Day 341

Xela, Guatemala

I’ve been here for three weeks now studying and my days are pretty much the same. I wake up at 7.30am, eat breakfast and walk the 50 meters to the school around the corner. I get a cup of coffee and sit studying Spanish until 10am when there is more coffee and usually cake. Every stands around chatting for half an hour and then there is more studying until 1pm. Sometimes myself and the other students and teachers will go for a walk around town to look at something interesting, sometimes we’ll go for coffee. The school hasn’t had many people in it so far, at most 5 students, which at least means its reasonably quiet.

After school I come back to my host family for lunch and then maybe I have the rest of the day to while away. For several afternoons in the week we take excursions out to markets or churches in the local area which fills the rest of the day. Sometimes I have a siesta in the afternoon, or just sit and play my guitar for a few hours. I found a cool little cafe with wireless Internet so like to sit there when I need to get my information fix. I pulled my bike out of my van as soon as I arrived so try to cycle everywhere. Xela is kind of hilly and the roads can be pretty bad but its small enough with a bike.

At 6pm I have a salsa lesson and there are two possibilities, Salsa Rosa, which is small and funky, or Guajira which is bigger and with a nicer room. They both cost Q30 ($4) for a group lesson but no matter which you go its always a gamble as to whether you end up dancing with someone suitable or not. There is a nice Canadian girl, Ashley, who usually goes to one of them who is pretty good to dance with, but you might end up with someone completely off your level, or worse, no one at all. It seems Salsa is pretty popular with guys in Xela.

And so it should be, last Tuesday I turned up at Guajira to find 8 new, and very attractive, girls lined up for the class. Apparently they were trying to learn some new skills as they were the contestants in the ‘Miss Xela’ competition later today. I had a fun hour dancing with some hot (and rather tall) girls but sadly they didn’t return the next night. :p On some nights there is Salsa music in a few of the clubs which I have been to a few times. I’m feel like I’m finally getting to a decent level but I am still hampered by the lack of a good regular partner…

After my class I head back home for my evening meal and maybe an attempt at my homework, depending on whether I was given any. I’ve been messing around with Cubase 3sx for a while in an attempt to record some music, but the PreSonus 1394 interface I have works but produces far too much noise to make it worthwhile. I’m still looking for a solution but its not easy without a permanent Internet connection.

Xela is nice, although a little cold and it seems to be raining a lot of the time these days. I figure I will study for another week, maybe two, while trying to find some travel companions on the road South before heading east to El Salvador and some more time on the beach.

Flores, Guatemala

No breakfast for us, Katrijn and I set off early for a very sweaty walk back to the car. Once there we found that Bill had patched up my leak with some JB Weld and we poured in a quart of oil and held our breath. It seemed to hold so in went another gallon and we ran it for 5 minutes. It was already roasting so didn’t take long to get very hot. It seemed we would be able to leave that day.

I took a few photos of Bill and his wife Katherine since they wouldn’t take anything for their trouble. I found out Bill is from Hendersonville in North Carolina, the place I spent my very strange thanksgiving last year. I promised to send them a copy once I got Internet access.

We left their little slice of heaven and drove gingerly along the rutted track, inevitably we snagged a few rocks on the way and each time I hopped out to survey the potential damage. Luckily I was careful enough to make it back to the paved highway, from now on it would be plain sailing.

We gave a lift to a local into San Ignacio which was much closer than I thought and we decided what to do. It was 11.30am by now and San Ignacio didn’t look that exciting. We had some lunch, worked out a few financial sums to make sure we had enough cash and headed towards the border. Hopefully we would be in Flores sipping beer by the lake very soon.

It was only 9 miles to the border and it didn’t cause any major problems. I got myself stamped out of Belize, canceled my car importation, paid my $37.50B and drove over no mans land towards the Guatemalan border. You have to drive through a building that sprays your car which proved completely ineffectual as by the time I had the windows up it had sprayed mostly the air in front of my car and little else.

No visa was required for me, I stood in the line behind a tiny Guatemalan lady and paid Q10 (€1) for my 90 visa. Next I did the paper work for my car which required my title and a copy of my title and passport. It cost Q40 which was payable at the nearby bank and I was given a sticker to place in my window. A border guard checked my paperwork and after paying a further Q50 cross the bridge we were in Guatemala and I was on country 5 of my trip.

