I'm Tikal-ing your mom to take to the prom!

Nuts! That's all I could think for the last few days. Everything I did and saw was absolutely nuts. It started when I went from Coban to Lanquin. Amazing drive. I got up a bit late, but still managed a bus out at 9:30. I had hoped for 8, but not quite. So it was a...ya know I can't really think right now with all these damn hippies blabbing in the background. Jeez I've gotta get away from them...Actually no. I was thinking about my urge to get away from this crowd, but I got to thinking. I had been asking some girl about why so many travelers are vegetarians. She was saying something about so many like-minded people are out traveling, and I get the idea that this is why so many people are congregating together like this. They have given up dealing with people with different opinions and ways of life back home, and so they take the easy way out and hang out in a little enclave in a third world country and gripe about this and that, but don't do anything. Maybe that's what I don't like about it, like everyone is all beating a dead horse in so many ways. Treading water. Other than the most extreme hippie, I don't really disagree with the stuff they say, I think it is just the context of it. What's the point of political discourse when everyone around you has the same viewpoint? So, now have I confused myself. Do I not want to be around them because I am not a hippie (which makes me no better than them as I am not challenging myself) or am I avoiding them because we ARE like-minded and I am sick of the same stuff coming out of everyone's mouth?

I apologize for that tangent...anyways, I got to my place in Lanquin, way out in a rural region of Guatemala that I have decided is easily the most beautiful in the country. It was called El Retiro and it was a big open area of cabanas. It was right on the river. I pitched my tent in a big expanse of grass. Then I met three silly German guys and we tubed on the river. The river was a beautiful turquoise because of the limestone in it. It was super peaceful and each side of the river had pretty thick junglyness followed by rolling hills. The Germans had never tubed before and they were hilarious to watch. Then it started raining. When we got back to El Retiro, I took down my tent and hung it up to dry. then I moved into the hammock cabana for the extra 5 quetzales just because I did not want to deal with a potentially wet tent in the morning.

Then the Germans and I took a cave tour to the grutas lanquin. I regret taking a tour because it turns out that this cave is completely lit very deep inside. Either way our 15 year old guide, Marco, was very cute and funny. He thought I was joking when I told him that most places in the states it is illegal to work at 15. He caught a spider in the cave that had about an inch long body, but with legs it was probably 8 inches across. It was blind, but it still freaked me out. I held it though. I'm cool. I have done several cave tours in the states and I love them, and I don't think this quite compared, but the first big room was probably the biggest one I've ever been in. When we got back to the cave entrance it was just about sunset and the bats were stirring. We all sat at the entrance as loads of bats swarmed around us on their way to feed for the night.

That night was pretty fun. The place has a big bar and big community dinners every night. The down side: most nightly dinners were all vegetarian. The up side: This night was a chicken bbq. The down side: I'm poor and did not want to pay $7 for dinner. The up side: I went and bought some tortillas from a tortilleria. I love doing that.

Next day I went to Samuc Champey. This place was nuts. NUTS! Basically you need to see pictures, but I will try to explain. First, I walked on this trail along a river, then there were waterfalls going into the river, which was rushing out of a cave. Basically this river was going through a limestone tunnel for about 600 hundred meters. But on top of the tunnel there was a series of stepped pools, one flowing into the next. The pools were all very turquoise because of the limestone, and I swam in them for a while. I walked up higher on the pools and eventually to where the river poured into the tunnel. I heard that 5 people had died in the last 10 years from falling in. Nobody has ever survived. There was also a pretty mean 20 minute hike to a viewpoint that was wicked.

Then I had to balls out of that town to make it to Fray. Took a few vans to get to the road to Fray Bartolome de Las Casas. It was where the pavement ended. Fray: 56 km. That's not too far, I thought, as I checked the time, which was about 2:30. I can fairly easily say that this was the most beautiful bus ride of my life. Even beating out the top of the bus in Nepal (which was still much more fun). Big rocky mountains covered in jungly goodness. I really can't explain it. I am brain dead right now. Eventually our bus stopped at 5:00. Construction. An hour later we were on our way, crossing a pass at sunset, watching the large expanses of green at the bottom of the valleys. It was pretty epic. Super rural. When I stopped in the tiny villages, I got stares. Great feelings.

I got into Fray at 8:00 or so. Quite a trip for 57 km. The guide book had mentioned the name of one place to sleep. I didn't know where it was. This was the most sizable town I'd been in for a couple days. It was dark, and I didn't know where I was really. I saw a hospedaje (guesthouse) and asked about a room. They had one for cheaper than the one in the guide book. Sweet. It was run down, but when has room quality kept me out? Sometimes people talk about a hotel or dorm room like a jail cell. That's because they've never gotten a room in Fray. This place was a 8x8 cement block with an 8 inch by 4 inch window with no glass, just bars. The bed had a lumpy inch thick mattress on a frame of lumpier boards. Luckily I only had to sleep there for a few hours because the only bus to the next town left at 3 AM. I went to a comedor on the street and had my first food other than tortillas all day. A carne asada steak, rice, beans, a stack of tortillas and a banana milkshakey thing for 2 bucks. Good eatin fa sho!

