Another week has flown by, and more ground has been covered. I did a quick milage count a few days ago, and it turns out that even though we´ve put in so many hours on buses, we´ve still covered only just over a thousand miles (not including the flight from the UK to Mexico!)!

I started last week still in Panajachel on the edge of Lake Atitlan, which was very different to anywhere we´d been before. There was a very large community of travellers, and the community catered very well for us. There also seemed to be a large ex-pat community, mainly American, who were definitely a breed unto themselves! Imagine a total stranger coming up to you in a bar wearing sandals with socks, tie-dye t-shirts, huge ¨fanny packs¨, and the women wearing full make up- and you´ve never seen this person before but they want to tell you that they´ve been listening to your conversation on the other side of the room and that they want to impart some pearl of wisdom on it. It happened more than once!

Odd travellers aside, Panajachel was a fantastic place to stay, very calm compared to the hustle and bustle of the towns and cities we´d been through previously, and I´m definitely planning on going back there. The only problem we had was trying to get money, which has proved itself to be a major problem, and not just in Panajachel. The first thing you notice about the Quetzal notes is that they´re very old. Not just old in a notes-been-through-the-wash-and-dropped-on-the-floor-a-few-times kind of way, but in an these-notes-should-be-in-a-museum kind of way. They´re extremely flimsy and thin and very dirty, as though they´d passed though several hundred thousand people´s wallets. The seceond thing we noticed was that as soon as we were out of the city, finding a cash machine with money in it was very difficult- and we soon found out why. The Guatemalan government had recently decided that it was time to get new bank notes printed, so they put their order in with the world bank and promtly started burning the old notes by the truck load before the new notes had come into circulation. When the new notes finally arrived they were all the wrong size so they had to be sent back and then there was a big problem- there was extremely little money in circulation at all. There have been riots and people have been rushing to the banks to withdraw all their savings and put it in a shoebox under their beds which means that there is even less money in circulation. Which in turn means that although I have plenty of money in the bank, I often find my purse completely empty! The morning ritual in Panajachel was going to all six cash machines, finding that only one was going to be filled that day and waiting in a queue until we could get money out! the rest of the day was then spent walking around the lake and perusing the many stalls that lined the streets looking at the beautiful textiles on offer.

Soon it was time to get moving again, and our next destination was Antigua, the old capital of Guatemala before it was destroyed by a major earthquake in 1773, when people fled Antigua and made the new capital city (the imaginatively named) Guatemala City. It was made a UNESCO world heritage site in 1979 and now it is a major tourist attraction. It´s a very beautiful city, nestled at the foot of the active volcano Pacaya, which has errupted about 20 times since 1565, but since the 60s it has been errupting continuously, and one of the tours offered around Antigua is a trip to see the lava flows. Needless to say, I wasn´t on that trip!

The hostel we stayed in was a bit strange with posters up on all of the doors asking us not to let the cats out at night/not to feed the cats because the neighbours kill the cats, and the slightly nutty lady that was continuously calling the cats in from outside using a very strange meowing voice. We didn´t spend much time at the hostel. Instead we wandered around the city looking at the numerous ruins of churches that had been fenced off and had let nature start to reclaim them again, or were being pianstakingly renovated back to their original glory. I much prefered the ruined ones as you could see the incredible detail, as the renovated ones seemed to be lacking in spirit. What I do like about this country is the difference between the very old churches you see in very traditional styles in the UK and Europe (which I do love the atmosphere of) that were made over decades, as if the people that built them wanted to prove something to God, and the churches here that are painted in all shades including fluorescent pink and lime green with a tin roof, as if the people think that it doesn´t matter what the churches look like, it´s what happens inside that counts.

Anyway, no matter how beautiful the churches, or the ruined churches, there are only so many that you can go and see before they start merging into one another, so we had to decide if we wanted to go North-east to the Mayan ruins of Tikal or South-east to the border with the Honduras and beyond. As we were so relatively close (still a nine hour bus journey away) we decided to go to Tikal. We got our tickets, set our alarm for 3.15am and bid farewell to Antigua. We had to get a minibus to Guatemala City and then a coach (no chicken bus this time!) to a town called Flores and then another bus to the national park of Tikal. The minibus ride was interesting, as when the bus turned corners the back axle touched the road, probably as a result of being over crowded and the roof being loaded with backpacks! There does seem to be a certain ammount of smugness over the size of one´s backpack over anothers. When unknown strangers comment on the size of my backpack compared with the handbag they appear to be travelling with, and ask me which pocket the kitchen sink is as 4.30 in the morning, they´re lucky I don´t drop my backpack on them. I do have a large backpack it´s true, but I´ve tried so many times to fit all my worldly belongings into a smaller space but they won´t. I have to say that my hiking boots, huge ultra warm coat and 8 books aren´t making my life easier, but they really are things that I can´t do without. As for the kitchen sink… Where would I do the washing up?! Smug backpackers also fail to see the funny side of my small bucket and spade attached to the outside of the bag.

