Chicken Busing Out of Antigua

After our quiet time at Rio Dulce, it was time to move on. The next trip started on to Antigua, where we stayed for only one night (we were coming back a few nights later) and then on to a homestay with a Guatemalan family in San Jorge La Laguna.

The trip to Antigua took seven hours, but as I recall (or rather don’t recall), it wasn’t particularly memorable. It included a stop at a restaurant somewhere along the way and, since the restaurant didn’t look particularly good, I moved on to Pollo Campero. Fried chicken always is a good idea.

Ultimately, we got to Antigua. It was already getting late in the day, about 5:30 pm, and we had a little walking tour of the part of the city in which we were staying. The hotel was only a few blocks from the city’s historical center and, thus, the walking tour was pretty brief. I took out some Guatemalan Quitzales and then we moved onto a sports bar, the Mono Loco, for dinner. (Mono Loco will feature prominently in a future post, I’m certain.) I had the best hot wings that I’ve had in Central America and they had a Champions League match on the big screen television.

There’s a girl in my group who is a huge Manchester United fan and we hung around the Mono Loco after everybody left to watch the rest of the match. Not much happened afterwards so we went back to the hotel, finished off the Jerk Chicken from the night before and that was the end of the night. (While we were walking back to the hotel, we were a little lost and we were stopped by somebody who gave us directions to our hotel and warned us that the neighborhood was dangerous. Another girl in the group was assaulted nearby (she was okay), so the warning turned out to be true. Again, that’s another story, though, for another person’s blog.)

The next day was chicken bus day for us in Guatemala. We had about a six-hour trek to San Jorge La Laguna and we took various chicken buses to get to our destination. Chicken buses are privately-owned buses, generally old school buses from the United States and Canada, that are used to transport people in Guatemala from city-to-city. If you remember when you were younger, each of the seats in the school bus could hold up to three children. Well, in Guatemala, the seats hold three adults. Uncomfortably. We were packed into the buses like sardines, with every third person’s ass cheek hanging in the aisle, while the daredevil bus drivers took the hard turns of the Guatemalan mountain roads at speeds that would make Jeff Gordon cringe. This caused the entire ride to be like a roller coaster and meant that you learned to be rather intimate with the people sitting closest to you.

Don’t get me wrong, the chicken bus actually was pretty fun. If nothing else, it is an experience that one definitely should take advantage of while in Guatemala.

After six chicken buses and a stop along the way for some breakfast and some shopping, we arrived in San Jorge La Fortuna.

This seems like a pretty good stopping point, so I’ll pick up San Jorge in another entry.

Sweet River Chronicles

The next day, we headed to an island on the Rio Dulce, once again via both bus and motorboat. Don’t ask me the name of the island because I couldn’t tell you. The Rio Dulce sits on the shore of Lake Izabal and our island was connected to the rest of the world only by motorboat.

We arrived fairly early to the island and we checked into our huts. These huts were more impressive than those in Tulum because we actually had electricity, though bathrooms were again shared. We arrive pretty early so we had time to do some activities during the day. A group of us went to Livingston, a tourist town on the banks of Lake Izabal and had a brief tour of the lake. We had lunch in Livingston and had some time to walk around the town, but there really wasn’t that much to it, to be perfectly honest.

When we returned to the island, we headed upstairs of the restaurant/lobby of the island hotel because there was a pool table upstairs. The “bad kids” drank beer and shot some pool as the night went on. Eventually, the party went outside and we continued to drink until we realized, untimely, that the bar had been closed. By this time, we really wanted some more alcohol, but I had run out of vodka the night before in Flores. One woman in the group had some leftover Mezcal and we started drinking that, which led to another woman throwing up on my leg. That was the end of the Mezcal and the drinking for the night. We tried to come up with a way to get more alcohol, but our efforts proved fruitless. Eventually, we decided to call it a night.

The next day, we headed out pretty early and went to visit a nearby hot waterfall. This was my first experience with such a waterfall. The water coming in from the nearby creek was cold but the water coming down from the waterfall was actually very warm. This made for very comfortable swimming conditions and I went into the water as far as my limited swimming abilities allowed. It felt good to get into the fresh, warm water and the proverbial good time was had by all.

After the waterfall, we returned to the island and there wasn’t a whole lot of activity going on there. A couple of us watched the Barcelona/Arsenal match on the television upstairs and then I retired back to my hut to work on this blog. (I still haven’t found sufficient internet connections to post anything, but that means there will be many posts in rapid succession once such a connection is found.)

At night, we returned to the billiards table and shot some more pool. After declaring myself Mexican champion (as well as Chinese champion back in October), my partner and I earned the right to call ourselves Guatemalan champions as well.