2:45, I wake up, grab my bag and knock on the front door to get out. A few minutes pass, and I'm out on the street in the dark all alone again. No cars pass, and I keep waiting for about 30 more minutes. Someone else left my hospedaje and told me I was on the wrong side of the street, so I switched, and the bus came around a little before four.

We neared Poptun around 8, and I told the driver's assistant that I wanted off at Finca Xicobel, just a few km outside of town. Well, we passed it, and the guy looked back, like, whoops, sorry, and motioned that I would have to go back. So when I got town I looked for a bus heading the other direction. There weren't any, so I found a tortilleria and got a stack. Then I went for some breakfast of eggs and beans. A tuk-tuk offered a ride out there for $3. Well, my 4 hour bus ride had cost $4, so I was not about to do that. I started walking. About a third of the way there I realized I was still several km away, and gave up, and got a tuk-tuk to take me there for $1.50. I should have just gotten one in the first place because I just missed the cave tour that I came to this place for specifically. That's what I get for being a cheapskate.

I got a hammock at the finca for a couple dollars. This place was very similar in setup to El Retiro, but felt more country club than backpacker hangout. It is a 400 acre area of cabanas, swimming, walking trails, and just pretty scenery. I was super excited because they had a wash basin to clean clothes. They had a cleaning service, but it was too pricey, so I borrowed some soap and spent my first hour washing my clothes for the first time in a while. They were all dirty, and I had been wearing the same shirt and shorts since leaving Lucas's about 5 days prior. Hung them up to dry and went the the swimming area to splash around. It started to rain torrentially and all my hanging clothes lost any progress in drying. I really didn't want to leave the next day with a bag full of wet clothes.

Throughout the day I ate about half of my stack of tortillas just to avoid the expeniveness and westerness of the finca's restaurant. In the evening a Japanese tour bus came in and invaded the finca. Except they were all Dutch, but the same idea.

And today, wow. Went on that cave tour. Que ridiculo. Manuel, our Spanish-only guide led me, 2 Dutch, and an American (all middle-aged) on a two hour hike to this cave. I was the translator, which was pretty sweet. I should have gotten a discount or something. So we walked through some jungleness and arrived at the mouth of this huge cave, surrounded by greenery. The floor of the cave was a river. Manuel lit a couple candles and his flashlight, and we followed him into the waste deep water. All of a sudden the ground came out from under me and I was swimming up this cave. We followed it a bit farther until it opened up to a huge room with a pool. Our splashing caused an echoing blub as the water lapped against hollowed out areas of the wall. The mix of the sound of that with the squeaking of the bats that were zooming around our head was unforgettable. We continued up this river that was anywhere from a few feet all the way to about 15 meters deep. Eventually we got to a spot where the river looked like it went into a cave within the cave, and no room to pass through. We climbed up on the cave wall, and on sold ground for a couple meters, to a ledge. We couldn't see over the edge until Manuel lit several more candles. The river was definitely about 15 down from the ledge. Rock jumping...BUT IN A CAVE! Dang Tubbs, I don't know if you can beat that. Manuel went first, then the American guy, then me. As I resurfaced I turned to my right, and there was a waterfall. That's where the river came through from the cave within a cave. This was absolutely nuts. We continued on through the cave for another 10 minutes until we got to a final large pool, then end of the road. We swam around for a while before returning. At one point we were all resting in the pool and I said we should all turn off our lights to see how dark it was. It was very dark, and I thought I felt something poking my leg. I figured it was that creepy dutch guy messing with me. I turned my light on and he was 5 feet away from me. I look down. fish! what? Living in a cave. This was nuts. And it was like 8 or 10 inches long too! The whole time in the cave was probably almost two hours. And coming back to the mouth of the cave and seeing nothing but thick greenery outside was awesome.

Booked it back to the finca, checked out, caught a bus to Santa Elena, transfered, and now I'm in Remate, not far from Tikal. Gonna hit that mananananana.


***

Oh super duper! I'm back in Belize City! It feels good to be in a familiar place. I love the excitement of a new town every day, but it's kind of a trip to be here. i know my way around, I know where to eat (EXCEPT THE BURRITO LADY (half the reason I came back here) DOESN'T WORK ON SUNDAY AND SHE'S TAKING MONDAY OFF TOO!!!) and get everything else I need. I haven't been able to find any of my old Rasta "friends" but they'll turn up eventually I think. I will probably stay here two nights just to wait for burrito lady and to go out with Christina and other people from my school. It will be my first day spending more than one night in a town since San Salvador. It went San Salvador, El Tunco, Coban Lanquin, Fray, Poptun, El Remate Belize City all in one week. Nuts.

