Scuba diving with crocodiles and other stories

As I’m writing this, I’m looking out on the sun setting slowly over the city of Chetumal in south-eastern Mexico drinking a nice cold Pacifico beer and contemplating some of the finer points of the next two week’s travelling.

First of all, apologies to those of you that I’ve not not managed to respond to or indeed get round to emailing at all, but the Internet connections have either been sparse, or have costed the price of a firstborn!

We had an incredible wedding, it was a fantastic day having everyone that we love close by and helping us celebrate the begining of our lives together- we’re both still slightly stunned and are still talking over the minutes of the day and feeling like the luckiest people in the world!

We arrived in Cancun after dark on Sunday evening thanks to long delays at Gatwick, our spirits not being helped by the incredibly unfriendly staff that made up the Thompsonfly crew- I knew an upgrade couldn’t be guaranteed as newly-weds, but I wasn’t expecting the premium seats with extra legroom that we’d splashed out on when we booked to have been re-sold, which made me a bit grumpy to say the least! But we arrived in the end and checked into our posh ( very empty) hotel and tried to stay up as late as we could bearing in mind we’d had about five hours sleep in about fifty!

Monday dawned bright and clear and we were up super early thanks to jet lag, taking photos of the sunrise and having an early morning swim before a day of… Having swims and taking photos! We fell asleep late afternoon and when we woke up it was dark and neither of us could summon the energy to go out so we ordered room service and had an early night.

We checked out the next morning after seeing the sunrise again and set off for Tulum, a few hours coach trip down the coast. As we left Cancun, I was very aware of what a monumental waste of concrete the place seemed to be- hotels builts where mangroves once were, side by side and boasting of having thousands of rooms each. I also became aware of the fact Cancun was fast becoming a victim of it’s own incredibly fast growth, with many small malls perfectly finished, but standing empty with no tennants and fading signs telling people that they were for rent. At the same time, there were signs of people having lost everything during hurricanes, with falling down bars, hotels and homes dotted amongst the new shiny malls. It was a very strange place to have visited, but we made of it what it was supposed to be, a place of excess.

We arrived in Tulum after a pleasant, shorter than expected coach trip, and we quickly got settled in our beachside cabana and decided to go for a walk along the beach to orient ourselves. We found the beachside ruins that Tulum is famous for, and also found a dive shop, as the main reason we stopped off in Tulum was so I could do some cenote (cave) diving.

The Yucatan peninsula is mostly made of limestone, and as the water levels have risen and fallen over thousands of years, the water has dissolved and carved away channels under the land, and when the water has been at low levels, stalagmites and stalactites have formed, at the rate of about one centimeter every one hundred years, and one cave is home to the longest underwater stalamites and stalagtites ever discovered! Over time the roofs of the caves and channels have worn thin and collapsed, creating pools of water dotted all over the peninsula that seem to be small ponds on the surface, but in fact go down incredibly deep into the heart of the peninsula and connect with other underground channels and lakes. Once the pools are open at the surface, rainwater collects at the surface and doesn’t mix with the saltwater, so the cenotes are often freshwater at the surface and saltwater underneath.

