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Website maintainence 09 September, 2011
This website might look a bit shitty for a while, moving to a new architecture...Edit: That's done, it'll still look a bit shitty, but no worse than it ever did!
CA Travels Day 21 – The End 04 September, 2010
And then we went home*, and lived happily ever after!
A. Guatemala City
B. Lanquin, Guatemala
C. Flores, Guatemala
D. Caye Caulker, Belize
E. Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico
F. Placencia, Belize
G. Livingston, Guatemala
H. Antigua, Guatemala
*which took over 25 hours from hostel to flat. Fuck me!
CA Travels Day 20 – Pollo Campero 04 September, 2010
It felt kind of strange to me to be getting ready to leave after three weeks, so it’s hard to imagine what it must’ve been like for the others, after three months! We had a last meal out in Antigua with Annie and said our goodbyes, since we were heading back to Guatemala City ready for the journey home the next day.
Me and Claire spent an hour playing backpack Tetris, trying to tessellate gifts and garments in a way that would make it humanly possible to carry everything. We took a taxi to Guatemala City and returned to a hostel we visited on the first day to pick up some belongings we’d stored there.
Pollo Campero, mi amigo!
Over the last three weeks, we’d eaten lots of traditional Guatemalan food, but there’s only so many tortillas, avocados, and piles of mashed fucking beans I can enjoy! There’s something else that Guatemalan people eat a lot of too that we were yet to experience, and that’s Pollo Campero, a massive chain of fast food places, similar to KFC, and the largest food chain in Latin America. The staff wear uniforms in primary colours, the tables feel clinical and the signs have photos of deep fried chicken, with supersize meal offers splashed all over them. So everything felt like KFC then, until they asked us to sit down and wait for table service! I guess it’s not a big deal but it felt really strange. Other differences include the chicken being better (!), the ketchup is worse and you get hot sauce instead of mustard. Nice!
I was feeling a bit ill and went to bed at 9:30 to get some rest before the long, long journey home the next day.
CA Travels Day 19 – Bartering 04 September, 2010
I slept drunkenly with my mouth wide open, and woke up with a really sore throat and feeling dehydrated. That wasn’t ideal in a country where drinking the water gives you diseases, and I’d forgotten to buy a bottle of water the day before. I drank some stale leftover beer from the night before and went for a piss.
Wooden Mayan masks
I hadn’t bought any souvenirs up until that point, so I took a look around the shops for a bit. I found some wooden masks, carved and painted Mayan style that I liked. Claire did some bartering with her Spanish skills and I got them for nearly half price, wicked.
Claire and the other girls got quite into the shopping, and Claire spent some hours talking shop keepers down and taking the best offers where she could get them. That included a pretty dodgy tourist T-shirt, with a pretty dodgy bit of word play, “Guatever!”. We got hassled about once per minute to buy jewellery, cashew nuts, ornaments, a shoe shine, and alternative medicines. The last one by a pretty obnoxious guy who I think was from London. Even shopkeepers, waitresses and taxi drivers stand at their doors shouting offers at you. “Nice food, low price for you my friend!”.
Me, Claire, and a fountain in the park
Claire and Anna had been recommended and Irish style pub by someone they met earlier in the trip, so we went to check it out. It had loads of beers to try, so I sampled some new local ones and also drank Brahva and Gallo, Guatemalan favourites. Did you know Brahva is Brazilian and more commonly known as Brahma in England? Well there you go.
I went to sleep with my mouth open again. Damn!
CA Travels Day 18 – Bavarian Touch 04 September, 2010
The only ATM in Livingstone was broken, and we didn’t have enough cash to pay the hostel tab. This meant somebody had to take a boat to the nearest town, Puerto Barrios, to bring back enough cash to leave Livingston. The night before we’d tossed a coin to see who’d do it. Heads for me and Claire, tails for Anna and Annie. It came up tails and I was glad I didn’t have to be up at 6am for the finance mission.
Tuk-Tuk!
