Bienvenidos a Guatemala!

Summary  Our first two weeks in Guatemala have mostly been spent in the lovely historic town of Antigua – we would thoroughly recommend a visit if you are ever over this way!

Dom is off learning Spanish, so it falls to me to write the next part of the blog! No, don’t worry I’ll try and keep it brief! We crossed the border into Guatemala from Belize smoothly, and changed up our Belizean dollars into Quetzals. We headed straight to the Parque National Tikal, and managed to snag the last (and obviously most expensive) room at the Jaguar Inn, it was that or camping in a tent!

Tikal is huge site, full of Mayan ruins. At it’s height the population of Tikal was between 50 and 100 thousand and was first occupied around 600 BC. The site was finally abandoned around the 10th century. We spent an afternoon battling mosquitoes and having a wander around the ruins. There were many animals around, including coaties, spider monkeys (which we saw swinging through the trees), howler monkeys (which we only heard roar!)

The following morning I opted to join a sunrise tour of the site, with a 4am start – Dom couldn’t be bothered to get up so early, so opted for the lazy stay in bed tour! It was still dark, and our group was the first to arrive at the top of Temple IV. We sat in total darkness and listened to massive roars of the howler monkeys, which didn’t seem that far away, and then all of a sudden there was a total eerie silence. Coincidence or not, shortly after a noisy group of Germans turned up and started to eat their packed breakfasts…

There wasn’t much of a sunrise unfortunately but the mist and low cloud added an air of mystery. We made our way back down, and our guide pointed out lots of interesting birds along the way, including the very special Toucan!

Once Dom had woken up , we spent the afternoon in the pretty island town of Flores, which meant taking a tuk tuk over the bridge, which was great fun! The afternoon was spent overlooking the lake and drinking coffee and watching the sun go down with a couple of Cuba Libres.

Then the time had come for us to board our Maya Gold class executive special double decker bus for the 8 hour overnight trip to Guatemala City. It was freezing on the bus, luckily we had worn plenty of layers and fleece jackets. It wasn’t the most comfortable, but the seats did almost fully recline and I did manage to get some sleep, unfortunately Dom didn’t, especially with the woman in the seat in front of me snoring the whole way there…

There was a bit of confusion once we arrived at Guatemala City, all the locals got off, but the Gringos hadn’t realised that we’d actually arrived, so we hurriedly got off the bus, and boarded the shuttle for our ultimate destination, Antigua. Getting out of Guatemala City was easy, the traffic going into the City was 4 lanes of solid traffic. We arrived bleary eyed at around 7am, and the pretty colonial town of Antigua was just beginning to wake up.

We set off for the Parque Central, where we spent a couple of hours lounging in the sunshine. I was leafing through our trusty Footprint guide, when a local guy approached and asked to take a look at the guide, slightly nervously I handed it over. Turns out he was a Spanish teacher, and his school was listed in the first edition of the book, and he was checking if he was still in there. Dom had expressed an interest in learning Spanish while we were here, so it seemed a fortuitous meeting! (never mind that Antigua is teeming with Spanish schools).

Dom signed up for 20hrs of Spanish lessons over 5 mornings with Vinicio – who used to play Basketball in his youth, which meant I got to wander round Antigua and enjoy the sunshine and coffee – result! We also got to stay with a local family so Dom could practice his new found language skills, many thanks to Blanca, Neri, Fabia, and Carla for welcoming us into their home, where we were fed handsomely 3 meals a day – of mostly very tasty vegetables.

Vinicio didn’t work over the weekend, so we took the opportunity to visit the black sand seaside town of Monterico, with its beach that stretched from horizon to horizon, and would burn your feet if you stood too long in the midday sun.

The highlight of the weekend was the releasing of 25 newly hatched baby Olive Ridley turtles. At 5.30pm an area of the beach was sectioned off, and we were each handed an ebony black baby turtle, it almost didn’t look real, like it had been carved out of wood. On the count of 3, we released our baby turtles on to the cool black sand beach, and watched them waddle into the sea.

