More Utila

Tito here just finished his Dive Master certification, which can take up to 2 months. The final test is ¨the snorkel.¨Rum and coke (mostly rum) goes in the snorkel then the mask gets filled up with beer and he has to show the crowd how to clear the mask as if he was underwater. Quite the spectacle.

The other pic is of Ian´s scuba instructor getting everyone and gear out of the boat and into the water.

Pics of Utila

Elisa getting ready to head out on the boat for a dive.

Sunset at the dock of the dive centre-hotel.

Bad Santa at the dive centre´s Christmas Party (he was also my instructor).

I found a cool shell while swimming at the beach.

We have found a new place to stay now, about 10 min walk from the centre of town. It is very nice and quiet with a comfy bed. No balcony to string a hammock though, but still, a nice change.

Ian and I get to go diving together tomorrow. We´re really looking forward to that.

Diving Utila

There is so much cool stuff to see in the ocean here.
The deep dive to 100 feet was back at the wreck again, a very cool sight to see. Then I did a buoyancy class where I learned how to hover in the water and go up and down just by breathing. The Night Dive was also very cool. I was a little nervous at first, but we all got lights to shine around. Saw a big crab and lobsters and a conch moving along the bottom. No octopus though. So now I´m officially an Advanced Diver. Ian´s out diving a reef with his class right now. He´ll be certified by this afternoon, Yay for him! I did 2 more dives yesterday on the north east corner of the island. Beautiful reef and fish. Not sure if we´ll be doing any more diving but we´ll definitly be staying until after new years.

A Utila Christmas

We finally got out of Livingston and Guatemala on Dec. 22. The boat from Livingston was late and we had to make a mad 5 hour dash to La Cieba in Honduras to catch the boat to Utila. However, when we got there, the boat was cancelled anyways due to bad weather so we stayed the night at a hotel by the dock that had cable TV.

Utila is the smallest of the Bay Islands off the Caribbean coast of Honduras. The people here are a mixture of north american, Latino and Garifuna and they speak many languages each. We are staying at Parrots Dive Centre. Ian is completing his Open Water Certification and I´m doing my Advanced. The dive centres on the island offer free accomodation if you´re taking a course, which is pretty cool. Our room is nice enough but the hotel is directly next to a bar so the music plays loudly all night. No peace for these travellers.

Christmas was quite the experience. On Christmas Eve, the Parrots Dive Centre had a huge party at the owner´s house complete with Turkey Dinner and all you can drink rum and beer. My instructor was dressed up like Santa (a very buff Santa) handing out shots of red and green booze. Ian and I were so full, we called it quits early and headed back to out room. Unfortunately, people celebrate Christmas by partying to really loud music until the break of dawn. The house across from the dive centre was blaring music and the bar was blaring music. It was very loud. Same thing on Christmas day, except it started around noon and ended around 4 in the morning. Ian and I and a new friend from England, Hik, went out of a great seafood dinner and the restaurant was playing Christmas music, so that was awesome.

Diving has been amazing. The warm water and great visibility is stunning. I dove down to a wreck yesterday. It was sitting at 100 feet and was an old cargo ship. I saw an octopus and a fire worm and got to swim through the little wheel house where other divers had left funny trinkets. my second dive yesterday was all about learning how to navigate underwater with a compass. Today I have a deep dive which is down to around 100 feet or a little more, a bouyancy class and then a night dive. I´m so excited. Ian got into the water for the first time yesterday and loved it. Where I had to do my first few diving exercises in a pool back home, he got to go right into the ocean and look at fish. So cool. He has a few more dives this afternoon too.

Not sure how much longer we will be staying at the Dive Centre, we have one more night free but might pay for another. If we stay longer on Utila, we are definitly finding another more quieter place to stay. We´d also like to explore more of the island, we´re only seen what goes on below so far. So much to do!

El Estor

Elisa walking down the streets of Rio Dulce, just getting off a bumpy Microbus ride from El Estor.

Juan and his boat. They took us for a paddle up the river in the Boqueron Canyon.

Hot Springs Waterfall!!!!!!

Polochic Bio Reserve, Bejamin, our guide, paddling us through a bed of waterlillies and checking out the rainbow in the background.

