scared, and I wanted to get off the magma-place as quickly as possible.

Luckily for us!! Nature forced us to get off the magma-place by introducing a thunderstorm, complete with a violent downpour and lightning strikes all around us. Of course. As the day had previously been clear and we don't exactly watch the weather channel in Guatemala, we'd left our ponchos in our hotel room. Not they'd have done much good by the time we hiked the two hours back down the mountain, this time in slippery volcano sand, mud and the dark. We were soaked. But now it's a fun story, isn't it?

And to top that, on our way back to the hotel, one of the passengers became violently ill and barfed out the window. Swine flu?! Just kidding Sue! Sort of. I opened our window and made sure we had a stream of clean air flowing across our faces for the rest of the ride.

The next morning, we departed for Lago de Atitlan, the only place in Guatemala where we've actually been swindled out of some money. I guess it was only about $20, but it's still upsetting. GRR! The rest of our time here has been pretty great. Oooh, I smell dinner! Hasta pronto.

After Semuc, the gritty reality of Tactic

This post won´t have any pics because I can´t figure out how to upload them from my camera without stealing them FROM the camera. Sorry guys. Sorry Kate and Mapache! I´ll put together a Picasa gallery later and put up captions and stuff. I hope the links in this post might make up for a lack of pìctures?

The following our Semuc Champey adventures, we arose early and caught a colectivo to Cobán. The driver asked me where we were going after Cobán, and upon hearing my answer, asked why. "Tenemos una amiga en Tactic. Con Peace Corps." His reply: "I was in Tactic on Friday. You should have gone then." Uh....how exactly does that help me now? So once we arrived in Cobán, the same driver gave me explicit instructions on how to find the bus depot where we could hitch a ride to Tactic. "It´s very close! Go straight here for a block, then three blocks to the left." Easy enough, right? HA! According to the generous hostess I will introduce in a moment, Guatemalans will aparently give you very exact direction to anywhere you want to go, even if they have no idea where it is. Which is exactly what we found with the next few people I asked (excepting the lady who wouldn´t answer me at all, which in retrospect was probably better)-- two policemen and a gentleman in the central park, all of whom gave me specific instructions in polar opposite directions. After wandering Cobán with two heavy packs, a third duffle and a fourth small bag, we were just loitering on a streetcorner in frustration when a rickety colectivo sped past and the driver shouted, "Adonde van?" Eric and I both yelled back "A Tactic!" and the driver made an open-fingered gesture that I interpreted as nah, we´re not going there, but I happened to look back and saw he´d stopped, so we both hitched up our bags and ran for it. What luck!

The person we were going to visit is Kate Griffin, a Peace Corps volunteer stationed in Tactic (pronounced Tack-teek) to work with the local high school. I came into contact with her somewhat by accident. When I was planning this trip, our friend Anne told me one of her best friends had a sister-in-law (I think) who was in Guatemala and kept a great blog about her experiences there. So of COURSE I read her blog from start to finish, beginning two years past, because I´m addicted to blogs, and found it to be exceptionally witty, insightful and informational concerning the way of life and customs in Guatemala. Once I got up to date on it, I emailed Kate to tell her how much I´d enjoyed it, we emailed back and forth, and eventually she invited us to swing by and see her on our travels. So we did!

30 or so minutes down the road in our crammed colectivo, we were let out in the middle of a downpour.....in a bit of a larger town than I had anticipated. It was at that moment that I realized I had absolutely no idea how to find Kate. I thought we´d be going to a small enough place that if I asked anywhere for "la casa de la gringa" anybody could tell me. Plus, a huge fair had just taken place and I was pretty sure there were plenty of strangers who´d have no idea what I was talking about. Crap. So Eric and I decided to get to an internet cafe where I could look in my Gmail account to find her phone number, then ask someone in a shop if I could use their phone. But Kate had apparently thought of this same scenario, and had emailed me exact (as in American, not Guatemalan) directions to her house. And we found it without any trouble.

