Happy Guatemalan Mother’s Day!
I just got back from a week and a half vacation touring the Oriente (eastern part of the country) with Kevin, and returning to real life is not all it’s cracked up to be. Nah, just kidding, it’s great to be back :) AND I celebrated 6 months in site on the 30th! (while out of site…lol) It’s so weird to think that I’m ¼ of the way done.
But back to vacation – Kevin’s flight was seriously delayed, so our trip was a little bit too, but we finally made it to the ruins at Tikal (the flight there was so strange…I’m so not used to modern technology lol) and they were AWESOME. That might have been my favorite part of the trip, I think mostly because I didn’t have very many expectations for it. But we also had a fantastic guide and I LOVED that you could walk all over the temples and pyramids – so much cooler than other ruins I’ve been to! We stayed at the lovely Hotel Gringo Perdido (very true in this case!) in El Remate, Petén, a small town on a really nice lake outside of the Tikal park. Then came a 3-hour bus trip to Rio Dulce, Izabal, where we spent a couple of days lounging on the water, kayaking to Guatemala’s only castle (the fail Castillo de San Felipe), and me getting serious amounts of painful water in my ears after jumping like 15 feet into the water! Next was the boat ride to Livingston, land of the Garifunas, black Caribs. While it was fun drinking coco locos (coconuts filled with rum yumm) and walking along the beach to the Seven Alters waterfalls and bar-hopping on the way back, that was probably our least favorite part of the trip. It’s kind of a sketchy place and our hotel/hostel didn’t have hot water.
I should mention that it had been raining sporadically throughout the trip, but it worked out great by vivifying all the places we were going to see. HOWEVER, we got seriously caught in the rain on our open boat leaving Livingston, going back to Rio Dulce. After drying off a bit, I hiked back to our hotel there, where I’d left my brand new Nalgene bottle and all the staff thought I was crazy…oh well, that’s neither the first nor last time someone will think that! I figured that would fully exhaust me for our 5-hour bus ride to Lanquin, Alta Verapaz, but somehow the bumps of the unpaved road kept me awake the whole time… Our grumpy spirits were slightly revived by lots of food and happy hour at the El Retiro bar. The whole place reminded me a lot of camp, with bungalows spread out across the property and one collective bathroom…which I got to know VERY well over that night with a sudden bought of diarrhea lol. I didn’t want to miss our tour of Semuc Champey the next day, so I took 3 immodium and Kevin’s antibiotics. Well, the caves and waterfalls at Semuc Champey were incredibly worth it, but oh man was I backed up over the next 2 days! My stomach was rumbling all 8 hours to Antigua the next day and although we had plans to go all out partying our last night, after a delicious dinner at Hector’s Place, one of my favorite Antigua restaurants, I was in so much pain that we had to go straight back to the hotel!
It was a sad goodbye when Kevin left on Saturday, but he made it safely back to the States and I made it back to Cunen in time to shower and head back out to Uspantan for their feria. It was a fun night, but I totally think our feria was better, even though their town is bigger. AND they did not have Los Conejos!
So now I’m back to real life and actually quite busy working this week. Plus there have been some developments on securing my own place to move into, so I’m working on that too :)
Here are some photos from the trip (on my brand new camera since I somehow lost my old one):
the Plaza Mayor in Tikal
Rio Dulce with the Castillo in the background
Kevin getting ready to jump off one of the Seven Alters
Kevin and I at Semuc Champey after an intense hike to the look-out point
Many more photos to come on facebook!