A perfect example of this is at cenote Angelita, where I dived yesterday. It’s about 17km outside of Tulum, and you park up about 200m away and once your eqipment is all on you head into the forest down a small track where it opens up at the end to a pool of water of the most brilliant turquoise you’ve ever seen. Unfortunately there’s very little time to take in the incredible view as when you look down you realize your skin has turned black as every available inch of skin has a mosquito on it, so you jump about two meters down into the water. I was told that a crocodile has been living in this cenote for the last few years, so I was a little wary, but happy to be away from the mosquitos. Once I was ready, we descended into the turqoise that completely surrounded us, with no real reference apart from the limestone wall on one side. The pool of water is a conicle shape, being about 12m across at the surface and widening to at least 25m by about 30m down. The water until about 30m is very clear and is freshwater, and then there is a flat fog of hydrogen sulphide, with an island of debris seeming to float in the middle. This layer of fog is in fact caused by the vegetation that falls into the water and sinks, and at 30m the freshwater turns into saltwater, which is warmer. The vegetation then rots which produces chemicals that react with the water creating this meter thick layer of fog. Underneath this layer it becomes very dark and the light changes from turquoise to black, and the light that your torch produces only goes a few metres and the beam is an eery orange colour. The water goes down another 30m or so, but there is a pyramid of vegetation that has built up over the years, the top of which is just visible above the fog layer, creating the illusion of an island. As we slowly ascended we spiralled around the walls and went through a short but beautiful swim through- a channel in the rock that you could swim through and you’d pop back out into another part of the cenote. It was an incredibly breathtaking dive that was a real challenge mentally as it was quite creepy, but I’m so pleased that I did it!

I also dove in the casa cenote, which was under mangroves and mostly without overhead restrictions (like being in an underwater cave or tunnel) which had strange mixes of saltwater and freshwater, creating haloclines- a very strange shimmering effect which is very difficult to focus through! My last dive was in Gran cenote, which was a huge cave with lots if tunnels and chambers leading off it to explore. This is where the stalagmites and stalactites were at their most magnificent, and the incredible light and colour of the water followed you deep into the caves and tunnels and was creating picture perfect visions at every turn. There were stark reminders of the dangers of cave diving all over the place- you have to follow the yellow guide rope through different paths otherwise you run a serious risk of getting lost, and at the entrance to lesser explored tunnels with signs telling you there was danger of death and I even saw one sign with a picture of the grim reaper on it!

Obviously I’ve survived to tell the tale, and I’m incredibly glad I decided to give cenote diving a go, it was worth every peso, and it was a very welcome return to diving.

We moved further south again today, getting to the dull border town of Chetumal, which has little to offer except the museum of household appliances and cold beer. I’m sure you can all guess which we decided to persue! Tomorrow we’re getting up at 4am to catch the bus that takes us accross the border to Belize, into Belize city, then over to Guatemala and into the Mayan ruins of Tikal, which will be fantastic!

Early next week we’ll be heading to a small village in El Peten to go and visit Hugo, the Guatemalan boy we help send to school, and give Action Aid, the people that work with small communities all over the world, the £110 that was put into the collection box at the wedding.

Photos to be posted soon!

Paris (AKA the Hen Do)

At the end of September I went to Paris for my hen weekend. Well, when I say ”Hen weekend”, it was a far cry from the usual sight in a city centre on a friday or saturday night, with all the hens wearing matching t-shirts, pink sashes and cowboy hats (and they’re tame in comparison to what some of the other parties look like). When I got engaged and people began talking about my hen party, I started getting worried, as it seemed like it was going to turn into this massive party with all of my female friends and family, and more than likely involving strippers and sashes and pink glittery cowboy hats, which was exactly what I didn’t want. Luckily my mum understood this, and when I broached the subject she suggested that we go off for a weekend to Paris with just my grandmother, aunt and sister.

It was a brilliant idea, and with only a few hiccups (i.e. the channel tunnel fire) we arrived in Paris pretty much on schedule. We’d managed to help the time in queues and on the train pass fairly quickly by polishing off a few bottles of champagne between us too! We had no real plans for our few days there, other than knowing that we wanted to spend a lot of time in cafes and not focus on sightseeing, as most of us had been before.

When we were booking the break, we used the Eurostar website to book a package deal for all of us, which came up trumps when we last went to Paris. This time the site found us an even better deal, and we found a beautiful five star hotel in the very central Montparnasse area (just 2 minutes walk from the Montparnasse tower). Of course, it’s always very difficult to know 100% if a hotel is going to be as good as the reviews on the website say, but we weren’t dissapointed. Fantastically large rooms with huge bathrooms, and most importantly, comfy beds. Once we’d checked in we decided that we had to make up for lost time, and we headed for a bar to sample some good wine.