The roads were worse than Belize which seemed strange and half of the trip over to Flores was on a rough, but mostly flat dirt track. I was just happy to get through the border in only an hour and relived my oil pan was still holding out.

I still wasn’t driving through the deep jungle I was hoping for, most of the roads look pretty much alike, houses and shops every once in a while and the usual hazards of dogs, horses and motorbikes. Flores was only a couple of hours away and a major tourist stop. It sits in the middle of a lake and we were early enough to check into one of the best and most popular hostels, Los Amigos.

We met Eva in the street and decided to give the tourist stuff a miss and spend the next day chilling out. I had ten million photos to process and lots of blog entries to write. Seemed like this was the place to do it, and when that was too boring I could go and visit the mythical city of Tikal. More ruins…. I think my last for a good while!

walk to car/bill and katherine/  jb weld/photos/lift to local/lunch/money-atm/hour at border/ok roads/flores/met eva/los amogos/shower/blog

Orange Walk, Belize

The night in the restaurant wasn’t too bad after all, and you can’t beat $5 us for a place to stay. We were up early getting prepared for the river trip up to the Lamanai ruins which we had booked with the river lodge. It was $40 us, the same as everywhere else in town, but these guys started further downstream which meant you got another 7 miles of wildlife to spot on the way up. The river was high right now too, check out the breeze block walkway to our hotel.

There wasn’t a huge amount to see really, but then we had just spent the day at the zoo! :p  A few iguanas and crocs but not too many birds. Why the tour left at 9am and not earlier didn’t make much sense but then I wasn’t running it. It was going to be a hot day either way.

During lunch I took a swig of my Sprite and was rewarded with something that had crawled or flew into the bottle. This normally wouldn’t be so bad but it then proceeded  to sting me inside my throat! The pain was excruciating and I could feel it moving around in my neck. Several cups of water didn’t seem to dislodge it but I was worried about the potential swelling. I blagged a anti-histamine from the Canadian mom in our group and was reassured to see she also had a syringe for when/if I stopped breathing. Luckily I felt fine, if very uncomfortable for the rest of the day.

Puerto Escondido

Day ??

I’m on day 8 of my visit to Puerto Escondido and thoroughly enjoying doing very little. I’m with 3 charming sisters from South Africa that I managed to persuade to share my van down to coast from Mexico City and I’ve been teaching them to surf. They’re very enthusiastic and between them seem to spend all day a the water on my board and a long board they rented. We spend half the time checking out the dead animals washed up on the beach though. 2 days ago we had great fun trying to help the lifeguard pull a dead and very rotten turtle up onto the beach so he could burying. What a stink. We also keep finding dead sea cobras. I want one for the hood of my car!

Its a nice little beachside town not that I’ve done too much exploring. Maybe its best to stay in the hotel, 2 people were kidnapped at gunpoint yesterday at a nearby restaurant.  The sun shines in the morning but has started to disappear in favour of an afternoon shower that comes in varying degrees of ferocity.  Yesterday it came down HARD. The little restaurant we had lunch at was leaking water everywhere and then the huge guttering inside collapsed under the weight of the water. If anyone had been underneath it they would have been killed.

Our Israeli neighbours standing in water with the electricity still on….. :p

Caryn cleans her feet

Day 220

New York, NY

Thankfully felt a lot better after my trouble on the plane and managed to get my bags, onto the train into Penn Station and into a hostel. I didn’t feel like wandering all around Manhattan so looked up a hostel in Starbucks and wandered the few blocks to get to it. $48 for a 4 bed dorm! Might have been better value if I could have gotten up for the breakfast but it didn’t happen. I wandered around for a couple of hours and had an early night.

Next day I packed up my bags and jumped onto the Subway to where I would be spending my second night in NY, the floor of a Daniella’s hotel room. She was over for a course for a couple of days and generously let me share her room. I dumped my bags and set off on a mission to buy a new camera lens. My 17-55mm was good, great in fact, but I was constantly finding myself wishing for more reach. A 70-300mm would suit the bill perfectly and despite the fact that B&H, the best camera shop in NY, if not the world, was closed for passover the prices were pretty much the same all over the city. I walked up past Union Square, which I didn’t even recognise in the sunshine and walked west along 17th Street to the Camera store of the same name. $400 poorer I could now stalk celebrities! After a lunch of falafels and snapple I decided to wear out some shoe leather and try to find something interesting to snap. Sadly the track of my route will never be published as I had managed to lose my GPS tracker! It was my own stupid fault for attaching it to my belt and then putting on my backpack. Bleh.