Flores to El Estor to Livingston

We had a great few days in Flores. We took a lancha (boat) to a little town across the lake called San Miguel. We were trying to find a lookout and got a little lost but ended up stumbling on a achealogical excavation. Apparently these ruins were just discovered in 2008. The site was very tiny and they had just started excavating. We eventually found our way and made it to the lookout. A great view of Flores and Santa Elena. Then we headed to a little beach for a swim in the lake (it was so warm!). On the way back we got caught in a torrential downpour and were soaked to the bone. The sun was out by the time we made it back to our hotel.

We decided to head to El Estor on Dec. 15, which is a small town on the biggest lake in Guatemala, Lage de Izabal. The bus was supposed to pick us up in Flores at 9:30am but was 1.5 hours late as there was a big protest against the government in Santa Elena and the bus couldn´t get through. I guess everything was cleared up by the time we rode through cause we didn´t see anything. We had to change buses in Rio Dulce, which is mainly a transportation hub. The main street is crowded with vendors and the cars/buses can barely make it through. Lots of honking and yelling going on. After dodgy walk down a few blocks, we found the Microbus to El Estor. Microbuses are vans with enough seating for about 12 comfortably but usually they try to pack in at least 20 people, plus sacks of goods. Our bus got into a fender benber in one of the small alleys and we had to wait while the drivers sorted it out (no insurance here). Finally we made it to El Estor with an hour of daylight to spare. Eeesh!

El Estor was a great town, a lot bigger than we had expected. We stayed in Hotel Vista El Lago which is the oldest building in town. El Estor got it´s name because the English pirates used to make their way here to the store to restock. El Estor is the spanish twist on the english word "store" and the building we were staying in was the original store. Apparently Che Guevara stayed in this hotel back in the day, in the room next to us. Cool. The food was excellent and cheap. Nothing extravagant, the usual rice and beans with some sort of meat and tortillas. All the tortillas were made fresh. The ladies cooked over wood burning stoves and strained the corn, grinded it then hand slapped the tortillas into shape. So yummy! The vendor food was also excellent and we didn´t get sick. 2 of the 3 nights we were there, the town had major parties right in front of our hotel. Their christmas celebrations are more like raves for the whole family. Needless to say we didn´t get much sleep. But we did go on some pretty cool adventures.

The first morning we hired a guide to take us out in his boat to the bio reserve that´s at one end of the lake. We had to meet him at 6:30am, yawn. We saw tons of birds and monkeys and water lillies. Our guide paddled us through some dense jungle with overhanging vines and we saw a very rare hawk. The day after we caught a microbus to Finca El Paraiso, a hot spring waterfall. The falls pour into a cold river and mix together. The water from the falls was so hot and most of our pictures are blurry cause the lens kept fogging up. Then another Microbus ride took us to Boqueron Canyon, where we hired a young guy to paddle us in his dug out canoe up the river. The walls of the canyon were so high with tons of cool rock formations. Finally, we crammed into another mirobus back to El Estor and into the middle of a huge outdoor party. Ian was like a kid in a candy store cause there were tons of firecrackers for sale. From little mighty mights to giant bombs. Apprantly Central Americans celebrate christmas by blowing things up. Ian was in his element.

Yesterday (Dec. 18) we took another over packed Microbus (poor Ian didn´t even have a seat and there were guys sitting on the roof) back to Rio Dulce where we took a boat to the Caribbean coast to a town called Livingston. Livingston is charming eventhough it is a little rough. There are lots of Garifuna here ( the black people there were shipwrecked off the coast hundreds of years ago that mixed with natives, like in Belize) and there´s more of a reggae vibe than other parts of the country. We´re in a nice quiet hotel run by locals. We had a glorious sleep last night, no crazy music blaring. We will be taking a shuttle to Honduras either tomorrow or Monday. They need to get a certain number of people signed up before they can run the trip. We have to take a boat to Puerto Barrios in Guatemala and from there a Mircobus across the border and to La Ceiba, where we get the ferry to Utila, one of the Bay Islands.

We only spent 10 days in Guatemala and we loved all of them. We only saw a small fraction of the country but what we did see was beautiful. The people were nice and the food was good (better than expected anyways). We´d love to spend more time here but there´s more adventures to be had.