As happy hour ended, we loaded up on beers to make sure we didn’t run out of alcohol once again. In addition, we were able to find some more Jerk Chicken on the island. For the second night in a row, it turned into a long drinking night, this time with Jerk Chicken and without anyone throwing up on me. Who could ask for anything more?

There wasn’t really much to do on the island but drink, so that’s what we did mostly, but we would make up for that in a few days when we hit the dry town. But that story is still a few entries away.

Flores/Tikal/Welcome to Guatemala

On March 5, we made our way to Flores, which is an island in Lake Peten Itza. The trip started with a trek to the border as we crossed from Belize into Guatemala. Getting through immigration and customs was pretty simple and we headed into Flores. (The highlight of Flores was Tikal, so all the pictures with this post are from that Mayan site.)

We arrived in Flores, checked into our hotel and went to lunch. Afterwards, somebody in the “bad kids” group discovered a bar with a happy hour that started within minutes of our discovery so we went there and had a few drinks. Afterwards, while others went swimming, I went onto my computer, since I was able to plug into the next-door hotel’s internet, and I played on my computer. At around six, we went out for another drink. We got back at 6:30 for a meeting with the rest of the group. In the meantime, I left my computer plugged in while we drank.

Sometime within the thirty minutes that we were gone, somebody had removed window panes from our window and broken into our room. As far as anybody could tell, the only thing that was missing was my roommate’s computer. The thieves nearly had to step on my computer in order to get to my roommate’s computer, but mine was left untouched. In addition, things were taken out of my small backpack but nothing was missing, despite the fact that I had about $200 in a small baggie at the bottom of my bag. The only justification that I can think of is that my roommate’s computer is small and was easy to hide by the thieves. At the end of the day, though, nothing of mine was stolen and I considered myself to be very fortunate.

The next day, we headed to Tikal. Tikal is a very interesting Mayan site. Unlike many of the Mayan ruins that we had visited throughout Mexico and Belize, much of Tikal has been reconstructed only to a very limited degree. It is a very large complex but many of the temples and other structures are in various states of disrepair. Still, the structures that are still standing are quite impressive. We also got to see some exotic birds. I found it interesting that the Australians in our group seemed to be very intrigued by woodpeckers and hummingbirds since those are so common in the United States. I was much more interested in the Toucans myself.

Come to think of it, maybe we went to Tikal the day before our room was broken into. That must have been the case because after our room was ransacked, I requested to be moved to another room. Since there were no more rooms available in the hotel, we were moved to the hotel next door. This turned out to be quite an upgrade. My roommate and I ended up getting a room with large beds, comfortable pillows and air-conditioning. We also had a huge balcony. The “bad kids” decided to take advantage of the balcony by buying beer and heading upstairs to drink. When the beer ran out, we emptied out the vodka that I had been carrying around since Mexico. For the record, vodka goes better with Gatorade than it does with Orange Crush.

That was pretty much it for Flores. Other than Tikal and being robbed (or at least my roommate being robbed), there wasn’t really much to report. The next day, we were heading to an island on the Rio Dulce and that is where I’ll pick up next time.

Xunan Tunich and Jerk Chicken

I wasn’t expecting much from San Ignacio but I ended up having one of the most unexpectedly fun nights of my trip.

I woke up early in the morning and I had absolutely no plans. It seemed like it was going to be a wasted day in Belize. The other “bad kids” were going caving and I was pretty much on my own. I stopped in a place across the street from the hotel to grab some breakfast, however, and ran into some other people from my group who were planning to head to the Mayan ceremonial center at Xunan Tunich and I decided to tag along.

We took the public bus to Xunan Tunich and walked about a mile to the Mayan site. Compared to other Mayan sites that I have visited on this leg of my journey, Xunan Tunich is very small. There are a handful of excavated temples, however, and a small group of folks and I climbed to the top of the tallest one on the complex and we were able to get fantastic views of the surrounding area. It provided a truly unique perspective on how these Mayan sites, located in the rain forest, were able to be completely swallowed up by the surrounding jungle. The Belize government did a great job of maintaining the site but you could see the jungle closing in from all directions. After visiting the site, we stopped for a beer at a nearby bar and then returned to San Ignacio via public bus.

I went to lunch with a couple of people with whom I went to Xunan Tunich at an Italian place about which I had read some great reviews. The food was actually pretty average but it did provide the line of the trip thus far. The owner of the restaurant was a tanned Englishman with a strong cockney accent. He also was our server as the restaurant was kind of deserted. As we were paying, an older, flighty woman in our group told the man, “You’re English is quite good.” The other person there and I sort of looked at each other as if to say “Seriously? You said that.” At that point, the owner responded, “It should be, I’m English.” I couldn’t do anything but lay my forehead on the table and bust out laughing. I think I may have offended the person who made the comment, but I couldn’t help myself. Oh, there are some in every group.