The area around the base of the Montparnasse tower seemed to be a little like the Leicester Square, with big illuminated signs and elevated prices, but the bar we sat in was pleasant enough, and after a few rusty goes at trying to remember pre-GCSE French, we managed to get our order accross to the waiters. After that we just decided to eat locally, and we found a sweet Italian place where more wine was drunk and food was eaten, and after a long day we decided to turn in relatively early.

The next day we were all up bright and early and we went off in search of some breakfast en route to the Eiffel tower. We had a fantastic breakfast of fresh coffee, fresh bread and fresh croissants with freshly squeezed orange juice- Yummy!

The rest of the day was passed by queuing at the Eiffel tower, queuing in the Eiffel tower, queuing for the Batobus, having a look inside the Notre Dame and hopping between bars and cafes. One of the most surprising things for me was how many people smoke. It must be much more prominent for me now that smoking has been banned inside bars and pubs, and maybe it was becuase we had lovely weather the weekend we visited, but outside every bar and cafe there were people smoking heavily, and loads of people going from place to place while smoking, and I think I was most surprised to see that it still seemed cool to smoke, whereas I think that is slowly starting to change in the minds of young people in the UK.

That evening we decided to go to the Gare de Lyon for our dinner. Some might think that it’s a strange choice to go to a train station for dinner, and possibly assume that one of us was an avid train spotter, but upstairs in the Gare de Lyon is an incredibly richly decorated restaurant called the Le Train Bleu, which was the best possible choice for our big night out in Paris. We all got dressed up and looked brilliant and spent the evening soaking up the fantastic atmosphere and eating incredible cuisine.

The next morning we had a quick trip up the Montparnasse tower to get a different perspective on Paris and have a cup of coffee a few hundreds of metres above the city, but all too soon our trip was over and it was time to go home. The journey home was much easier than the journey out there and we got straight on a train and were home in a few hours. Thank you to everyone on the trip, I had a great time, and an especially big thank you to my Granddad who made it all possible!

Where I left off

I can’t believe it’s taken me so long to blog again, even though there have been so many exciting developments in my life. I think the best way to tell you what’s happened is to go back to the morning I arrived in New Zealand.

Once I’d arrived in in New Zealand after another very long flight, I spent an hour going through the very strict control at the airport having my bag searched and my shoes checked- not for bombs but for seeds, as New Zealand has to be very careful that foreign plants and animals are not introduced as they could damage the eco-structure that hangs in a very delicate balance in New Zealand. After that I muddled my way around the airport and got onto a shuttle bus, that after an hour and a half, would get me to my next bed of the trip.

The hostel looked uncannily like a mental institution, and I crawled into bed at sunrise to get a few hours sleep before exploring. Auckland was bright and sunny and although it was early winter it was surprisingly warm. I first went down into the harbour to overlook the amazing view of some of the smaller islands that make up Auckland’s 625 km2 sprawl. After that I went back into downtown Auckland and decided to go up the SkyTower- The southern hemisphere’s tallest structure. It was scary, but the views were incredible. Auckland is made up of over 50 volcanoes that have risen out of the sea over time, making it incredibly hilly terrain, and from the top of the tower you could almost count all of the extinct volcanoes. While I was in Auckland, I did the usual tourist route around the city, taking in the brilliant aquarium and antarctic museum (complete with an icy penguin sanctuary!), the zoo, walking on some stunning beaches before deciding to crack on with getting a job sorted, as it had been nearly three weeks since I’d earned any money at all and my funds were dwindling. So I started looking on various sites for jobs, which were fairly plentiful, if a bit dull- bar work or shop work mainly. After a few hours of looking online I realised the real extent of the massive size of Auckland, and that the jobs advertised were from every corner of the city. So then I started thinking that really I should decide where I wanted to work, I should find somewhere to live and job hunt in that area. But how can you get a house without a job? But how do you get a job without knowing where abouts in the city you’d be able to live? it was at that point that I started thinking about completely restructuring the rest of my trip and coming home early. After all, if I was going to be working a long day, and living my life as if I was in England, but while missing my family and friends, what was the point in staying away? I went to visit a place to live in “trendy Ponsonby”, which was a good omen, as I’d heard a lot of good things about the area. I took a taxi, as I had no idea where to go, and it took me past all these lovely houses and apartments, and the cab driver turned into the road that the house was situated on and my spirits lifted as it was gorgeous. Then it pulled up outside the house I’d come to visit. It was a run down old bungalow that looked like it had been used as a squat for the last ten years, complete with an old bed outside. I couldn’t find anyone around to let me in, even though I’d made an appointment, and left feeling disappointed. But, the rent was cheap, so when I was back at the hostel, I phoned the landlord and said that I’d take the room. Who then informed me that the rent had gone up to $800 dollars with a four month rent deposit, which was just ridiculous amounts of money. Obviously I had to decline the kind offer.