I had a feeling of foreboding when we got on the big coach in Guatemala City as most of the windows were cracked. I should have got off then. The journey was fairly uneventful for the first five hours, but then the coach seemed to turn into a local bus, picking people up and dropping them off every five minutes, and it got very, very full.I had a woman sit in my lap and a man prch on my shoulder, and a girl threw up on my feet. Anyway, eleven hours after leaving we arrived in Santa Elena, (the town that has cash machines) before we got a bus to Tikal. We did the usual thing of going to every cash machine in teh town before managing to get enough money out, and had to get a taxi to take us the 60km to Tikal as we´d missed the last bus. I have to say it was very good value for money and the taxi driver was one of teh nicest we´ve had on teh journey so far, and he gave us a full run down of the weather over the last month in the region as he drove.

Tikal is the largest of the ancient Mayan civilisations, and is a UNESCO heritage site. It is also one of the lost cities of El Dorado that the Spaniards spent so much time and energy trying to find without any luck, as Tikal is only a golden city for one week of the year- at the spring equinox all of the temples are lit up by the sun and appear to be made of gold. We arrived in Tikal in the pouring rain (the taxi driver pointed the rain out to us as he dropped us off in a field) and we squelched our way to the nearest hotel. Instead of getting changed into dry clothes, we decided to pull on our boots and go out for a walk into the reserve and see if we could see a few ruins before it got dark. We managed to see one, temple VI (later we were told that it was the ruin where bandits hang out and rob people), which was stunning, before heading back to the hotel. We had an early night, as we´d booked ourselves onto the sunrise tour the next morning.

The first words out of my mouth that morning were ¨If I hadn´t already paid, I wouldn´t be going!¨Our alarm had gone off at 4.15am and although we were in the middle of a rainforest, we were freezing, and an odd group of people assembled at 4.45 to walk through the forest and be sitting in the highest temple by the time the sun rose. It wasn´t so much a tour, as a hike through woods in the dark, but it was good fun none the less. We walked for about an hour, completely losing our sense of direction in the dark and occasionally seeing the outline of ancient ruins backlit by stars. By the time we were sat on the ruin, we´d all warmed up a bit and were waiting expectantly for the sun to rise. More and more people were turning up, and by the time we noticed the sky getting lighter there were about a hundred people all perched on ledges 70m above the ground. It dawned extremely misty, and the only sounds were of birds, monkeys and the odd selection of noises that digital cameras make. Occasionally we could make out the carpet of trees spread out in front of us, or the top of a ruin, before the mist closed back around us. I still wish I´d managed to get a photo of a group of a hundred people with their cameras posed to take pictures of mist.

Once it was light (no visible sun rising to be seen) everyone left to finish the rest of the tour, but I decided to stay perched on my ledge for a while longer and wander the still almost empty site by myself, which I think was a great decision. I got to wander the forest in the mist, stumbling across ruins and climbing up them and taking photos of them with no one else clambering on them, and watching birds and monkeys wandering on the path in front of me, and was sitting in the Grand Plaza a few hours later when the sun finally burned through the mist and the full extent of the ruins was finally revealed. They were absolutely stunning, and I would write more about their beauty, but words fail to express what I saw that day, you´ll just have to go and see for yourselves. The rest of the day was spent exploring and getting very, very hot! I´ll definitely be going back there again, as the site is so huge, and impossible to explore in just one day, but it´s all we had as we couldn´t get enough money out of the cash machine to stay any longer.

So yesterday we packed our bags once again and got the bus into Flores, an island in the middle of a big lake. It was supposed to take less than an hour, but in true Latin American style, we arrived two and a half hours later to find that none of the cash machines in the city had any money, which left us stranded! The plan was to get a bus to La Ceiba in the Honduras, but none of the travel agents were able to take visa so we were stuck indefinitely. Luckily this morning Daisy saved the day by spending our last five Quetzals and getting a tuk-tuk (yes they´re here too!) into the next town and finding some money and booking us tickets to San Pedro Sula in the Honduras for tomorrow. We spent lunchtime celebrating and then the rest of the afternoon our kayaking on the lake and swimming in the surprisingly warm water and we´re about to have an early dinner followed by an early night, as we´re up ridiculously early again in the morning.

I´ve finally uploaded more photos (being stranded has it´s plus sides) so have a look and feel very jealous please. Next time I write I should be in the Honduras on the island of Utila, so check back soon for the next installment of Penny´s world domination!