Friday, 26 June 2009

Guatemala so far...

As you cross over the border from Belize to Guatemala there is a big difference.. gone are the bright carribean colours and English signs and we are greeted with bumpy dirt roads, rain and roadside stalls, which for some reason was really appealing!

Our first stop in Guatemala was Flores..its an island surrounded by a lake and you just drive over a bridge to get to it. It looked amazing (even in the rain).

The next day we went to Tikal, at the entrance we were met with The Grandfather Tree (you can see Deb at the bottom) - it is set in the middle of a Jungle, we saw loads of monkeys.


The ancient ruins of Tikal were about 70m high, the climb to the top was alright for some but not for one (Deb) but the sweat and tears were worth it, you could see for miles.


That night we went for food with people we had met in Caye Caulkner who are travelling the same route as us... We decided to travel together for a bit, as it seems to be a fair bit cheaper in groups. So the we are now with two Americans and a chopsy Australian girl called Elyse ( she has us in hysterics all the time) so between us we re like the three stooges.

After Flores was the worst journey to date, only 9 hours but 4 of them were in the back of a pickup going off road to Semuc Champey.
Every man and their dog had machettes but they were smiling so they couldnt have been too bad.
We arrived in the middle of the jungle miles away from anywhere with the only building around us... our hostel. As we arrived the owner of the 'Las Marias' was bringing a 6 inch scorpion out of one of the rooms... this did not please Deb at all, but with no where else to go she had no choice but to stay with the creepy crawlies. The hostel cut the power at 10p.m so of course Deb had all of us in the room an hour before bed to make sure that the only living creatures in the room were us lot. Well she didnt have the best sleep in the world, but sleeping with one eye open can
do that to you!
Happy to be alive the next day, we signed up to go caving not fully understanding what we were letting ourselves in for....



We were given a candle and told that we didnt need our flip flops, we wandered into the cave waist deep in water laughing and joking and before we knew it we were in a cross between the krypton factor assault course and The Goonies movie.














Swimming in torrids of water with our candles blowing out left right and centre climbing rope ladders up waterfalls. It was amazing! We both came out with battle scars but they are merely flesh wounds.



We made it out alive and kicking. There was no time to relax though, our guide promptly giving us a tractor tyre inner tube and with a quick bridge jump we were in the water and given the relaxing run down river which meandered through the jungle to our hostel; which was pretty convienient.....

Semuc Champey is a definite recommendation.

Alex as graceful as ever getting into his tube!
He finally gets in and manages to look like he's got fake legs!
Next day we headed out of jungle ready to climb the active volcano about 2 hours away from Antigua. We arrived in the cobbled streets of Antigua, it is very pretty city. We got ourselves settled in our hostel with Elyse and a couple from Kentucky, USA and had an early night ready for the 6am bus to the Volcano.

The Volcano walk was a lot harder than we thought, luckily it wasn't sunny, it was warm enough though.It took about two hours of steep uphill to reach the hardenened lava. It was really weird to walk on. The rock beneath your feet was hot, crunchy and hollow sounding. We walked up further with our guide to try and find some flowing lava, the heat was incredible. We saw lava, but nothing like we were expecting from what people had told us form their experience. The redish colour rock in the photo is actually red hot though and melts anything that touches it. We bought big walking sticks for 50p off the kids at the bottom of the volcano, Alex threw his in the lava, it went straight up in flames. We then had toasted marshmallows..a sugar rush ready for the walk back!


Getting back to the hostel, we met a cool Aussie couple Vic and Mel.. it was Vic's birthday so we started drinking about 4pm and then headed out for some live music. It was a really good night, let off a bit of steam getting drunk..loads of people from the hostel came out...the place we went to was fronted by a library and when you walked through to the back it turned into a bar... it was just like the Roof!

A big thanks and hello to Peter Turley and The Archers for getting the ball rolling on the donations!!

Sunday, 14 June 2009

The Blue Hole, Belize


The Blue Hole is a large underwater sinkhole off the coast of Belize. The hole is circular in shape, over 300 metres (984 ft) wide and 125 metres (410 ft) deep. It was formed as a limestone cave system during the last glacial period when sea levels were much lower. As the ocean began to rise again, the caves flooded, and the roof collapsed.


We are still in Caye Caulkner, we got up at 4.30am to go to catch the boat to the Blue Hole it was our first of three dives. After a choppy 2hrs in a speed boat we arrive in the shallow, turquoise water that surrounds the Blue Hole. There were no other boats there. You could not see the full circle but you could see a clear line where the hole drops.
We were briefed on the boat about the dive and told that we may experience Nitrogen Narcosis which is simular to feeling drunk but 40 metres under water.

As we decended into the Blue Hole we were met by stalactites of gargantuan size. They were bigger than you could of imagined... It was BONKERS!!!




After swimming through the stalictites on the ascent were surrounded by 16 Carribean Bull Reef Sharks they were about 3 metres long and had a hungry look in their eyes! Its definitely the best dive we've done so far.






The sharks came so close to us...














Didn't fancy going back in the water here after seeing them go mad for food!









Friday, 12 June 2009

Caye Caulkner, Belize

It feels like the trip has started here in the Caribbean waters! It is a paradise island they're moto is 'GO SLOW' eveyone speaks English, Alex is gutted he can't practice his spanish here.

Spent our first day here snorkelling and lounging on the beach, made friends with a local called Phillip (Al has decided to refer to him as crazy Phil). He was telling us how he feeds these huge island bird with Sardines we didn't really believe him, but we trusted him and gave him a dollar to go and get the sardines. When he came back him and Al stood up on the dock and Crazy Phil started waving his arms around with a sardine in each hand. The birds started flocking around him, and a scared Alex!! very funny. Not content with the birds taking sardines out of his hands, crazy Phil put a sardine in his mouth! One minute Alex was saying "There's no way I'm doing that". The next this you know crazy Phil stood to the side, Alex had a whole sardine hanging out of his mouth. I think the pictures say it all!

Wednesday, 10 June 2009

Cultural trip to Museo Nacional de Antropologia, Mexico City

We arrived in Mexico after a 11 hour flight both with red wine smiles. I think we drank a few more complimentary wines than we thought....they ran out!
Got to the hotel safe and sound, it was amazing and in a really nice part of Mexico City, El Condessa. It was full of middle class Mexicans we fitted in perfectly! There was a famous singer staying in the hotel apparently she was Mexico's Mariah Carey.
First day of our trip we decided to go exploring the museums...

As you can see we took the whole thing very seriously! The museum was really good but we do get bored very easily.
That evening we decided to head out for some traditional Mexican food. On the plane we made friends with a young greasy Mexican, he said his favourite place to eat was just round the corner from where we were staying. We thought we couldnt go wrong, we thought wrong. We had trouble finding the El Greco restaurant, this was due to the fact that it was actually a kebab shop (imagine Mexico's answer to the Olympus in Bridgend). Alex couldn't believe his luck, so kebab dinner it was!
Mexico City was much nicer than we thought it was going to be, but we got itchy feet and booked ourselves on to a 25 hour bus trip to Belize City. The journey was as you can imagine cramped, hot and a screaming baby; this was meant to be first class. We woke up on the bus to a beautiful sunrise and the Mexican army! we had to get off the bus and they search everyones bags..we were half asleep so it all seemed a bit surreal but it went surprisingly smoothly considering we didn't have a clue what they were saying!
We jumped straight off the bus on to a boat headed towards Caye Caulkner..so nice to be finally getting to our destination, the sun setting as we arrived.