Honduras

When I upload pictures it mixes them up and backwards in time.



We stayed in Tela, Honduras for one night. It`s a Carribbean beach town that was absolutely crawling with Honduran vacationers. When we arrived, all the rooms were double the price of what we expected, and everything was full anyway. It was dirty, kind of intense, hard to find something to eat, etc. We were going to stay a couple nights to ride bikes to the largest botanical garden in Central America, but decided to just leave the next morning. While we were eating baleadas for breakfast at a hoppin comedor, the torrential carribbean rains came. The streets flooded, and the comedy unraveled in front of us. We decided it was a good time to take pictures from the safety of cover.

This little boy did not like the rain, so they waited it out.

Many umbrella toting bike riders.

A lot of people were using plastic chairs as umbrellas. This family was one of dozens who thought they`d beat the crowds to the beach.

It was very common for people to just take off their shoes and wade through the streets barefoot. This guy was my favorite.

In Copàn, Honduras.. taxis are tuc tucs.
Copàn hosts the Copàn ruins, a nice little site with temples and tombs and jungle.

climbing jungle vines like Tarzan.

An emormous Ceiba tree, the tree of life.

A bunch of big Macaws live at the ruins, and we were in time for breakfast.

Playing cards on the top of a temple. Ian finally got a haircut.



While staying in Copàn we visited a butterfly sanctuary. This is a malachite.

Owl`s Eye butterflies. They`re huge, you can hear their wings beating together when they fly, and on the inside it`s a beautiful blue color.

baby caterpillars soaking up some rays.

older pics...

Lìvingston, Guatemala.

School boys in Antigua.

Lake Atitlàn and the Indian`s Nose.

Now we are in La Ceiba, the port to the Bay Islands. We`re just staying a couple nights, and we`ll be couchsurfing on Utila soon!

photos from the last month

The arcade in the market in Antigua where we enjoyed Mortal Combat and Race USA. The kids loved watching over our shoulders and telling us which moves to make.






One of the ruined churches in Antigua.


Volcán Agua looms over Antigua.

The Tanque, where people can wash their clothes and such with free water. Those are fellow couchsurfers.

This is the super cheap hotel we stayed at in Antigua.





Lake Atitlán
Where we´d swim/bathe in San Pedro.

In the late afternoon the shores would be lined with people bathing and doing laundry.

A lot of the shoreline in San Pedro was lined with beautiful plots of corn and onions.


What five dollars buys at the market in San Pedro.


One of many coffee processing places in San Pedro. All the coffee is grown, picked, dried and sold on the lake, and it´s wonderful. One of the few places we´ve found where the coffee isn´t directly exported and the locals are left drinking instant.

Coffee cherries.

Two beans per cherry. It takes about 4000 beans to make a pound, and the indigenous people pick it all by hand.




The view from San Marcos

Volcán San Pedro (the one we semi-hiked) looms over the lake, along with about 5 other incredible volcanoes.


Here, you can barely make out the Nariz del Indio (Indian´s Nose) in the background. It looks like a screaming face emerging from the landscape.



We´re back in San Pedro for a couple of nights, after going to Santa Cruz. It turned out to be a place where the 4 hotel owners bully the locals out of business for selling food cheaper, and have a monoply on the town so that there are absolutely no options outside of the hotel. We found the one man with a tienda and he told us that the foreign owners hassle him all the time for selling wine in his store, and when his wife makes tamales on Saturdays. So we left in the morning.

Back here in San Pedro, we´re up to the same stuff - watching movies and eating really cheap food. We played in the Boccie ball tournament again this weekend, and our Aussie friend who never played before last week came a point a way from winning the whole thing! Last week I made it to the finals for the losers´bracket, but that´s not saying much.

Tomorrow we are off toHonduras!

crater lake

We`ve moved to San Marcos La Laguna, another pueblo on Lake Atitlàn. It is a much more picturesque little town, nestled in the rocks. We`re staying at a place high up on a hill with a beautiful view of the lake and volcanoes. The only downside is that San Marcos is a bit more expensive than San Pedro, where we paid about $3 for a room (Hotel Ti-Kaaj). We intended to camp up on this hill, but after setting up the owner told us that it was too dangerous, so we put our tent inside their kitchen for the night for free. Now we are staying on an open air deck with a view of the lake, and a really HOT shower!!! I havent had a nice shower since my birthday!
At this place we are paying $10 a night (Xamanek).

