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Our three weeks in Spanish school really paid off on the journey from Flores to El Estor when we left one of our bags in the bus and Tom had to chase the bus down the street to retrieve it! We then had to find our onwards bus from Rio Dulce and negotiate a price with the driver, something we would definitely not have been able to do a few weeks ago. We even helped an Austalian girl buy her bus ticket (Tom getting too big for his boots there)!
Upon our arrival to the small lakeside town of El Estor we set out in our usual manner to look for a hostel whose location we weren't sure of. It took only 45 minutes of aimless wandering in the truly unmerciful heat (and being followed by a wild pig, two barking dogs and three horses) before we turned on each other. At this point we promptly gave up the search and decided to book a room in the hotel we passed a mile ago.
The hotel was really nice and had an amazing view over the lake however the fact that it was built entirely from wood made trying to fall asleep in our room more like trying to cozy down in an industial furnace. The hotel manager later told us that the room next door to ours had once hosted Che Guevara back in the 1950s.
The main attraction in El Estor was Finca El Paraiso, a hot spring cascading over rocks into a free flowing cold-water river. To say that this place was nice would be a gigantic understatement - it was like a little piece of paradise on Earth. The water in the plunge pool under the waterfall was beautifully cold with pockets of hot water. We smeared some of the sulphurous mud from the hot spring onto our skin (it smells like cat urine sprinkled over rotten eggs - particularly disgusting when spreading it over your own face) but in order to do so we first had to sprint through a stream of water at a temperature of 85 degrees Celsius! Tom was going to jump back into the river from the top of the waterfall but an American doctor advised against it, saying that a couple of years earlier he had rescued someone who had broken their neck diving into the wrong side of the river.
That night we got drunk with a couple of fellow travellers, Neil from USA and Felix from Germany, and the resulting hangover helped us to decide to stay another night and spend the day at the waterfall again! On the return journey home we all hitched a ride in the back of an open van in order to avoid yet more racial profiling (Trudy was terrified by thoughts of the van tipping over and landing on her head for the duration of the whole journey!).
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