After lunch, I ran into the rest of the “bad kid” group. They were all exhausted but filled with adrenaline from their day of caving. After waiting around for an hour for everybody to shower, we headed to a nearby bar for a drink. Then we had another. And another. Eventually, we moved the party to a table in the back that was outside because there was some smoking involved. If you recall, in an earlier post, I made reference to a group search for Jerk Chicken. Well, after about beer number ten, the bartender came over to us with a spring roll of Jerk Chicken . . .

. . . Eventually, we finished our Jerk Chicken and went back to our hotel. I had a seat on the couch in the lobby and a girl from the “bad kid” group sat next to me. Within about two minutes, her head was on my shoulder, her hand was on my stomach and she was fast asleep. I was a bit tired myself and I sat there for about an hour with her slipping in and out of consciousness. After a while, however, I had to piss and my arm had fallen asleep. I slipped out from under her, went to the bathroom and returned to find her sprawled out on the couch in a fetal position. I got her up and walked her to her room so she could go to bed and then went to my own room and had one of the better sleeps that I had experienced in a while. I think that this is what solidified our designation as the “bad kids.”

Convenience Store Hopping in Caye Caulker

The next day in Caye Caulker was destined to be a Sheldon Day. Most of the other folks on the tour were going snorkeling and I was going to stay around town.

There’s really nothing much to Caye Caulker. Like I said in my earlier post, none of the streets are paved and there are virtually no vehicles on the island except for golf carts and bicycles. I went out to breakfast with some friends and then decided to explore as much as exploration was possible in Caye Caulker. I walked the streets for a couple of hours, stopping in to several shops to see if anything was worth buying (it wasn’t) and stopping off here and there for a drink. Close to our hotel, next to the graveyard that we had to walk through to get to our hotel, was a restaurant at which I stopped for some lunch. It had internet access, so I played on the internet, had some fish and chips and some beer. That was the highlight of the day. I went back to the hotel and wrote a little bit before the others returned from snorkeling.

In the group, somehow I’ve been linked in with the “bad kid” group. (Okay, it’s not “somehow.” I know how.) The rest of the people just sort of look at us with disapproving glances and then we respond by doing pretty much whatever we want. When the group returned, we went out to dinner. Sadly, two of the “bad kid” group were diving the Blue Hole at 5:00 in the morning, so they went straight to bed after dinner. That left two of us to do something I’ve never done before – convenience store hop. There’s really not enough bars to go bar hopping in Caye Caulker, and walking with open containers is not a problem there, so a friend and I went from convenience store to convenience store, buying beer whenever we ran out, and walking the streets of Caye Caulker at night. That lasted until about midnight when the last of the convenience stores closed. The highlight of the walk was watching a crab try to cross the street while, at first, we started gawking at the crab and then a group of tourists joined us. We got back to the hotel about 12:30 when we got shushed by another hotel guest. We ended up going out to the pier and hanging out for an hour or so before going to bed.

The next day, the group was stuck in Caye Caulker until around 4:00 pm and few people really wanted to do any of the water activities so the day was pretty much like the day before except I had people to hang out with. It was hot and we were bored so we just went from restaurant to restaurant and sitting in each one for an hour and a half. The highlight of this day was going back to the restaurant in which I had eaten lunch the day before and ordering a mango colada while we played on the internet. The mango colada was one of the best drinks that I’ve had on the entire trip.

We took a boat ride off of the island and then hopped on a local bus to San Ignacio, going through Belize’s new capital, Belmopan, on the way. By the time we arrived, there was time for little more than dinner as there were plenty of activities planned for the next day – our only full day in San Ignacio – so that was pretty much it.

Sorry there wasn’t any more excitement than that on which to report with respect to Caye Caulker, but excitement didn’t really seem to be on call there. I’ll get into my day – and night – in San Ignacio in the next entry.

Belize is Alright With Me

Tulum was the end of the Mexican leg of this trip. From Tulum, we took buses and boats across the border into Belize and Caye Caulker. Belize was to provide me a few days of being able to be by myself.

The trip into Belize started at mid-morning. After breakfast, we headed into our final comfortable Mexican bus to head to the border. The bus took us to a port where we were stamped out of Mexico. Then, for the next hour or so, I suppose I was a man without a country. When we stopped, we went through immigration and customs in Belize, where I got to declare my water bottle filled with vodka. It’s a long story. From there, we hopped on another boat to Caye Caulker.

There’s really not a lot to Caye Caulker. It’s about eight kilometers long and even at its widest parts is less than two kilometers wide. It’s strictly a tourist trap, but does have its charm. There are no paved roads on Caye Caulker and the only motor vehicles that you see are related to construction on the island. People get around by golf cart and bicycle to some extent, but walking will get you pretty much everywhere.