So yesterday I went to the ruins of Tikal. I caught the 5:30 AM bus just to avoid the tour groups. I had heard from one person that it wasn't worth the new price of $22. That's like a whole day's budget! And I'd seen pictures, and yeah, they just look like another ruin. Well, the wild card with this ruin is the environment it is in. I walked in, and just to get to the first temple I went to (VI) I had to walk for at least 20 minutes through a jungle road. When I finally got to it, it caught me by surprise because it was just all of a sudden right there. And huge. It was not restored very well, so it was exceptionally gnarly. Temple V, though, the next one I headed to was even taller, and well-restored. It towered above the trees, and it's top was even obscured by passing clouds. There were wooden stairs affixed to the side of the temple to walk to the top of it. They looked like stairs, but they were so steep it was more like a ladder. I am not necessarily afraid of heights, but I do not do well with being at heights on a challenging climbing apparatus while over a big stone mess of a building. I got to the top of the stairs and walked onto the ruin and turned around. I was a few meters above the trees and I could see Temple I popping out of the trees and clouds too a few hundred meters away. Immense jungle surrounded me. And then I went to to the stairs and looked down. Jeez it was high. And I had read five minutes prior that 2 people had died while climbing the stairs on a different temple. I went down facing the stairs, again, using it like a ladder. I looked down and literally began to tremble. This didn't help, and just made it more difficult. About ten stairs down, 50 to go, a lost a footing and started to slip. I grabbed the stair in front of my face, but my falling body was too much wait for that hand to hold alone, and I tried to grasp at more as I started to tumble. Must have looked like a rag doll as I fell almost straight down, hitting a few stairs on the way down. It felt like, forever, but when I hit the ground I had completely flipped over, and landed flat on my skull. The last thing I remember seeing was a pool of blood forming on the concrete next to my eye. And as it was 6:30 AM, nobody was around to help.










JUST KIDDING! Sorry, it started to get boring, so I made the stair scene a little more dramatic. I actually made it down just fine. Awesome.

I explored an acropolis on the way to the main plaza, which was awesome. Temples I and II faced each other, about 100 meters apart. They were very well restored. I was the only one around too. The rest of the park was a lot of the same. I went to two more temples another couple plazas, a pyramid, and some other ruiny junk. It was all really amazing. One of the structures I saw dates back to 700 something BC. I think that makes it the oldest thing I've seen, which previously was one of the Buddhist statues at the museum at Sarnath. Around 9:00 the tour groups started to descend so I wrapped it up by ten. Even though I spent several hours in the park I probably only saw 2/3 of it though. They say that if you see all the main stuff you will have walked 10 km. I think I might have down at least 8.

I grabbed a bus back to El Remate, then, grabbed my backpack, then got ripped off on a 2km microbus ride to the highway (10Q!) where I got another microbus to the border. Went through Guatemalan immigration, then accidentally missed the Belizean immigration. Whoops. Not sure what I'll do about getting out of the country. Maybe I'll just have to stay here. Got a taxi to the next town where I got a bus to within 30 minutes of Belize City, where it broke down. I got out of the bus after about 20 minutes of waiting and waited for the next bus. On the new bus we made a stop about 10 minutes later that was a bus stop that I had used before on my very first day in Belize about a year and a half ago. I realized it was my first bus ride outside the US, and how shocked I was to see how packed the bus was, and how they all looked at me with such disinterest. Where would I put my bag I thought? Wow, I have come a long way as a traveler. I had done a lot in the last year and a half, and I was glad to be able to say that.

In the city, I went right for the North Front Street Guesthouse, that hole that I had stayed in last time for 10 bucks a night. I was expecting to see Bill, the manager, and that weird hick/hippy expat from Florida that just kinda lived/worked there. They were replaced by another weird expat/local combo. Also, they wanted to charge me $15 for the room. Well, none of this would do. I went across the street, and they were $13. It was called Smokin Balam, which I think is an Indian thing. The guy at the door looked kinda Indian with his thick mustache. I asked his wife later where they were from. "Belize, where are you from?" she responded with a tone to make me feel stupid for asking. America, I told her. "Really? I would have guessed, Mexico," she said. I thought she was joking, but she was dead serious. She told me I didn't look American, and that she didn't really look Belizean either. She said she always gets asked if she is Mexican too.

So today, I am gonna go explore the city and try to find some people and food that can compare to the Burrito Lady. We'll see how far I get with that.

Oh, and if anyone knows anything about ticks, I think I've got like a dozen on me. At least I hope cause I wouldn't want to think of what else it could be.