3/10/09
We are now into our 3rd week of school here and things are going good, We still like our school and teachers. Alicia has the hardest teacher again, mine and the kids are easier. We all get what we desire or what we can handle. Shannon is leaving us in the dust as far as conversation is going with a good accent and very little studying. Alicia is doing real well and Jared never talks much but I hear from other people he is doing well. And me I am struggling along. This week and next we have extra hours as we took off last Thursday and Friday to go to Tikal. When you miss a day you can make up two hours of it later, also the teachers can get paid for the days you miss that way. I think since I paid the school in for the week they should pay the teachers if I miss a day, not have to have them work in the two hours to get paid.
We really enjoyed Tikal and Yaxha. We took a shuttle to Guatemala City on Thursday leaving at 7am and caught the day bus for Flores. Flores is located on a small island connected by a causeway to Santa Elena about a 1.5 hour drive from Tikal. The bus (Linea Dorada) was run down but it got us there the whole trip lasting 10 hours. It was only half full so we were able to take two seats each and stretch out. East of Guatemala City it is dry with high hills and was like a desert with brush and cactus. After we got to the low lands it became more flat and very green with tropical forests. A lot of land was cleared for grazing, but in between is very thick vegetation. Near the east coast of Guatemala we drove north into the El Petén (the outback of Guatemala) where Tikal is located. My favorite area in Guatemala is the El Petén with its tropical forests and ranch lands. You can tell that the forest rules here as any unmaintaned pasture is taken over by trees in short order.
We spent the night in Flores (a nice little town) and took a shuttle to Tikal on Friday morning. Walking through Tikal and climbing the temples and palaces was a lot of fun. We climbed all the temples except one as Shannon was not feeling good. She was fighting the cold that I was fighting for 2 weeks but she felt better later in the day. Alicia and I were able to see more than we did 9 years ago, as they have uncovered and restored more in the last 9 years. We were lucky to finish when we did as it poured for about 15 minutes right after we returned to the visitor center,
On Saturday we took a private shuttle to Yaxha which is near the Belize boarder about 1.5 hours from Flores. We had to take a private shuttle as there are no scheduled ones to Yaxha due to the lack of tourists going there. Yaxha is smaller but we liked it a lot due to the lack of tourists. We arrived latter in the day at 12:30 and the other 4 groups that were there were just finishing up. When we walked through we did not see any other tourists. The grounds are very pretty. Yaxha has only two large temples with one sitting on a hill with a great view of the surrounding land and lake which it borders. They still have a lot to uncover in the area. We also saw spider monkeys and heard howler monkeys near by.
After we returned to Flores at 5pm we got dinner and hung around till the 9pm night bus left. The night bus is was not fun as it was full and the seats crowded. It was very hard to sleep with trying to get comfortable with the loud movie they had playing and stops to pickup people. But our shuttle to Antigua was waiting for us at 5:30 am and we arrived in Antigua at 6:30am. Laying down in bed felt very nice. We where going to go to church but over slept so only went to the last meeting.
On Monday evening we went over to visit a family from Church and had a great time getting to know them. They have a house in one of the blocks next to Central Square, that was had been his fathers. He works for the government running the training program to train guides. He was a guide in Tikal for 3 years when he was younger returning to Antigua every weekend on the night bus, I don’t know how he did it.
The Catholics have also started their weekly processions around Antigua starting with the first day of Lent two Sundays ago. They put art work on the streets either in sand, sawdust or flowers and carry floats with religious themes on their backs. The processions wind through town and end up at the Central Park. They are interesting to watch. Apparently the processions get bigger each week and climax at Easter. We miss Easter by one week, I should have checked the calendar as the Easter one would have been fun to see. Every thing in town is booked that week, with foreigners and locals.
We are off to Copan Honduras tomorrow (Friday) after school.
3/15/09
Back from Copan, we loved it. Only wish we had a few more days there. The trip over was not the greatest. We were to leave at 1pm but our shuttle picked us up at 2 pm. Then we had to pick up another person , not bad, but for some reason we drove into town to where the road leaves for Guatemala City (5min) then doubled back went right past our place the down another road, adding another 20 min to the trip. The shuttle had 13 of its 16 seats filled then we picked up 2 more in Gauti (as everyone calls Guatemala City) more time. We where pretty packed in. Some of our passengers were band members and they had two of their guitars inside with us, so I had my leg up over the guitars for part of the trip. There is not much leg room in these things. But we switch shuttles half way to Copan to a newer shuttle with better seats and they put the guitars on top. There was also a accident along the way that took a while to get by. Stopping at the border we had to pay our illegal exit and entrance fees. Under some agreement between Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua there are not suppose to be any exit or entrance fees, but the border guards still charge one with the money going into their pockets. They did give up a “official” receipt that we later found out got you back across the boarder for “free”. We ended up getting to Copan at 10pm when where supposed to be there at 7pm normally a 6 hour drive. So at 10pm we went looking for a hotel, I had requested reservations on line for one hotel but had not heard back. We had only gotten our shuttle tickets on Monday. We where going to walk to the hotel that we had the request, but after looking at a map found it was out a ways and we where having a hard time figuring out where we where exactly. Luckily we ran into a American that was teaching English in Copan and he recommended a place right up the street and even went over to ask if they had a room. We got the last one. It is a little unsettling to get into a town at late night, on foot and not knowing where you are going to stay especially if you have a family. Needles to say we were very tired and decided not to go find something for dinner and went right to bed. Jared and I on one bed and Alicia and Shannon on the other. We sleep well till 4am when some idiots started setting of fireworks and driving around the area with what had to be a sound truck. A sound truck is a vehicle with large announcing system on top used for advertising and they drive up and down the streets with the sound cranked up, very annoying especially at 4am. And the fireworks are not your firecracker kind they are larger aerial ones, larger than you can get in the States, that are very loud,. The locals like them down here. This noise went on for at least a half hour. We got to see some of the town in the morning its small and very nice. The surrounding area is hilly and covered with trees with farms in the valleys. The ruins are about a mile from town so we took a tuc tuc there and toured the site for 2.5 hours before running back to catch our noon return shuttle.
The Copan ruins turned out to be our favorite, its very pretty and has a special spiritual feel to it. These ruins has the best preserved hieroglyphics of all the discovered ruins in Central America and they are very neat. We could have just sat there for a while enjoying the site but had to hike through pretty fast. At the ruins they also have tunnels where they have dug down to older structures that had been built over. A lot of the temples have multiple layers where they had been built over by latter rulers. The tunnels are open to the public at extra cost. Hopefully some day we will be able to return to this area.
The drive back was on time and nice as we only had 4 other college students with us and they transferred to another shuttle after about a hour and a half and headed east. We did pick up 2 Australians in Guati but the that was only for the last hour, it was nice to have a whole row of seats to ourselves for most of the trip.
This week we are climbing Pacaya an active volcano south of here.