After meeting someone that was staying in the same hostel as me that was in the same predicament, he posed two simple questions to me. “What do you want to do in New Zealand?” and “Why are you here?”, and I couldn’t think of a single answer to either of those questions, and something clicked in my brain- I wanted to go home. As soon as possible. I missed Rick, I missed my family, I was worried about my family as my mum wasn’t very well at the time and was scheduled in for an operation, and there were strange family dynamics that were affecting my whole family following the death of my aunt just before I left. As soon as I realised, I was instantly so much happier, it felt as though a weight had been lifted. I booked my flight the next day and three days later I was on my way home, via Sydney, Hong Kong and Heathrow, to find Rick and my family waiting for me at the gates.

From that day on, everything has passed in a blur, I’ve never known time pass so quickly. Within two months Rick and I had moved in together, and within two months and a week Rick and I were engaged! There’s been trips to St Helens to meet with Rick’s family, a trip to Marrakech for Rick’s birthday, lots of gigs gone to (some memorable, and some not!), fancy dress festivals, a trip to Paris (and to Disneyland!!) and lots of wedding planning. the family business has also expanded, we opened a new shop in may and has been better than any of our expectations! It has meant a lot of hard work, but it’s great seeing it pay off.

Best of all has just been time spent with Rick planning our life together, which has been incredibly exciting and there’s been a lot to learn about living with a partner! In less than six weeks I’ll be married, and onto our first adventure as a married couple- I’m taking Rick to Guatemala, somewhere that meant to much to me at the start of my trip, and somewhere that I knew from the first time I set foot there, that Rick would love it.

I can’t wait!

The Race for Life

The southern hemisphere… Finally!

Well, I had a very short stay in Santiago, Chile, before I flew onto New Zealand.

I’ve always wanted to go to Chile, and was never put off by people that had been there telling me it was slightly boring and very expensive in comparison to the rest of the continent because I was desperate to explore the beautiful and varied terrain that Chile is blessed with. Unfortunately, with only six days, and with Chile being over 4000km long I didn’t really get very far. But I did explore Santiago fully, and did a lot of wine tasting!

It was a ridiculously long journey from Utila to Santiago- 16 and a half hours of flying alone, but I made it, more or less in one piece and set out to explore fairly early on the morning that I arrived. The first stop was Cerro San Cristobal, the highest point in Santiago, which is a really steep, high hill. I wandered along the meandering path, all the way to the top, and was surprised to see that I was well above all of the tall buildings and could see for miles over the city, and over to the snow capped Andes in the distance. Unfortunately, what I didn’t realise was that clear sunny days were going to be in short supply while I was there, and didn’t take any photos. The photos that I did take a few days later are ones that show the city shrouded in fog, and I could barely see my hand in front of my face at the top of the hill! You’ll all just have to go and see for yourselves.

