It wasnt long until our shuttle bus made a quick petrol and toilet stop. Gazing out of the window I was amused to see that next to where you pay for petrol was a gun shop?! Clearly the Guatemalans don't find having live ammunition near flammable liquid an issue...
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| Gives a new meaning to the term drive by shooting... |
After a number of hours (I've stopped counting how many hours my journeys are these days...) I arrived in Flores. The town is situated on an island in the middle of Lake Peten Itza and connected to the mainland by a causeway.
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| A postcard illustrating Flores from above |
Weather wise it was back to the heat and humidity. Whilst I didn't mind the heat, the humidity was a little unbearable and meant showers just didn't cut the mustard - literally the minute you had one, you needed another that was how sweaty the humidity made me!
Given it had been a long journey I was tired and ready to fall asleep. Settling into my hostel room I noticed a fairly strong damp smell but didn't give it too much thought as most tropical countries tend to smell like, thanks humidity! It wasn't long before the smell came back to haunt me. At about 2am I was suddenly awoken by water cascading from the roof on to my bed! It was raining outside and clearly the ceiling had issues with keeping the water out - hence the smell. I quickly gathered up my belongings as I had visions of the entire ceiling caving in. The hostel moved me to another room which had wet floors - they had forgotten to shut the windows when it started to rain?! Fortunately the bed was dry. Unfortunately the roof was made of corrugated iron which meant the sound of the rain was deafening.
Needless to say I didn't get much sleep so I made sure I didn't pay full price for that night. What shocked me the most was that the next day when I walked past my old room the hostel staff had just made the bed and not done anything about the ceiling?!
Thankfully I had booked my day trip to the ruins of Tikal the day after next which was just as well as the trip requires you to be up at 4am...
There really wasn't much to do on Flores except chillax. Which was just as well as I was ready and raring to go (well as much as you can be getting up at 4am!) by the time the day trip to Tikal came around.
The ruins of Tikal are based in what is now a national park. The park has one of the largest archaeological sites of pre-Colombian Mayan civilisation in the world. I had wanted to visit them as Id heard they were pretty impressive and tend to be the "go to ruins" for any TV and film footage.
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| Mini me |
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| I am indeed holding this ruin up... ;-p |
In true Latin American fashion our group had around thirty visitors to one guide. Our poor guide should have had a megaphone as his voice was hoarse by the time we finished walking around.
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| The masses |
Walking through the park it wasn't long before we came across our first piece of wildlife - a tarantula. Terry (I thought Id give spidey a name) was calmly minding his own business when suddenly he had thirty odd (I kept a wide berth) tourists gazing and poking at him. I managed to get a pic of him using my zoom lense...
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| El Tel |
The ruins are quite a site. They're much bigger than those I saw in Honduras and way more impressive. Our guide took much pleasure in telling us that it was the filming location for Yavin 4 in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Whilst being a fan of the films, I didn't know who or what Yavin 4 was and I couldn't quite visualise which scene they were talking about. Thankfully Mr Google gave me a visual aid:
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| Courtesy of starwars.wikia.com |
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| My view of the same shot |
I was so glad we had visited the site early in the morning as the afternoon heat would have been intolerable. It also meant that despite our rather large tour group size we were literally the only ones walking around the park.
Unfortunately the time soon came to leave Guatemala. I was rather sad at the prospect of leaving what had become one of my favourite Central American countries. This was somewhat alleviated by the fact that I was heading to Belize and returning to the Caribbean coastline where the water is like a bath its so warm : D
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