Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
A Year Away
So I last left my plans up in the air, with a possible change of itinerary taking me to Honduras. Well that change of plans changed back to the original plan and I finally (sadly) moved on from my dear Panajachel. I took a chicken bus (read: really crowded bus full of locals and the occasional animal) from Pana to Solola, Solola to Los Encuentros, and Los Encuentros to Guate(mala City) where I caught a cab to the real bus station. The cab driver was a nice guy, and like many of the people I meet here, when he realized I was a foreigner that could actually carry on a conversation, he asked me lots of questions about my travels and where I was from, told me I was beautiful and asked me out to coffee. Ha. I have to say, it gets kind of old. I never would have thought I'd say that getting asked out would get old. Maybe if my suitors were even somewhat eligible it would be a different story. ;) Anyway, I grabbed a bus to Coban, about 4 and a half hours north of the capital. There was even in-bus entertainment! I had the pleasure of watching "Tristan and Isolde" dubbed into Spanish on the way up. Hee hee!
Once in Coban, I found a hostel that my friend Milton had told me about. He actually works here as a tour guide and was 'guiding'in Chichi when I was there and he told me about this place. It's got good cheap dorms and hot water (most of the time) and really excellent tours. I signed up for a tour to Semuc Champey and some cave system for the next day. In my dorm is a girl, Daniella, and an adorable British couple, Amber and Richard, who were also signed up for the tour and we all kind of hooked up and hung out the whole day.
We started our tour with breakfast at the hostel at 700am and took off at 730. Milton was actually our guide, which was thrilling, and he hooked us up with him in his little 4WD truck, while the other 12 people were in a shuttle and probably more crowded than we were. It's good to have friends in high places. We drove an hour on paved roads, then another hour on a funky, hilly, full-of-switch-backsy road before we reached the Semuc Champey park. The first part of our walk consisted of ascending and descending lots of wooden stairways that were perpetually slippery because of the damp air and the rain every afternoon. It felt pretty treacherous, but it was only to get more-so. We arrived at Semuc Champey after about 20 minutes or so and it was gorgeous. Semuc Champey itself is a rock bridge where the water from the river thunders underneath and into the caverns of underground caves. But not all the water, the rest remains in a series of blue and green pools that are perfect for swimming in. But we were not allowed to swim yet, first we were to climb to the lookout above the pools, which took us up about half an hour of what seemed like practically vertical stairs, equally as treacherous as the first ones. When we got to the top finally, I was red as a beet and sweating like a pig, but so was the rest of the group so I didn't feel quite so bad. The view was fantastic, and as Richard put it so well, we earned the pictures we took up there, it's evident from the sweat on our foreheads, you can see it glint in the pic. Gross I know, but well worth the trek. Only then were we to descend, which was easier than climbing up, but if one of us had fallen, we surely would not have gotten up again. Then Milton brought out our lunches and we ate and swam and fed the little fish in the gorgeous pools we'd seen before.
After this break, (oh man it was so fantastic) we walked back to the trucks and stripped down to our bathing suits and left everything else behind to go trekking into the caves. We got to the entrance of the caves, all in a line, and Milton shows up with a bunch of candles, lights them, and starts handing them out to us. He leads us waist deep in the river in the cave entrance and demonstrates how we are supposed to swim through these caves while holding up the candle in one hand. And that is just what we did! We spent the next hour wading, climbing and swimming through this series of caves. At one point Milton had us all blow out our candles because we had to climb up under a ledge and behind/under a waterfall. !!! It was so fantastic! My glasses were strapped to my head so I could still see, so for obvious reasons, camaras were NOT recommended. Ah well.
When we left the caves, swimming out the way we came it, we found that there was a torrential downpour going on. I sure didn't mind, the water was relatively warm and pressure was better than any shower I've had here in the last couple weeks. If I'd have had a bit of shampoo, all would have been perfect. As it was, Milton wouldn't let us back in his precious truck all soaking wet as we were so he threw us in the back and drove us to a hotel to change. I can only imagine how pathetic we looked, all four of us in our swim suits huddled in the back of a pick-up in the pouring rain. Ha ha! Even better, it was so sunny when we went into the caves that I'd left my shirt in the back to dry. Yeah. That SO did not happen.
Today Daniella and I decided to catch a bus an hour away to the Biotopo del Quetzal. (A Quetzal Reserve, the Quetzal is the national bird, but you almost NEVER see it.) So we got there and decided to take the longer trail, a 4km hike up the face of a hill (that was almost a mountain in my opinion). We didn't see any quetzals, which we hoped to, but didn't expect to, but we saw tons of other stuff. There were little lizards bopping and jumping around all over the place, I saw a trail of leaf cutter ants that I'd only seen before on the discovery channel or animal planet or something. We saw a gigantic beetle the length of my index finger, a snail about 6 inches long, a spider that looked like a mini tarantula, another spider that was small, with black legs and a yellow bulk on it's back that had black stripes and 3 bright red pointy spines that was exTREMEly creepy and totally freaked us out. There was tons to see and it was all absolutely beautiful. It took us about three hours because we kept stopping to listen to birds and take pictures of bugs.
We had taken a bus to get to the reserve, but getting back just required us standing on the side of the road and flagging down the first vehicle that looked to be transporting people. That vehicle happened to be a shuttle-type thing with about 12 actual seats, and 21 people. Oooh boy. I was shoved in the front with the driver and 2 Austrian girls, and Daniella was standing up behind my seat, and whenever the car stopped, the guy in the back would have to shove her butt out of the way to open the door.
So it's been quite an eventful couple of days. I'll miss Daniella and the two Brits when we part ways tomorrow. Daniella will meet up with her friend and probably go back to Semuc Champey, Amber and Richard are on their way to Xela to take Spanish courses for a month, and tomorrow morning I head up to Flores with a couple from Holland that I met on the tour yesterday. I always hate leaving the people I meet, but the next city always has a new group to hang out with, and the only thing that's guaranteed is the fact that it will be a completely and utterly different group than any of the previous ones. I don't know though, I've got a couple of really difficult groups to beat here....
- comments