While San Pedro is the gringo-party town, San Marcos is totally focused on meditation, spirituality, yoga, etc. This weekend there is a Festival of Consciousness. It is a nice place to relax, enjoy nature, and jump off rocks into the crater lake.

A few days ago we attempted to hike up the San Pedro Volcano. Unfortunately, our guide was a kind of burro, hiking to the volcano directly from town, rushing us up really steep paths, acting annoyed when we needed to take a breather. By the time we got to the first vista, about two thirds of the way (after two hours of hiking), Ian and I felt like we were going to vomit. Unacclamated to the elevation? Out of shape? Who knows. We stopped there, took in the vista, said goodbye to the guide and made our way back down.

benchmark: Lago de Atitlàn

We`ve finally left Antigua, after a week`s stay longer than we planned. I got my tooth filled... an interesting experience when compared to seeing the dentist in the states. No appointment or paperwork, I was in the room with a needle in my gums within 5 minutes, cavity filled in 20. This was also attributed to my dentist`s extreme sense of urgency, he drilled and filled with the quickness of a speed freak. Which I`m sure he wasn`t. And it was only 300 quetzales, about $45.

For our remaining time in Antigua, the couchsurfer we`d been hanging out with all week invited us to stay at her apartment (saved us 5 bucks a night) and we had a great time hanging around town with her and other surfers. We also visited some beautiful church ruins, spent lots of time at the market, and in the arcade playing Mortal Combat (obviously I`m always Sonya Blade)... took pictures that I`ll post later.

On our way to meet our shuttle to leave town, I twisted my ankle with my big backpack on, rolled it flat, loud crunch. Then the driver of our shuttle kept grinding the stick shift the whole 2 hour drive, at one point it killed the transmission on a hill and we had to get out and walk!
I don`t really know what to do about it but ice it, it`s very swolen and is inhibiting our volcano hiking plans.

So we are at San Pedro La Laguna on Lake Atitlàn, the cheaper, more "party-oriented" of the villages on the lake, or so they say. There are other towns on shore, accesible only by boat or a sketchy hike between pueblos, like San Marcos and Santa Cruz which are more "meditation-spiritually-orieted" I`ve read, but haven`t visited yet. We took the boat here from the biggest town, Panajachel, the more built up "touristy" zone.
What I`ve seen here so far is a rather gringo-y type bar/restaurant/hippie atmosphere. But then again, I`ve been constricted to how far my ankle will let me wander. We will stay here for a week, we have a friend from Barton Creek who`s in our hotel, then we`ll move onto another village along the shores of Lago de Atitlàn - the most picturesque of all bodies of water we`ve yet visited, framed by at least 3 beautiful volcanoes.

And while there is an invasion of the gringo trail here, there is still a lot of traditional living around the lake; indigenous women and children dressed in beautiful trajes tìpicos, of colorfully detailed fabrics that shimmer in the sunlight. We`ve spotted a couple men in the traditional garb, and it is a beautiful display of embroidered shirts with patterned pants and folded fabrics for storing work tools on the hip.

el veinte y uno

We´ve decided to stay in Antigua longer than we thought, and Ian had a great birthday yesterday. We´ve made a lot of friends here through CouchSurfing and have been keeping plenty entertained.
The other day Ian did the hike up the Volcano Pacaya, but I stayed in town with friends because I didn´t feel well... thank god, I got hit with bad food poisoning that lasted through the night and left me week for a couple of days after. Ian was also sick when he came back from the volcano, so we´re figuring it was a pinche Subway meal we should have passed up for some local fare.

Luckily we recovered in time for Ian´s fiesta night and we all went out to the only Irish pub in Guatemala, with some free birthday drinks and a silly hat. The law here is that all bars must close at 1pm, so there are these illegal bar places called After Parties where they pay off the police to be open afterhours. The one we went to sucked, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

We´ll be staying in Antigua until I can see a dentist, since the great couchsurfer girl here is giving me a good reccomendation, I don´t want to pass up the chance to get my cavity filled for cheap (by a qualified technician, of course).