For the rest of the day, we visited with Kate, her Dogo Guatemalteco puppy Mapache (Spanish for raccoon, because he has cute little spots on his eyes) and a co-volunteer of hers, Mike. We visited an excellent place for a much-needed, delicious lunch, talked about our similar taste in books, and took a challenging uphill hike to a Chi-Ixim church that had a black Christ and a cool Mayan sacrifice area (no humans) out front. We also walked around the markets and former fair-grounds of Tactic, and took more pictures of a church with carvings of jaguars and mermaids. And all along the way, Kate regaled us with stories of the Mexican and Guatemalan drug cartels, the goings-on of Tactic, terrible whitewater rafting accidents and hilarious observations of Guatemalan idiosyncrasies. We had an absolutely great time! Kate will be done with her volunteering tenure this year, and I´m going to miss her blog.

Okay so.....somehow Eric has secured a small show for us. As in, Eric on guitar and Gini on the microphone show. IN THE MIDDLE OF GUATEMALA!! How he does this, I will never know! So tomorrow I´ll be back with stories of Antigua and more link(s). You´ll have to wait for the story of the show. :)

Hasta pronto!

quickly now, quickly

We are leaving in 30 minutes for a ride to Lago de Atitlan, so I'll do pics later. Just a note to say we're fine! I couldn't text last night because my phone's acting like it has a virus on it. Weird and slightly impossible. Until later...

The Lanquin river valley is paradise on Earth

The morning after the $10 icky room(80 quetzal or just Q), we escaped Flores in a new little colectivo headed for the Lanquin river valley. It was a very long 6.5 hours, but so worth it because the valley was truly spectacularly beautiful. Rolling mountains of brilliant, lush green, sporting coffee, cardamom, and unbelievable amounts of corn. Corn, corn and more corn, planted on the steep hillsides. What a pain to harvest! But it all made for a breathtaking picture, and all of us in the colectivo (us two Americanos, two kiwis, three people who spoke Hebrew so maybe Israelis, and four Italians. Central America is hugely popular with Italians for some reason.) kept trying to take pictures through the glass until the kindly older driver stopped at a lookout point. Here´s what we got--




I don´t think pictures even really do the countryside justice.

The driver wanted to drop us all in Lanquin, which was fair, but I didn´t want to have to pay a new driver to take us to our hotel, El Retiro, so I just tipped this one 20Q to do it. And El Retiro itself....I could have stayed there forEVER. This hammock and view were directly outside our room.




Those are cows dotting the hill!

Down a winding stone path, there was a sauna (we missed out), reception, the hotel restaurant and a small area for you to get into the Lanquin river and let yourself hang from a rope in the strong current. And since it was nearly sunset when we arrived, by the time Eric and I got in the water, the famous bats from the Lanquin caves were on their nightly exodus for food.....and every one of them prowled the river, swooping over our heads and filling the sky with their sonar.


You can´t see the bats here, but it´s a good representation of the river and rope. Deep water!

After our day at Semuc the next morning, we understood why El Retiro offers family-style buffet dinners every single night. We began with a 12 km ride in the bed of a pickup truck (it had a cage on it for standing and holding on) on a really rough gravel road, which I found incredibly fun because I just find weird things fun. We chatted with our other passengers-- three Swedes, a German, and a British girl, and got pretty comfortable with each other. We started our all-day excursion at the Ka´anba caves, a newly discovered system really close to the river. Since we´d be wading with candles through waist and neck-deep water in some places within the caves, we were encouraged to acclimate ourselves by sitting on a really long swing, swinging and jumping directly into the middle of the Lanquin river. Of course, as the loud American girl, I was the only one who screeched on her way off the swing and into the water. Super fun!! I wish I´d had another go. The only people who didn´t were some other people who spoke Hebrew, and actually one of those girls was really prissy and I had NO IDEA what she was doing outside of a city, much less scrambling through cold water over sharp rocks in a cave.

