I'm sorry if the updates are too frequent, but I needed to add a quick update on our journey from Mexico to Guatemala. We choose the less common route that was more direct from Palenque to Tikal. This meant a 6am van from our backpackers oasis at El Panchán (though in tipical Mexico fashion, it showed up at 6:35) to the side of the river seperating western Guatemalo from Mexico. We caught about a 45 minute ride in a long, pointy board with an engine, through a pretty, tropical river. Nice. Then we landed at what appeared to be the backyard of some random family. There we were greeted and given immagration cards to fill out while we waited for another group of travelers. When they arrived, the driver put our gear under a dusty tarp on the roof, poured water on the locks so the keys would work, and fired up the Tourismo Bus. Think those Millenium Falcon Toyota Vans that my parents used to own, the kind you can work on from the middle seats, and add fifteen seats. We road for ten minutes to the Official Immagration Shack, where we traded our Pesos for Quetzales, and got our papers stamped. Very, very informal and hot. From there we drove about 4 hours down dirt farming roads at roughly 30 miles an hour, stoppen whenever one of the twenty German/Isreales had to pee at an ice cream stand. At least three of the ten buildings we passed in those 4 hours were ice cream/hardware/veteranarian stands. Eventually we passed an actual village where we picked up two school boys needing a ride and....Edy. Edy works for the bus company we were taking. It was his job to hustle us into buying tickets from them over the next hour and a half. Its not a bad hustle, since they are one of two or three main providers in this area and I was going to have to buy tickets from them eventualy, but the fact that he yelled at us for two hours about how "Tikal opens at 7am and closes at 6pm" and "You ask, why can't we go earlier? Because Tikal opens at 7am and we go at 6am." while touching his crotch. This was mildly entertaining. But when we stopped at two banks and two different ATM's so people could get money and change to pay him. We wasted an extra hour and a half waiting for this hustle to go down before they dropped us all at a hotel they had a side-deal with. To sumarize, we did not buy and did not tip, and briefly planned a mutany/murder with German passengers before we were detered by the prospect of Central American prison treatment. We found a different hotel and had an amazing dinner looking out at the lake our hotel sits on. Bad travels, good times. Tomorrow we go to Tikal at 6am and Thursday we leave for Belize. PAZ