I was staying at BellaVista Hostel- nothing swish, but nice enough and with free internet and friendly people staying there it had a nice atmosphere. It was very central and in the up-and-coming district of BellaVista, a very bohemian and studenty part of the city. I spent most of the time exploring the sights of the city centre, very, very wrapped up in lots of jumpers as my body wasn’t used to the zero degrees that sometimes fell on the city.

Santiago is a city steeped in history, having been founded in 1541 by Pedro de Valdivia, and becoming the country’s capital in 1818. Dotted all around the inner city are examples of Spanish colonial architecture, including the former Governors’ Palace, now housing a museum; the stunning cathedral (founded in 1558);the Palacio de la Moneda (built in 1788–1805), now the presidential palace; many churches; broad avenues with a mix of big shops, resaurants, tiny shops; and skyscrapers that almost look out of place. There are also a mix of nasty run down tower blocks on most streets that echo of the time when the country was ruled by a dictator. Pinochet is best remembered for his brutal security operations where over 3,000 suspected terrorists were killed, and over 30,000 people were tortured. What he did do was push the country towards economic reform, and is the one responsible for Chile’s robust modern economy, which is still doing well today. Chile is one of the most modern, westernised and wealthy countries in South America.

All too quickly my time in Chile was up, without having explored any further than the Santiago city limits, but on my taxi ride to the airport, looking out across the stunning pink tipped Andes in the late afternoon sun, I resolved that it wouldn’t be the last time I’d be visiting Chile, and I’d definitely be exploring a lot further next time.

But, looking to the future, I was very excited about setting foot on a new Continent, one I’d never been to before, and experiencing more things for the first time.

Whale sharks and other stories

Ooops, I nearly lost the website under the pile of dust that it had gathered! I´ve been so busy, and so much has happened and there`s a lot to write about, so best get a cuppa and come back!

So, first of all, I`m now officially a divemaster! I passed all of my exams (Physics, Physiology and First Aid, Equipment, Decompression Theory and the RDP, Dive Skills and the Environment, Supervising Activities for Certified Divers, Supervising Student Divers in Training, PADI Divemaster Conducted Programs), mapped a dive site ( the new dive site of Penetration Point, Southside, Utila), reached my minimum requirement of sixty dives and well beyond, spent many hours underwater supervising new divers, passed the water skills and stamina test ( 400 metre swim, 15 minute survival float, 800 metre snorkelling, 100 metre inert diver push/tow, rescue of a non-breathing diver at surface), proved that I can demonstrate the 21 essential diving skills and the dreaded snorkel test (the wordwide initiation of divemasters is to put a dive mask on their face, put a snorkel in their mouths and pour alcohol (in my case rum and coke) down the snorkel at regular 15 second interval, and having the mask filled with beer and then have to demonstrate how to clear it). The last test was definitely the hardest and least fun, though I passed it and recovered from it after a couple of days.

The scuba divng on Utila is absolutely incredible. Whilst diving on Utila I`ve seen whale sharks, nurse sharks, dolphins, seahorses, jellfish, huge fish, tiny fish, incredible coral, small wrecks, bigs wrecks and seen literal abysses which drop to thousands of metres below me. I plan on doing a lot of diving on the rest of the trip, and while I can´t expect to have the same experiences as diving on Utila, I can only hope that some of the other places will equal it.

Life on the surface has been great as well. I became a manager at the Bundu Cafe (the busiest and largest restaurant on Utila), as well as becoming the Utilan quizmistress on a friday evening (yes, I am now the queen of useless trivia) for the Bundu pub quiz, and still found time between diving and working to have fun at some of the many bars with some of the many friends I`ve made. I also made one very special friend- I adopted an albino lab rat that a friend was given and didn`t want. While rats aren`t the most exciting or cute pets to own, they`re very intelligent. Harold Gunterson the 3rd (named just to confuse the Spanish speakers of the island) became a regular sight around the dive shop and now everyone (even the ones that were scared of him at first) have come to love him. Spare time is spent going to the beach or sitting on a dock and sunbathing, snorkelling around some of the closer sites, sitting in Bundu, reading, watching DVDs on fish identification, listening to music, cycling around the island and just generally having fun. The party atmosphere on Utila is always present, which contributes to it´s friendly atmosphere, as that´s the way that people meet new friends.