So anyway, after the swing, we all got our candles and proceeded into the cave with our guide, sixteen-year-old Guate native, Cokie. It probably lasted an hour and a half and was....yeah, I think I´m out of adjectives here. It was like a movie. The water was first knee-deep, then just puddles, then waist-deep, then it was so deep I couldn´t stand and had to swim with my candle, an interesting experience. We didn´t bring our camera in because I´m a dolt and left our awesome waterproof one on the plane and this new one is not waterproof. We climbed over rocks, climbed a knotted rope through a waterfall inside the cave, slid into the water on natural formations that were like slides, and I got to jump into a deep pool of water from the very top of the cave. (I hit the bottom and don´t recommend it for anyone over like 80 lbs.) The caves were crazy, one of the coolest things we´ve ever seen, honestly.

After the caves, we got inner tubes and floated for about an hour down the Lanquin, and it was supremely relaxing and exceptionally pretty. Then it was lunchtime, and after lunch we did another crazy thing...we jumped off a bridge into the river. Including Eric!!! It was really scary but really fun, and both of us would do it again in a heartbeat. Here´s Eric on the way down!



Here´s me next to a Swede girl, deliberating over who should go first. (It was me.)



And finally, after all that awesomeness, we made our way into the nacionale parque Semuc Champey. Eric and I hiked a grueling 20 minutes (seriously, it was hard) with the Swedes to a lookout point aptly named El Mirador, where we got these heartstoppingly high pictures--





Then we hiked back down and went to swim in the pozas, or pools, of Semuc.


Here´s where the Lanquin drops 300 meters and rushes underneath a natural limestone bridge before it comes raging out the other end in whitewater rapids.



Incredible day.

Since we sadly didn´t have another day at El Retiro, we decided to also visit the Lanquin cave, from whence had come swarming the thousands or maybe millions of bats from the night before while we. El Retiro runs a short tour specifically so you can see the countless bats leaving. And it was also awesome! It was hard to get good pictures since it was so dark, but here are a couple.





We ended our day with a huge, well-earned dinner and cervezas. I was really sad to leave El Retiro the next day and honestly feel like I could live amongst such beauty, serenity, cameraderie and fun for the rest of my life. I totally understand why some backpackers make it there and never leave. But leave we did, and onto la proxima aventura!

Continuation of Tikal

La Casa was pretty great. It was scrupulously clean and I even showered in bare feet (ie, amazing). The restaurant above was quick and delicious, and we enjoyed watching geckos catch their own dinner by the lights. After a satisfying night's rest, we rose at 5 am (yes Rebecca, FIVE AM) to take a 5:30 colectivo (like a shuttle) to Tikal. We passed through several small aldeas (villages), and they were all nearly ephemeral in the pre-dawn light. El Remate's free-ranging chickens and pullets were everywhere, all pretty and speckled, and there were many horses grazing calmly by the roadside. One even trotted across the road in front of us, untethered. I wish we could have stopped for pictures there, but truly, we'd have been stopping every 20 feet.


David searching for tarantulas with a boy, Kai.


Eric with a giant tarantula on him.

We arrived at Tikal a little past 6 am and the sun had unfortunately already risen. Nevertheless, there were very few visitors so we knew there would just be pretty much jungle sounds. We left our heaviest packs with the restaurant on-site and set to hiking. On the way to the first temple, we walked right underneath a noisy flock of...TOUCANS! We must have stood for at least five or more minutes, grinning like fools, watching them play and chatter and watch us right back. Awesome!!

The main temple of Acropolis Sur arose from the jungle as suddenly as a slap. We took pictures of its shocking rise from the trees and hurried into the main clearing, where we were surrounded by more ruins, fields of grass and clover, and an eerie, droning hum. It sounded like a huge, HUGE horde of bees coming fast from really far away. It was extremely surreal, and the hum kind of made me uneasy. It wasn't until after we'd walked around for a bit, admiring, that Eric realized the drone WAS bees. Thousands of bees in the clover all around us, busily collecting nectar and humming so collectively that the sound fooled our ears into thinking it was coming when it was already there. Really, one of the strangest and most unnerving sounds I've ever heard, but strangely appropriate for the ancient and abandoned ruins of Tikal.


Not the best picture, but we'll save the best for later.

