Its Spanish now!

Hey everyone,
We just crossed into Guatemala, we don´t know the language at all, but we seem to be doing good enough anyways.
We haven´t really had the time nor the money to come on and update the blog (sorry). So this one is going to be pretty packed.

Let see, what have we done.

Well, see on Sunday we caught a bus to the Mayan ruins in the north of Belize called Lamanai. This was definately an interesting day. We started fairly early to catch the bus at 6:30 in the morning. Unfortunately we missed it (although I think we were on time). So we jumped in a taxi that hunted the bus down. That was definately an interesting drive, quite frightening actually. The taxi driver took the inside of every corner, but I was glad he did, cause he caught the bus quickly and the extra taxi ride only cost us $7 BZD. This bus took us to a neat little town called Orange Walk, in the northern part of Belize. On the bus we met with a Croasian named Maya, who was on the same tour we ended up having to pay for. This tour was expensive ($80 BZD each), but it was definately worth it. It consisted of a trip up the New River to the ruins, then a tour of the ruins, plus lunch and some drinks. Our guide was knowledgable, and the ruins were spectacular (you´ll see the pictures eventually). The rest of the day went pretty smoothly. We caught a very packed bus back to Belize City (Maya counted over 85 people on one school bus) which we had to stand up on for the whole ride. We got back to Belize City fairly late, but there were 5 of us together, so it wasn´t too bad (we also met a Kiwi named Jeremy).

The next day we were off to a different place, as we were all sick of the busy-ness and heat of the city. We slowly got ready and caught the bus to a town in Western Belize, called San Ignacio at about 10:30. This bus ride was fairly busy, but nothing when compared to the bus we took the night before. We arrived in San Ignacio around 1 p.m. It was a nice town, it was up in the farmlands and near a river. We quickly decided to camp at the nearest campgrounds (as we had been grossly overbudget with the expensiveness of Belize and the tour we had been taking). The campground was very cheap, we paid $60 BZD for 2 nights. We then spent a good part of the afternoon (after a midday drink and snack) exploring the nearby ruins called Cahal Pech. This was a pretty neat, although small, set of ruins. It consisted of 4 plazas. with a fairly tall ruin in the centre. There were a few tunnel to explore, but nothing overly huge. The thing that I find really cool about these ruin sites is that nothing is fenced off, it is all open to explore and touch and see nice and close. After a quick swim, we went to find out about tours we could take the next day. We ended up signing up for the cheapest one we could find, which happened to be the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve tour, (I leaned towards this one because it reminded me of home, ´Pine Ridge´) which cost us $60 BZD each. We went and ate at some restaurant, nothing of special merit really. This is when we worked out just how grossly overbudget we were. We got pretty worried about money right then, but its okay guys, Belize is just expensive.

We got up pretty early after a night of playing guitar and lounging in hamicks at the campground, to go catch our tour. We met up with this American couple that we went on the Lamanai tour with, and it happened that they were going on the same tour as us. We waited around for a while, then all hopped into a minibus (air conditioning...ahhhh) and headed down some dusty road. Eventually we came to the first destination of our tour, Rio Frio. This a huge cave carved by the river flowing through it. It was pretty neat, some really cool rock formations, and we had a very knowledgable guide. We then had a quick walk in the jungle, and we learned lots about the local flora. The guide also told us the very interesting (and now obsolete) method of harvesting the sap from rubber trees. Everyone hopped back into the bus and we had a really short drive to another cave (sorry guys, can´t remember the name) which we actually needed flashlights for. The cave entrance was about 3 feet tall, but then it opened up quite a bit. This cave went on for a long time, but was much more interesting as it had many rock formations. At the end of the cave the guide (Sam was his name) told us to turn off all our lights, and we experienced pure darkness. We climbed all the way back to the surface, and, once again, hopped back in the minibus. Our next stop was just up the river from our first cave, and it was a series of small waterfalls and rapids, here we were allowed to swim and play in the falls. Sooo refreshing.... more sunscreen, then back in the bus. The next stop was definately the most fun of the tour. We stopped at a seemingly random location on the road, and had a significant hike down to the Big Rock Falls. Here once again, we could swim, and play in the much bigger falls. We did some cliff jumping and got some great shots of us doing so. Thanks go out to the woman on our tour who was kind enough to take a few pictures of us together near the falls. Again, we found overselves back in the van, sweating again after the hike up from the falls. Our last stop was at a resort/bar/lodge overlooking the Five Sister Falls. Here cold drinks were available at rediculous costs. We were all craving, but, alas, we couldn´t afford such a luxury. Back into the bus which carried us back to our temporary home, San Igancio. That night, since the campground had the means to do so, we decided to cook our own meal. We grabbed some fresh potatoes and bananas from the local market, then wandered up into the supermarket for some butter and drinks. At the campgrounds we cooked the potatoes and ate some bananas.

We got up uber early this morning to give us lots of time to get to our desination. The campground owner was kind enough to find us a $5 BZD per person tazi ride to the Belize/Guatemalan border. The crossing went well, and we switch our money over to Quetzales (the Guatemalan currency) at a fair good rate, bartered for a long while for a bus, or taxi, or whatever we could find to Santa Elena, eventually we found a minibus at 20 quetzales per person and we were off. The bus ride was great, and I slept a bit. We were dropped off in a random location (we had no idea where we were) in Santa Elena. But with some help from the locals (even with the langauge barrier) we found the bus station. We had lots of time to kill, so here we are, but my time is up, so I must go.

Peace everyone, I hope you are enjoying the snow, my tan is coming along nicely.

Craig