Life on Utila isn`t always perfect- long days and hard work is essential, contrary to popular belief, and diving so frequently takes it`s toll on your body and you feel absolutely exhausted sometimes from all the lifting and carrying and the crazy infections your body picks up from being in the water all the time, and as a divemaster, I`ve seen a lot of crazy students underwater, and have had to help tame them and refine their dive skills (though the best thing about them is the anecdotes I get to tell in the pub), and unfortunately, sometimes we have to use our skills that we learned on the rescue course, which is something that everyone who has been through the rescue course knows, you never want to have to use. I had to use my skills with a diver who came up to the surface and started panicking, which lead to her hyperventilating, which lead to falling unconscious on the boat. When she came to she was showing all the classic symptoms of having decompression sickness (the bends) and we treated her accordingly. We worked well as a team, and got her to the hyperbaric chamber to be recompressed and she made a full recovery, but at the time, it wasn’t only the diver with DCS that was scared. What I learned from the experience was tremendous- how well I coped in an emergency, faced with such a serious illness, and the realisation that I could cope with that situation improved me greatly as a diver as it gave me a confidence in my abilities that I’d never had before.

A few weeks ago, I made my first trip to the mainland since arriving on Utila, and while it was extremely odd to leave the little island, even for a day, and get various supplies like clothes and pillows and spices and other things that island life doesn’t provide, and to have to dredge up all the Spanish that I’d forgotten in the three months that I`d been on the island, I got a small buzz out of going somewhere different and seeing new things. Over the next week or so the sensation of island fever really got to me and the thought of moving on became more and more persistent until I decided to book my onward ticket from the island so that I could resume my adventure once more. I can’t pinpoint one exact reason for realising that I wanted to move on, though it was probably a combination of many things- working so hard, everyone on the island knowing me and my business (no matter how insignificant the event, everyone always knew of it!), and the knowledge that I still wanted to see the rest of the world, and while ever I was on Utila, I was eating into my time elsewhere, and so I decided it was time to leave. I spent a tough few days trying to work out where I was going to go from Utila- I knew that diving was now an essential part of my life, and I also knew that having spent so much money on dive courses, I had to have a backup in case that I couldn’t find work in dive shops. New Zealand seemed like the obvious choice.

So, last Tuesday, after many leaving parties, and saying goodbye to many incredible friends, I left Utila and started my journey again. I’d just like to say a few thank yous to various people I met- Lance, Mark, Jared, Amo, Manuel, Charles- thanks for being such a great team! UnderWaterVision- thanks for making it such a great experience (I bet there’s no where else in the world that you can go diving with a pirate!), the Bundu gang- thanks for always smiling, especially in the faces of Bundu Dogs!

Utila, Utila, Utila!

Wow- what a month!

I have spent the last month on Utila, off the coast off the Honduras in the Carribbean sea. And I love it! One day seems to have merged into another here, as life tends to do once you’ve settled down in one place, but I’ve had some great highlights since I’ve been here, and lots of big decisions have been made.

First of all, I’ll give you a run down of the last month. The main idea of staying on Utila was to relax and kick back and give our backpacks a rest, which we definitely did! The first week was spent reeling from the journey from the UK to Utila, and then it was time to get ourselves diving. I started my advanced course (no teeth trauma!) and got hooked on the diving bug once again.