I headed east and then south, ending up under the brooklyn bridge and finding I could photograph birds with some success at last!

I also checked out the World Trade Center site again, and although construction has started on the new towers it still looked much the same as it did the last time I was there in 2002. A bloody mess!

It was a nice afternoon walk back up to the hotel, I was absolutly knackered but I had arranged to meet Dani when she got off her bus…. I took my laptop out to the local Starbucks but for some reason didn’t bother checking my mail…. duh!

I sat waiting from 11pm until 1am and she didn’t show up. I tried in vain to call her but just ended up shouting at the stupid phones in frustration. Her bus broke down and she finally turned up at 2am. If I had checked my mail I would have had a nice sleep :p

wander past union/can’t find shop/17th str photo/wander west/photo bridge/WTC/walked north/use net/meet Dani/2am/sleep on floor.

Day 219

Mexico City

Well if seems like its that time to put my trip on hold for a month, I will be back in the UK on Saturday after 3 days in New York. I was lucky I made it to the airport. I was woken up multiple times by the ignorant French wanker who moved into my dorm yesterday. I needed to get up but I felt really awful. I staggered down to breakfast and only managed a small plate of fruit.  I was convinced I was going to throw up sooner or later but somehow I avoided it. I guess I will blame the lentil soup I ate for lunch yesterday, I can’t think what else it could be. Max and Josca were fine, but they had pasta.

Josca gives me some ears while Max dishes up the Jamaica

I hovered around the toilet for ages but eventually I had to get my stuff packed and get myself to the airport. I took the Metro and by the time I got here I felt somewhat better, I was shuffling around like a zombie though. I’m soooooo tired!

New York here I come!

Day 164

Mazatlan, Mexico

Today was the day of partings once more, Roland decided it would be time to head to Guadalarja to meet his father in a few days and would have to go now. We checked the bus station and the buses left every 1/2 hour 24 hours a day so he would be off whenever, but we wanted to try to see a few things first. Mazatlan boasts the second highest lighthouse in the world, but the weather was awful, with low clouds and a heavy wind, it would be pointless to climb that today. We decided to go over the bay to the local ‘island’ (its attached to the mainland) where there was a nice long beach but we didn’t last long. The wind just threw sand everywhere and after an hour of getting blasted we gave up and headed back. Today would have been the one to drive down the coast, but how were we to know!

Cloudy Lighthouse.

We went back to the main beach as the sun slowly started to appear but it was still pretty windy. For a late lunch we had the local speciality ‘Pescado zzzzzzzzzzz something’ which was pretty good and then went back to see the old town some more in the daylight.

Cheers!

We spent some time in the Catherdral before wandering back to the square where we sat and people watched for a few hours. There is a local music school nearby so we listened to the students practice their various instruments and just chilled, quite literally, it wasn’t a good place to sit still in shorts. That became too much so we went off for some internet usage and returned to the potato woman for some much needed late supper. I was going to be sorry to see Roland go, but he’s in the country for a few more months and we’re both going south, I will no doubt bump into him again. Maybe then he will have become a Couchsurfing Ambassador like me and I won’t look down on him so much

new hotel/checking bus station/over to ferry/lighthouse cloud/sitting on the beach/too windy/horses.ATVs/back to maz/claifornia grass/fishy dish/catherdral/sitting in square/fast internet/potato woman/bheer by the beach/bus for roland

Day 158

Somewhere in Baja California Sur

After getting gas and not having to worry about driving like a maniac the dusty, sandy road we had attempted the previous day didn’t seem to bad. We soon learned our mistake in that the road was really only rocky at the start, there were plenty of campsites soon after we gave up the previous evening and we had enough gas to get to the next station. However hindsight is always 20/20 and prudence is not always a bad thing, especially when you’re facing the possibility of getting stuck somewhere dangerous. It seemed Betsabe drove horrendously slowly and since we didn’t have her rolling along in front of us made much better time. The road up the coast was best in a 4WD but easily done in a regular car, as long as care was taken when the rocks started poking up. The amount of property for sale out there was astounding, it made little sense to me since there was little water available, the road was bad and there wasn’t electricity. All they had in abundance was sunlight and sea. I’m not sure what people will do when gas becomes so expensive they can’t afford to ship water in. It only rains for a month a year…