Some of them took longer than the others, and it was like they were waiting to hear the waves crash on the beach so they knew exactly which direction they should be going. Once they were swallowed up by the waves, they had to get out to the Pacific Ocean by themselves, and then no one really knows where they go! I felt very privileged to have witnessed such an extraordinary sight, I hope Rico and Monte live long and happy lives, and will hopefully return to the beach to have babies of their own!

Marlin: Crush, wait. How old are you?
Crush: Hundred and fifty, and still young dude. Rock on.

They release around 42,000 hatchlings a year, they buy the eggs from locals who gather them from the beaches – and would likely have sold them on as food otherwise.

We spent the evening, eating fresh fish by the sea, and drinking 70p Mojitos (it was happy hour). Walking along the sea in the dark we spotted some tiny flashes of light in the water, like fireflies. We knew from diving that this was phosphoresence in the water, tiny critters that light up when agitated. I even managed to scoop one up in my hand and it blinked at me 😉

After not getting sunburnt (yay!) we headed back to the more temperate climate of Antigua, where Dom finished off his Spanish lessons, and I drank more coffee.

One of the best places we found to eat was the Cactus Taco bar. A tiny place but the Fish Tacos and Blackberry Mojito were really great…!

On Saturday we took a tour of one of the local coffee plantations: Finca Filadelfia, which was very interesting. They sell premium grade coffee primarily to Japan, Korea and Europe (we may have bought some of their green beans previously?) and we were shown the entire process from planting and grafting the seedlings right through to drying and sorting the picked beans. And then we had some very nice fresh coffee. Delicious! Muy Rico!

Washed Coffee beans drying on the terrace:

Monday was quiet in town, with many places closed, so we walked up the hill out of town to the Tenedor del Cerra – a restaurant / art / events complex built on the hill overlooking the town. It was quite a hike up but well worth the views at the top. The placed was closed on Mondays but that meant we could wander round the site un-troubled and it was well worth the visit.

There´s even a Helipad:

On Tuesday we booked a scooter tour with a local rental company. Our guide, Freddy, took us on an excursion out of the town to the North, up the valley to Parramos and out into the open, rural landscape. We stopped at a popular recreation park (like Butlins, but hotter) where we flew across the lake twice on a zip-wire.

Go scooter go!!

Freddy also took us to a local shrine, dedicated to “Maximon” – a local folk-hero to whom people go for good luck, blessings, and all the usual things (see Wikipedia). It was not religious as such, but very much a part of local folklore. Outside the small building people would burn offerings of food, light coloured candles, and leave part-smoked cigars for Maximon, as he was fond of a smoke.

Check out those cigars…!

We made such good time (burning along on our 150cc twist-and-go scooters) that Freddy offered to take us to one of the other Tour sites – the very hippy and remote “Earth Lodge”, high on the hillside above Antigua. What a fabulous spot! We had a bit of lunch sat in the sunshine overlooking Antigua, the volcanoes, and with the coffee plantations of Finca Filadelfia nestling below us. Food was great, and the run back down the hill was a lot of fun. Must have made 50kmh…!!

On our last day in Antigua, we went to the fruit and veg market and bought some mangoes, plus some unidentified purple fruit… And then went back to the Cactus Taco bar for one last time!

Fittingly for our last night we had some lovely clear views of the volcanoes:

Here’s a list of places we went to, more for our benefit than yours, dear readers, so that we’ll remember it!

Rainbow cafe
Dona Luisa Xicotecl – banana bread
Cafe Refugio
Fernando’s cafe – great chocolate
Cactus taco bar – fish tacos and burritos, blackberry mojitos
Sunrise Canadian pizza bar
Cafe portal on the square
Cafe No Se
Mono Loco

For more photos, see the set on Flickr, here…