The weather is mostly fantastic here, hot, hot sun, but we have had a few days of rain. Not many days, but a lot of rain! I’ve never seen it rain like that before- just four days of torrential downpour where we’re marooned on the island with no boats or planes coming or going, and nothing to do except stay in or enjoy the rain. One of the best days I’ve had since I have been here was getting to the dive centre about midday on one of the rainy days to do a session on dive theory, to be told by my instructor that the day’s lessons were cancelled and that we were going to play cards and drink rum for the rest of the day! Well, it is the Carribbean! I’ve had other moments where I’m sitting on a jetty at night looking up at the stars, or I see a new fish that I’ve never seen before, or I watch dolphins somersaulting in front of the boat or when I walk around in a vest top and skirt late at night in the middle of winter and not feel cold and I feel really, really lucky, and very, very happy!

I knew that before I left Utila I wanted to have my rescue diver course under my belt, so I enrolled on the course, which was the most physically draining course I’ve ever enrolled in, but it was fantastic, and I feel so much more confident as a diver as well as in general having learned how to save people from the bottom of the sea to giving them life to life on the boat to bandaging cuts. As I was halfway through the course, I was offered a job as a Divemaster with the company that I was diving with, which was a fantastic opportunity that came with a lot of thinking. Could I sacrifice time in other places to stay on Utila? Would I be earning enough money to make the rest of the trip viable? Could I change my flights? What would Daisy do?

In the end the opportunity was too big to pass up, so I’ve committed myself to stay on Utila for another two months at least. The downside of the decision was that Daisy didn’t feel the same way, and we’ve parted ways as I stay on Utila and she carries on with her trip, and I’m really pleased she made that decision. I’m also trying to decide if I’ll be changing my route around the world or not, but I think that mainly depends on how long I end up staying on Utila for.

So now I’m a member of the diving community on Utila, studying with UnderWater Vision, to get my divemasters certificate so I can begin to earn money by doing something that I really have a passion for. Before I pass, I have to get a lot more dives under my belt, and have to do a lot more exams- including physics and physiology exams(!)- but it’s a challenge I’m willing to rise to.

So that’s all my latest info for you all back home- and for those of you that are away, and I’m sorry it took so long to get a post up! Broadband internet has now been established on the island, so I’ll be slowly going through the huge backlog of emails from you all!

I hope you’re all well and happy and looking forward to spring

xx

Internet Connections on Utila

Hi everyone,
Just a quick note to say that there won’t be any long posts for this week and probably the next, as Utila’s internet connection is slow at best and internet time is rationed! Once I get back to mainland I’ll write a long catch up which will be mainly about sunning on Carribean beaches, scuba diving and a few other Honduran adventures!
Take care!

Panajachel to Antigua to Tikal to Flores

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!

Puerto Angel to Tapachula to Guatemala City to Panajachel

It’s been a busy week of travelling about this week, but it’s been well worth it!

Last Sunday we headed over to the surfing beach at San Augustinillio, which was well worth the hair raising taxi ride over there. The beach was fairly deserted, and we nabbed a beach umbrella and two chairs and then we were set for the day! The waves were absolutely huge and the currents were very strong, but it was great fun playing in the waves. Because the sun was scorching hot, I only got out of the water to apply my (new waterproof children’s purple coloured) sun lotion. That is until a huge wave caught me off guard and dragged me under so that I bashed my shoulder on the sea bed and really hurt it, so I couldn’t play in the sea any more. I just had to make do with sunbathing instead! Later that even we found a new restaurant to try in town, as we’d already got a bit bored of the limited menu that the beach bar served, and as a sunday treat, we ordered a bottle of wine too. We also had a glass of wine after dinner, with some of the local mezcal (don’t try it, it’s disgusting and lethal) and then another glass of wine on the beach before bed. It was the first time since we arrived that we’d been nearly drunk, and it was nice to relax a bit.

