We had only planned to spend three nights in Flores then move onto Belize however food poisoning changed our plans and we are about to spend our sixth night here, but hopefully moving on tomorrow. Flores is a small island, linked to the mainland by a large bridge, situated in Lago Peten Itza. It's pretty quiet and there don't seem to be that many tourists here. Most stay just to access Tikal (see next blog entry) so are away in the day. It's quite pretty and doe...

We left San Marcos at 5:30am on a tourist shuttle bus, which took 12 hours to reach a small town called Lanquin. We couldn't face doing this journey on the chicken bus and I doubt it would have been possible to complete in a day if we had. The landscape became more tropical and much hotter. In Lanquin our hostel met us and we rode in the back of a pickup truck the last 10km to Semuc Champey. Semuc Champey is a series of turquoise limestone pools situat...

We spent two and a half days on Lake Atitlán, which was both beautiful and comical in parts. We got the chicken bus from Xela which dropped us by the turn-off to Panajachel on the Interamericana highway - where we caught two more short buses down to Panajachel on the lake. Finally we caught a boat across the lake to the small village of San Marcos which is much more beautiful than the built up tourist town of Panajachel. We chose to stay at a wonderful pla...

We left the house at 5:45 with Shenny (our Guatemalan home stay mother) and Ina (another Spanish student staying with Shenny) to climb the Chicabal volcano. We met two of Ina's friends in Parque Central and caught two micro buses to the start of the walk. It was a steep track up a mud road to the visitor centre and an even steeper one after that to the crater's edge. Inside the crater is a lake which is considered to be spiritually important and it took us...

We have successfully completed five days in Spanish School- it´s been intense! Monday to Friday, we had one to one lessons from 8am-1pm (with a half hour break). We´re in Xela which took us four and a half hours to get to from Antigua last Sunday. We had our first Chicken bus experience and I´m pleased to report that there were chickens on the bus (in a box in the overhead rack). Who knows what the poor things thought of the many people, the loud noise of the...