It was strange to be setting off for Antigua for the final leg of the trip, we stayed in Antigua for a few days because it’s close to Guatemala City, where we’ll fly home from. The bus to Antigua was the most comfortable I’ve ever witnessed. Big leather reclining chairs, leg rests, onboard films and for some reason the drivers wear a pilot’s uniform. A far cry from the chicken buses where I once spent half an hour with an arse in my face.
We took a Tuk-Tuk to a place for dinner. It was a moped with a little carraige, and fitting four people in made things a little cosier than is comfortable, especially around the bumpy cobbled streets of Antigua. The restaurant was a German one, so it was a bit of a cultural mish-mash. I had currywurst and a few maß of beer, that is, a litre stein at a time. I was quite up for having a few more drinks after we left, but the bars all close early so me and Claire bought beers fomr a newsagent type of shop and had them in our hostel room.
CA Travels Day 17 – Going For A Walk 04 September, 2010
Canoeing down the river
The four of us met our guide Pedro, in Livingston town at 10am and set off to walk to Siete Altares, the Seven Altars, which is a series of waterfalls and pools a few miles from Livingston. We walked out of the town, through a graveyard, and through rural villages where we were barked at by angry dogs. We felt quite sceptical to start with, thinking that we shouldn’t have gone with such a cheap company and we could easily walk around town ourselves. The path got a bit tougher though when we walking through thick forest paths with ants nests and spiky plants to avoid. We saw massive butterflies, hummingbirds, herons, vulture, and some sort of colourful jungle crab.
We arrived at the ‘birth of a river’, as the guide put it, and walked over rocks through the shall water til it got deeper, and we met another guy with a canoe and we all jumped in. We canoed for half an hour down the river which brought us to the beach, passing a massive field of wild marijuana along the way. We were told it was guarded and trying to take some wouldn’t end well.
The seventh altar
We stopped for lunch in a beach bar, and walked along the beach to reach the entrance to Siete Altares. I found a wicked walking stick to help the climb up the rocky river. It was light, sturdy, aesthetically pleasing, and a slight curve to it like a banana. I called it Stick 2000, but it was more of a staff. The seventh waterfall was the biggest, with a four metre drop and a pool to have a good swim in. It was really refreshing to jump in the water after walking in the heat and high humidity for hours, and some other dudes were doing flips off the waterfall, but I couldn’t be arsed with that. I was more interested in soaking my sunburn, and my feet where ants had chewed on them.
We finished the day with a few drinks, and that helped us sleep through the sounds of nature.
CA Travels Day 16 – Power Cut 04 September, 2010
A bus and a boat got us to Livingston, back in Guatemala. It’s close to the Belizian border so a lot of the hassle you get in the street is in English. The Iguana Hostel came fairly highly recommended, so we checked in there. It started raining heavily so we put off going out for dinner til it stopped. While we were waiting the sun went down and there was a town-wide power cut, so we were operating in the dark from now on. Cheers to my dad for thinking to pick up a wind-up torch, it came in pretty useful! We wandered into town looking for open restaurants, and had a fiarly poor meal. I’ll let them off though because they had to cook it in the dark. It started raining really heavily on the way back to the hostel and we got utterly soaked. We had a few beers before bed, and said hello the the pet racoon that the owner keeps without getting too close to the cage, vicious little bastard!
Fiddler crabs
Me and Claire stayed in a little wooden bungalow hut. It was nice during the day, but suffered from being neither sound nor insect proof, so it was a pretty rough nights sleep between being woken by the sounds of crickets, toads, birds, dogs, cockerels, and if they make noise, crabs. There were loads of crabs all over the hostel grounds, little ones called Fiddler Crabs because they haul around one massive pincer, making up about half their size. My favourite crab moment of the evening though was when a big one scuttled to get out of our way, and ran right off the side of the road, landing upside down in the gutter. Silly crab.