The next day we needed to get into the nearest bank, which was in the main town of Pochutla, and after being so relaxed in such a quiet town for a few days, it was a real shock to the system. It seemed to be the only place in Mexico where the taxi drivers tried to scam us, and it was very noisy and hectic and very unlike anywhere I’d been before. By the time we got back to Puerto Angel, both Daisy and I felt shell shcoked! We went back to the beach for a while in the afternoon and did some snorkelling around the rocks at teh edge of the bay, watching shoals of fish come in really close to the shore, being chased by bigger fish, and seeing the pelicans dive in the water to catch their food. nothing much else to note on our time in Puerto Angel, apart from the fact we were shaken awake by an earthquake at 5am one morning (only 4.3)!The time spent in Puerto Angel was spent relaxing and wandering around the area, and we decided that it was time for a change of scenery, and booked our tickets to the Mexico-Guatemala border.

It was a tweleve hour journey from Pochutla to Tapachula, which flew by as the bus we were on was very comfortable, and it was an overnight bus. We arrived feeling very groggy, and checked into the nearest hotel to catch up on some sleep.The hotel was a bit run down and The porter had trouble opening the door to our room that was painted in varying shades of green with an advocado coloured en suite. Later on that day, as we were leaving the hotel to go and see some of the town, the key broke in the lock, and the hotel tried to charge us to have the locked fixed again, so we left there and booked into another much nicer hotel, and swam in their pool and got ready for the trip over the border into Guatemala the next day. Tapachula seemed to be full of Mexican and Guatemalan businessmen and very few women, which gave it a strange atmosphere!

The next morning we packed, changed up our Pesos into Quetzals and got a taxi to the border. We drove through scenery that I hadn’t yet seen in Mexico, everything was very green and lush with steep mountains in the distance. The border was at the foot of one of these mountains and not very well signposted so we ended up getting a bit confused on our way over, but we made it in the end. We had to wait a while for the next bus into Guatemala city, but then we were off into the unknown. The drive was mostly in the dark, but as the sun was setting we saw little towns and people in brightly coloured clothing (with Sampson and Delilah dubbed into Spanish blaring into our ears), and as night set in we saw lots of fireworks being let off. There didn’t seem to be any national occasion, apparently letting off fireworks is just a national trait! We got to our hotel quite late and after we’d dumped our bags in our rooms we went to explore. It was strange, as even though it was only 10pm on a Friday night, the streets were deserted and all the restaurants were closed, so we went into a a big bar and had a few of the local beers before heading to bed.

The next day dawned bright and clear, and cool because of the altitude which we were at, and after breafast we went to explore the city. We were in zone one (next to zone four and ten!) which is where all the colonian buildings are, so there was some beautiful, even if a bit run down, architecture to see. We saw the (plain on the outside, stunning on the inside) cathedral and the palaces around the main square and walked around the street markets. We tried in vain to find a special ice cream parlour that sells flavours such as fish, chilli and beer ice cream, and settled on a small coffee shop where we could watch the world go by. That evening we decided to go out earlier rather than later so that we wouldn’t miss out like the previous evening, but once again, everything had closed! I don’t know or understand why, but everywhere (apart from the bars!) was closed. We had also encountered this in Mexico city (if you know why, please email me – pj@apennyforthem.com), so it was another early night for us.

This morning we got packed again and went to the bus station that would take us to Panajachel on the shores of Lake Atitlan. We got one one of the buses I’ve always associated with places with Guatemala- the old American school buses that are all painted up very brightly with music blaring from the windows. It was a shortish cramped journey, but the views as we went up through the mountains were spectacular. I also saw my first volcano! The first view of the lake and the surrounding mountains and volcanoes took my breath away- it is possibly the most beautiful view I have ever seen! I’ve only been here for a few hours, and only in Guatemala a few days, but I have a really good feeling about the time I’ll be spending here.

Over the next week our plans are to see a few more towns around the lake’s edges and then to head to Antigua (the old capital of Guatemala). I haven’t had a chance to put up any photos yet, but keep checking back as I’ll be doing some this week.

I hope you’re all well and enjoying yourselves!