Bye bye Belize - loved ya. First stage was to catch an ex American school bus to a road junction, where we waited only 10 minutes to pick up another local bus going to Punta Gorda close to the border with Guatemala. The scenery was lovely, thatched clap board houses on stilts, palm trees and blue mountains behind.

Punta Gorda is where the road ends and where the boat to Guatemala starts. It is a sleepy Garfuna settlement surrounded by jungle and has a symbolic ladylike twin domed hill. I am certainly feeling sleepy here after having a second breakfast to kill time before catching the boat.

It seems this place doesn't get hit by hurricanes much going by the number of old characterful wooden places that look like they might fallover if you breave on them.

After we settled the bill we headed out to take some pictures of these. However we did not count on upsetting a local mad man with dodgy legs on a trike next to the building. He seemed to be upset that we took a picture of the actual building. I decided it would be interesting to figure out why so went over to him. After one hell of a strange conversation we concluded that he probally was actually mad.

The Belizian border crossing was probally the most chilled I have experienced. We were told that only one of us needs to show both passports for stamping - meaning I could remain sitting by the lake with the bags. However it transpired you cannot get away with this anymore because one passport they stamped out belonged to a guy in jail.

Anyway after the usual nuptials we got onto a small boat and were handed life jackets - kind of odd in these places. Despite looks to the contrary the boat was no slouch. The bow rose out of the water and we were soon buffeted by the chilly sea air. Despite PG having a universal reputation for being hot, we were soon reaching for the life jackets to use as wind breaks.

Livingston despite being a border town had a nice look to it (if you forget the beach though). However like most border towns it was not short of annoying people trying to make an easy buck. They followed us to the immigration office where we could get the all important entry stamp into the country. Once we were officially here they would close in, showing you places in the hope of getting a possible commission.

Livingston has very cheap accomodation but unlike San Pedro the standards reflect. Anywhere habitable was full, we even started to listen to our hanger on about where was good and cheap. He led us to the Africa Hotel that had Morrocan aspirations. The aspirations were still just that - ie aspirations. It had a turreted roof, arched doors and the odd thing here and there that suggested that it was trying to be something different. However under this veneer it was still Guatemala albeit a wildly excentric Guatemala.

The room was the expected simple concreted floor, ceiling and wall shell. There was just enough concessions to comfort to stop you going mad but it didn't smell and looked clean enough. Bags dropped, we are taking it.

Soon you start to notice things about the quality of the place. The floors and walls are not completely perpendicular to each other making you feel slightly off balance. The big hot shower selling point is in fact a possible death shower (notice the blog picture showing switch box and wires in the shower). The fan has no cover and the door has big splits in it. It looks like everyone in a long list of previous occupants has had a go at patching the splits up. You get the impression of desparation when you see toilet roll in addition to four types of tape (what were they trying to keep out).

Lights out indicated more annoyances, despite the light being off it flashed every so often, a dog was barking and the hotel owners were watching TV just outside our room. A mosy around our ears was too annoying to ignore. We tried to spray the room with some insect killer but soon realised that we had to find a novell way of rigging up our mosy net. Welcome back to Guatemala.