We couldn't climb the main temple because it was too delicate, so we climbed the one across from it. It was still a hefty ascent but the view was magnificent. After a brief rest, we explored more of that main plaza. There were all sorts of buildings hidden in the jungle, all with little footpaths leading to more. At the top of one such building, we saw a howler monkey in the low-hanging branches above it, snacking on fruit. We climbed closer and closer, hoping for a good picture, but it kept moving behind foliage that obscured our view. Absentmindedly, I made a soft clicking noise that usually makes squirrels stop and look at me, and instantly the monkey dropped his fruit and advanced toward me on his branch. So of course, instead of waiting for a good pictorial opportunity, we immediately freaked out and ran off the temple! You never can tell with a monkey what it's going to do....we preferred to escape Guatemala sans rabies shots.



After exhausting that plaza, we continued to our next destination, Temple IV. On the trail there, we saw someone who had been in the colectivo with us, watching another howler monkey. That was old news to us by then, we after watching it swing around for a moment, we continued down the path. Then we saw a real coatimundi, right by the trail! As Eric stopped for pictures, I heard a really strange noise behind us, like a crackling fire or the loud, continuous snapping of dead sticks. The other guy was still there, also trying to figure out the sound, when we simultaneously saw a large black bird with a colorful beak, maybe half the size of a toucan's, hopping around...and the sound was coming from IT. I've never heard of a bird call like that, so I thought it must be imitating a sound, and the only bird I know of that can do THAT is a mynah bird. It had the right-looking black body, but the beak was different. I also have no idea if mynahs live in Guatemala. Amazing nonetheless. I will probably never know what the bird was. I told the guy to come over our way because there was a coatimundi, and he didn't know what it was. All three of us got really close but stayed a respectful distance...you know, because it's a wild animal. I did something-- looked away, or leaned over, or something--and when I looked back, the coati had literally walked right up to me. It was less than a foot away, looking at me with mild interest, long nose twitching. Then it continued snuffling on its way, scruffing up the ground for whatever it eats. All along the jungle trails, we continued to see absolutely astounding wildlife, including some kind of incredibly tiny tapir and turkeys with blue heads.

Temple IV was the steepest of all, so Eric and I took turns watching our bags and lunches while the other ascended and descended. You could see several other temples from the top and the surrounding, rolling jungle. Temple V was similar, and helped us see a couple other ruins we'd missed. After taking pictures until our camera battery died, we headed back to the park entrance to catch a colectivo to Santa Elena. This colectivo continuously started and stopped, letting people on and off, and when it was full to brimming, it rocketed full speed ahead to Santa Elena, where we were dropped at the bus terminal. There, I learned there were no buses to Coban as I'd thought, so I booked our passage to Lanquin the next day instead.

Tikal hoy

At dawn this morning we hiked all through Nacionale Parque Tikal, the most famous Mayan ruins in the world. Gorgeous, especially in the early morning light! We got some great pictures and totally exhausted ourselves. This computer is really slow and I can hear it overheating, so I am not going to try to upload pictures...again. Sorry! Today has been a little harrying, as there was not a bus to Coban as I thought, so we have to stay the night in Flores. Negotiating all that was really tiring and my brain hurt for awhile. A 10 dollar room in Guatemala is uh, just what you might expect it to be. Thankfully, there are no bedbugs and it is clean enough, but the showerhead looks like it could electrocute us.

Last night the ancient proprietor of La Casa de Don David, aptly named David, took Eric and me and a little family tarantula hunting on the hotel grounds. There were TONS, and they all had lovely rosy backsides. David (who has to be in his mid eighties or maybe even 90) swiftly captured a couple of them and let them crawl around on the dad and son of the little family....and Eric too! I, thank you very much, was perfectly happy to take pictures and not let a giant spider (ie monster) crawl on me with its huge fangs. I have a good picture of Eric and spider beaming though!

In the morning, we are on another 6.5 hour bus ride to the south, into the mountainous region of Alta Verapaz. We will stay at El Retiro near Semuc Champey, commonly called the 8th world wonder. Google it and see! (because there is a man here eyeing me with some impatience). El Retiro for two days, hopefully much better internet because it is a place in demand the world over, then to Tactic to stay with a cool Peace Corps volunteer named Kate. We hope you are all well and miss you and Inga!