We made it up to Cabo Pulmo after only 2 hours, which was much less than the projected 10 hours from the previous day, but then once you hit 40mph on the slightly rutted roads you stop bouncing and glide over the mini-topes. It was pretty windy now, so no weather for snorkelling or diving, we had lunch at a place on the beach with the other gringos and drove back to Los Arbolitos to find a camp spot. Any spot on the beach would blow our tents away pretty quickly and we faced the challenge of getting my van onto the beach safely, and the greater challenge of getting it off again without being towed. We settled on the better option of camping near the road under a nice tree which was only 2 minutes walk to the water. The place was full of semi-permanent Americano’s with their satellite dishes and solar panels. Down by the beach there was a ramshackle village of mostly abandoned huts and shacks, I wouldn’t have risked sleeping on the mattresses down there though. We collected firewood for our new spot and Roland went off rock scrambling again. I went looking for him as the sun set as I didn’t fancy carrying him back in the dark. Why do I get stuck with the ones with the deathwish?? :p

Another perfect camp spot!

Day 157

San Lucas, BCS, Mexico

We returned to the supermarket on the advice of our neighbour to buy more supplies for Los Arbolitos beach which was in the middle of nowhere and on a terrible road. We didn’t want to be driving around looking for food, we would be pretty much trapped with whatever we took with us. Betsabe was at church, it seemed Sunday had rolled around again without us noticing but had invited us to lunch and we drove over to sit and chat and leech her Internet connection. Expecting to spend the night at a dodgy beach I had left my laptop at her place, uploading photos and downloading movies. She is a Lost addict and was stunned to learn that the fourth series has recently started and I spent quite a while earning a extremely positive CS feedback by copying the latest 3 episodes to her laptop and ensuring they play. She made delicious lunch and I finally got to eat cactus which was really nice, although I have no idea how she made it. Roland is the chef, I hope he took notes.

Lunch was late though and I started wondering where we were going to spend the night. When we eventually got going it was 3pm and Betsabe drove us over to La Playita beach, which we had been looking for, before putting us on the road along the coast up toward Los Arbolitos. Of course all this passed me by as everyone was chatting in Spanish, but the road was pretty appalling, sandy with regular bottom scraping rocks. Betsabe got her Toyota saloon over the obstacles with no problems and I followed, with an increasing sense of uncertainty and dread. No one was camping up here, the road was bad, the sun would be setting soon and I only had a quarter of a tank of gas. Not a good combination for a trip out into the Baja wilderness. We came to the first town after half an hour and I decided we should go back to the original beach and come back better prepared, if at all. We said goodbye to Betsabe and her friends and once again went to set up our tents by Barb, our Canadian neighbour, who once again wanted to know why we hadn’t left :p

Day 149

Larento, BCS, Mexico

The plan called for a 9am start to drive the convoy south but I still didn’t have a new tire. Leaving Sheena and Pat at the beach Drake followed me back up Mulege to get a new tire. The first place said they could get one for me if I wanted to wait 10 minutes. 30 minutes later they turned up with the wrong tire and we carried onto the place recommended by the owner of the bar on the beach. This met with more success and after trying one that didn’t work I finally got myself fixed up with a used tire for 400 peso’s. I was tempted to get a spare wheel with tire to replace the crappy spare but it was getting late and we had a long drive to Larento. More desert and another military checkpoint later we drove into Larento and started looking for somewhere to stay. There were no couchsurfers in this part of the world but after checking our mail learned that we would be able to stay in La Paz with a German documentary film maker called Mike so we were sorted for a few days. We found an RV campsite and negotiated a camping rate for the night along with a $2 charge for use of the Internet. I attempted to put up my tent but it was just too windy and I also discovered one of my poles had a split which needed fixing. I gave up and decided Sheena wouldn’t be sleeping alone that night…

In Larento town we had lunch with a couple we had chatted to at the previous beach and I finally picked up a Mexican sim for my phone. Telcel apparently have the best coverage and for 300 pesos I got a sim and 300 pesos of credit. They still have the retarded American system of paying for incoming calls though, but my T-mobile sim was hardly connecting anymore and I needed a reliable connection to the rest of the world.

up early/tire saga/drive south/larento/new sim/met other campers/rv park/dinner/no sleep for sheena