Escape from the jungle...

"Most people go to Tikal, she said. "But we're taking a five day trek to the more remote El Mirador", she said.

Or not...

To be fair, we did try. The overnight bus to Flores wasn't as bad as we'd feared. Some sleeping tablets and we both slept through the night. We arrived in Flores and booked our El Mirador trip through a strange German guy, Dieter. We were supposed to be joining another group but one person was ill so we went ahead to be joined by them a day later. After a 3.5 hour bumpy ride, we arrived in Caemelita, our campsite for the night.

We set up our tent and hammocks and tucked into a plate of egg and beans - our diet three times a day for the next five days. The Guatemalans are proud of their egg + beans and the many, many different ways they have of serving them. For example, there is a very distinct difference between egg + beans and beans + egg...???

Shortly afterwards we headed back to camp + I started to feel a little dodgy. I will spare you the details but I did not have a good night. Not helped by being petrified each time I headed off to the 'toilets' in the dark, after the guide had shown us a tarantula just around the corner from our camp. The next morning I woke with a fever and decided that heading into the jungle with no communication for five days was a bad plan. The other group never made it as they had all gone down ill, so it was a bit of a no-show. We felt sorry for the guides and I felt bad that Dave missed his jungle trek but my toys were out of the pram and I needed a proper bed and decent facilities and something other than egg and beans, or was it beans and egg?

The only way home was the four hour local 'chicken bus', which I thought would be hellish. But was actually quite good fun. The bus serves many purposes, including postman. It stops at nearly every house in every village picking up packages, wood, food etc and then drops it somewhere else. And, we had did actually have a chicken on our bus, which made our day.

So, like true tourists, we booked on a trip to Tikal to see the Maya ruins. It was truly awesome, but I'm going to leave Dave to write about that as he will do it more justice and it deserves an entry of its own. I have pics but I've just tried to put my camera card in this PC and it's saying something about trojans :-(

Last night we got another overnight bus + are now back in the lovely Antigua. Unfortunately we had out first rip-off experience, which is a shame as Guatemala has been nothing but friendly, lovely + safe. But a travel agent sold us some duff tickets for the overnight bus and transfer to Antigua, which never materiliased. But we swallowed it, bought some more tickets and here we are.

Next couple of days will be chilling out, reading books, learning more Spanish and I have two more phone interviews with Microsoft. It's then a flying trip to Panama City for one night and on to Ecuador, for more jungle. Hopefully the zillion Guatemalan mosquito bites I have will have gone down by then, so I can get some new shiny ones from the Ecuadorian rainforest.

Final point... for Richie and Beven (if you are reading our blog). Dave informs me my comment about terrordactyls actually being vultures was incorrect, which I am sure you will have picked up on. It was the birds that we thought were eagles that were vultures. So that means there must actually be terrodactyls in Brazil...