CA Travels Day 15 – Bonus Quotes! 30 August, 2010
Hungover, sunburnt, and bitten to pieces by mosquitos, Saturday was dedicated to rest. I don’t have much to write about for Saturday, so here’s some quotes…Daves Favourite Things That A Foreigner Has Said
| Claire (looking at menu) | “Cheap as chips!” |
| Foreigner | “Yes, it is cheap like the potato.” |
| Claire (sings) | “You’ve got a lovely bunch of coconuts!” |
| Foreigner (holding coconuts) | “I have many coconuts. I bring them for my friend also.” |
Also, we found a sausage dog, like this:
Look how long it is, haha!
CA Travels Day 14 – 3-6-9 3-6-9! 30 August, 2010
Up at 6am and on the road for 7am, we took a bus from Chetumal to Belize City, where we didn’t want to hang around, and got on a Belizian chicken bus. That was definitely the busiest, sweatiest bus I’ve ever been on! It was a retired American school bus, with school notices still intact. All the seats were full, with most seats having three people on, or even four when there were small children. There was about 30 people standing in the aisle, including me halfway up, and I reckon there was close to 100 people on there altogether. Amazingly, a man selling lemonade ad a seaweed based drink managed to work his way down and back at one stop.
Annie and Anna in The Barefoot Bar
We got to Placencia in Belize mid afternoon, after our tri-bus journey, and spent an hour finding a hotel. We got a nice room with a double bed for me and Claire, and two singles for Anna and Annie, with air conditioning – something that I’ve never appreciated so much! I had the tastiest burrito ever at a cool outdoor bar, The Barefoot Bar, and started getting the drinks in because it was Friday evening. In English currency, a beer is about a quid and a good local bottle of rum is about a fiver.
Claire and me in The Barefoot Bar
We got rum and mixers from the Chinese supermarket and sat on the balcony playing drinking games. Everyone knows that 3-6-9 goes down a storm, it was a game me and my mate Martyn learned from some Korean lads in Germany on a previous adventure! Annie is from St Louis in the USA, and I asked her to take it home, and send the game to Asia if she ever gets the chance, so we’ll literally have taken it around the world.
One! Two! Clap! Four! Five! Clap! Seven! Eight! Clap! Ten! Eleven! Twelve! Clap! Fourteen! Fifteen! Sixteen! Fuck!
CA Travels Day 13 – Zip Lines 29 August, 2010
The group split for a day because me and Claire wanted a more adventurous day. We saw a poster in the hostel for a day of zip lining, snorkelling in caves, and sky-cycling, but we didn’t know what that was yet.
Zip line splash
When we arrived we were pretty disappointed to see a big commercial park full of American families with young children. Our hopes of adrenaline fuelled adventures faded fast, it was Mexico’s answer to Center Parcs. We rode on the back of a truck down a bumpy trail to the sound of disgruntled middle class American parents, and arrived at a clearing with lockers which would be our base for the day.
I don’t want to sound ungrateful, we had a really fun day playing in the jungle! It just wasn’t as raw and as genuine an experience as we’d have liked. The first thing to do was the sky cycling, where you hang under a steel cable on a chair, with some pedals attached to a pulley so you can cycle along through the jungle. We went up into the trees and down into a cave, it was pretty cool.
Sky cycle
We zip lined through the trees, and down into a pool in an underground cave. We rappelled too, which is basically abseiling through a hole in the jungle floor into the cave, and also snorkelled in it. Snorkelling was the most genuine experience of the day, swimming through small spaces and exploring the stalagmite and stalactite formations in the cenotes near Tulum. The final thing we did was this newly opened zip line rollercoaster, where you attach your harness to a pulley on a steel track and dip and swoop through the trees, finishing on a water slide into a cave pool. It was a rough ride leaving a few bruises, and loads of fun.
Me and Claire had to split from the group early to catch a bus, and got the best ride of the day. They called for a guy to drive us back to reception, and the pair of us stood on a trailer dragged by a buggy down a little used jungle track. It was really bumpy and overgrown, and hanging on was a bit of a challenge.
The rest of the day was spent travelling back to Chetumal, which would set us in the right direction for the next part of our journey.
We didn’t have a camera with us that day, so the pictures are of internet strangers doing the same thing!
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