On the first night, we went out to dinner and then a few of us went out to get some drinks. It was just a few of us going out since the group with which I’m currently traveling isn’t exactly the party crowd. Anyway, we went to a reggae bar and had some Belizean beer. I like the taste of the Belizean beer (Belikin), but it makes me feel a little cheated because it comes in heavy bottles that only hold 284 milliliters, so you never get as much as you think you’re getting. People usually hold up the empty bottles to their mouths thinking there will be more because of the weight of the bottle only to have their little beer-guzzling hearts broken.

Back to the reggae bar . . . downstairs, there were swing set seats at the bar. After a few beers, we headed upstairs to see what that was like. It was a pretty cool area, with tables and hammocks and a loungy-type area, lots of rasta folks and tourists and a distinct tinge of marijuana in the air. The upstairs closed around eleven and we moved back downstairs for a little more beer, some dancing and then we wound up closing the bar at midnight.

After the reggae bar closed, three women and I headed to a night club that was open until 2 am or so and the night’s goal had changed as everybody started looking to score some jerk chicken. (Okay, we weren’t looking for jerk chicken, but this is a family blog, so let’s just call it jerk chicken.) Assuming that the rasta guys were the best sources, the women went into search mode and I drank some more. The entire ordeal turned out to be a lot more trouble than it should have been since there were people all over Caye Caulker willing to sell jerk chicken to anybody that was interested. It took so long to score in the club that I finally decided it wasn’t worth it and at 1:30, I just headed home. (Oddly enough, somebody tried to sell me some jerk chicken on my walk home. By this point, though, I was no longer interested.) The ladies did eventually find what they were looking for and ended up getting back to the hotel around 3:00 am. There were some ordeals involved in that adventure, but that’s another story for another person’s blog. As for me, the night was over and a new day beckoned.

Tulum Carnival 2011

Our second day in Tulum turned out to be much more productive than our first day, thanks in part to an early start to the day and in part to beautiful weather.

The group from the Italian restaurant the night before had decided to meet at 9:00 am to head over to the ruins of Tulum. I ended up getting up early, around 6:30 am, shortly after sunrise. I showered and went out to the beach, where I laid on a beach chair and watched and listened to the tide as I occasionally dozed off. At 8:00 am, the electricity in the hotel returned and I made it up to the restaurant for breakfast. Okay, coffee. We ended up heading out to the ruins at around quarter after nine.

I really don’t have too much information on the ruins of Tulum. After visiting places like Palenque and Chichen Itza in the prior week, the ruins of Tulum really pale in comparison. Their main claim to fame appears to come from the fact that they are right on the shore and include a public beach. We didn’t have a guide and the information plaques were not particularly helpful. We stayed for around an hour, took some pictures and headed back to the hotel.

In the afternoon, I stopped at the hotel bar for a few drinks and some lunch. Afterwards, I went and did some work for my soccer blog and got caught up on the internet. By mid-afternoon, the weather was still pretty good and the wind had died down along the beach, so it was finally time for me to get into the water. Since I don’t swim, the beach is the only place I really indulge and I had a good time although I did cut my toes up in the beginning because of some rocks hidden close to shore. All-in-all, it was fun.

That night, after dinner, we found out that there was a carnival in town, Tulum’s annual carnival. A few of us decided to check it out. There were a lot of rides (mostly for kids), food stands and lots of stalls with vendors selling stuff. We had some hamburguesas and tacos for dinner and then rode a couple of rides. My favorite, though I don’t recall the name of it, was the kind in which you get strapped down and then turned upside down about 40 feet in the air. The best part of it was that there was a moth sitting on the bar holding me in shortly before we started and he was still there when the ride was over. He was a true badass. We finished at the carnival by sharing a bag of churros and then we returned to the hotel.

At the hotel, we stopped at the bar for a nightcap(s). All was going well – meaning we weren’t attacked by snakes this time – until near the end of the night when we tried to pay the bill. Actually, we tried to pay part of the bill so one person to go to bed while a few of us wanted to stay and drink some more. The person in charge must have thought that we were arguing about the amount of the bill because when we tried to pay one person’s portion, he got really frustrated. Eventually, he told us not to pay and to just have a great holiday, though he was still obviously frustrated because I think he still thought we were trying to get out of the bill. Finally, we just settled up the entire bill, grabbed a couple more beers and mozied down to the beach where a friend and I just drank and talked. We ended up staying down there until about an hour after the electricity was turned off, making our quest to find our cabañas in the dark quite daunting. Fortunately, my trusty iPhone turned into a flashlight and saved the day. Is there anything the iPhone can’t do?