Also....FELICIDADES to Rebecca and Jason on the purchase of their first home!

On the banks of Lago Petén Itza

We have successfully crossed the Belizean border into Guatemala. But let's begin at the beginning...

Belize seems to be a poor country, something that rather surprised both of us upon arrival. San Pedro was quite small and a bit dirty, but brightly painted and with constantly-playing, colorful music, so it seems more charming than not at first glance. Perhaps I put us in the more rundown part of town with my choice of budget hotel? Everyone got around on golf carts or by foot, but mostly golf carts. Cabbies on every corner, petitioning you with "taxi? taxi?" One guy said that our hotel, Ruby's was far away, when he knew quite well it was only a block! He then laughed when I called him on it. There were also mongrel dogs running around everywhere.

Every place we ate had GREAT food though. Last night we forwent a nicer restaurant and ate pupusas at a tiny hole-in-the-wall too. Pupusas are like cornmeal tortillas stuffed with an endless variety of meats, cheeses and vegetables, then fried on a griddle right in front of you. Incredibly filling, cheap and delicious! The place was called Waruguma, meaning "star" in Garifuna, which is another dialect further to the south. We enjoyed chatted with Estela, the daughter of the proprietor and maker of our pupusas. We also met a newlywed couple from Philadelphia there, Thaddeus and Stephanie, with whom we spent the rest of our evening talking and drinking.

But befoooore all that, we went snorkeling at the Hol Chan Marine Reserve and Shark Ray Alley! It was pretty surreal for both of us. The reserve was beautiful, with huge brain coral and delicate purple sea fans, brightly colored fishes whose names I sadly don't know, darting between gaily waving anemones. One of the things I liked best was seeing how small schools of fish would gently sway back and forth to match the rhythm of the sea grass and anemones. It was a little hard to believe we were there.

At Shark Ray Alley, the guides dropped food over the sides of our boats to attract grey nurse sharks and blue manta rays, then encouraged us all to leap overboard...so we did! One guide fed a ray by hand, played with it, then gathered it up in his arms so we could touch it. Eric saw a guide feed an eel a conch out of its shell! I'm a hypocrite here because I know you shouldn't touch the wildlife, but I touched the ray anyway and I liked it. It felt like firm, velvety slime; it doesn't sound appealing but it was great! There were clouds of yellowtails beneath our boat, and beautiful black fish with deep indigo fins nibbled algae off the bottom.

Our fellow snorkelers were a father with daughter and son from Toronto, and a family from San Diego. Their younger son spent the whole time declaring he would not get in the water, not because he was scared, but because he knew aaaalllll about sharks and knew better. He wanted to a shark biologist...but wouldn't get anywhere near a peaceful nurse shark? HA. He kept repeating "Bull sharks kill with a smile on their face!" I actually thought he was very amusing and chatted with him a bit, tried to persuade him into the water, but he stood firm. Oh also, I saw our guide plug a hole in the corner of our boat with his foot, which was a bit disconcerting! Of course I didn't notice this until we were already underway.

Today we took a five hour bus ride into Guatemala. During the three hour ride to the border, we saw many shacks of scrap wood and corrugated steel, more mongrel dogs and countless barefoot children (albeit well-fed). There were also at least a dozen houses abandoned mid-construction. Foundations laid, walls built up, but sans doors or rooves. They looked like they'd been there a long time. Very strange.

Across the border, the vegetation thickened and it was clear we were headed into the jungle region. There are many cleared areas by the Macal River, with cows, field of corn, and brightly colored house. It's very hilly and when we are high enough to see over a series of valleys, the view of forested hilltops is almost too perfect. Our bus driver dropped us off right in front of La Casa de Don David and we have loved every minute of this place. It's huge, with a variety of fruiting trees, hedges trimmed into whimsical toucan shapes, beautiful bright flowers and an amazing low-lying shrub that responds to touch! We met the owner of this place, David, and he showed us that if you bent down and just brushed the shrub, it snapped its leaves closed and tightened against the ground.

Off to look at tarantulas now.....pictures another time. Hasta pronto!