Tikal to Flores

We are now in Guatemala.
We took a shuttle from San Ignacio, Belize to Tikal, Guatemala where we camped for 2 nights. We went into the Ruins for an evening walk on Friday, if we bought our ticket after 3pm, the next day would be included. We did a quick tour of the 3 biggest temples and basically ran to the top of them. We only had about 2 hours of day light and the entire ruin site is 16 square kilometres (though we didn´t venture to the outer reaches that day). As we were leaving I practically stepped on a boa constrictor, it was about 1.5 meters long and was just laying across the path, I thought it was dead at first. But then Ian got in close and started to play with it. It was hissing and trying to bite him. Ian kept grabbing it so it couldn´t escape. Crazy! We went to the local commedore (restaurant) for a few beers to celebrate our first wild snake encounter.
Saturday we spent a good 5 hours wandering around the ruins and we did get to the outer reaches of the site. No more snakes but lots of Spider and Howler Monkeys. A mob of coatis (long nosed and long tail brown racoon type things) ran by us while we were making breakfast that morning too. Later on, we saw a ton of police and military enter the site. It turns out that there was some sort of Mayan traditional ceremony that was going on and someone from the Canadian government was there. Nobody could tell me more than that though.

This morning we caught a minibus from Tikal to Santa Elena (a town 5 mins from Flores) then we took a Tuk-tuk to our hotel in Flores. Tuk-tuks look like they belong in asia, they´re 3 wheeled covered motorcyle type things. Flores is an island in Lake Peten Itza (yes, the same Itza´s as in Chichen Itza, they were a major Mayan family or tribe) connected to the mainland by a bridge. It´s very small and pretty touristy but very beautiful. We´re staying in a nice hotel with the view of the lake and a TV and it´s cheaper than some of the dives we stayed in in Belize and Mexico. We´re just going to hang out for a few days then we´re heading south to Rio Dulce.

Flores

Tikal, Guatemala

Pics of Caves

Ruins and Caves

We've had an awesome few days doing some tours around San Igancio. Tuesday we went to the Mayan ruin site of Caracol. The site was nicely spread out through the jungle, so we had a nice walk (in the shade) as well as seeing the ruins. We were able to climb up and around the buildings and got a great view of the jungle canopy at the top of the 50 meter high temple. We had to have armed guards with machine guns escort us for the drive out there, it was an hour and a half down a bumpy dirt road that came close to the Guatemalan border. Apprently some tourists were kidnapped and held for ransom a few years ago. The guards and their machine guns were also dotted throughout the site. Nice to know safety comes first. After a sweaty day, we stopped at a waterfall for a swim on the way home.

Our tour yesterday was pretty much the most amazing tour we have ever been on to Actun Tunichil Muknal. We drove down a crazy potholed dirt road for about an hour where we left the truck. Then we walked 45 mins through the jungle, crossing rivers and listening to the birds until we got to the entrance to the cave, which was at the mouth of a little river. With helmets and headlamps, we swam/crawled/srambled/climbed/hiked through the cave, seeing all sorts of cool geological formations like stalagmites and stalatites and crystals and such. At one point we had to leave the river and climb up a steep little cliff where the cave opened up into a huge cavern. This is where we saw old mayan clay pots that were about 1000 years old, maybe even older. The mayans belived caves were sacred and part of the underworld and they would bring in offerings to the gods. Since the caves fill with water, a lot of the pots had lime stone crystals covering them. Then we had to climb up a rickety ladder and that's when we saw the skelletons. One was of a 10 yr old boy and the other of a 13 yr old girl, with the same crust of limestone as the pots. The one of the girl was completely intack. Amazing!!! It is believed that these were also sacrifices to the gods, namely the rain god. Some speculate that the mayans died out because of a drought which would explain why they were desperate enough to sacrifice children. Since the archealogical site was so fragile, we had to take off our shoes and walk around in our socks. I can't say the word "Amazing" enough to describe this tour.

Today we took it easy. Slept in, watched TV (in english for the last time until we get home). We made a new friend, Andrew from Nova Scotia (he was on both tours with us) and we've been hanging out with him alot. The 3 of us went to the little ruin site Cahal Pech, right in San Igancio and walked around for a bit. We're getting our gear together to camp at Tikal for a few nights. We've got our kerosine for the camp stove and some grits. I also sent off some postcards today. Finally!! I've been carting some around with me since our first week in Mexico. The Moscow Circus is in town and it's openning night tonight, so we might go there if it's not too expensive. Our shuttle to Tikal leaves at 7:30am tomorrow, so we might want to lay low tonight. Tomorrow we head back into adventures in Spanish for the rest of our trip. I hope we haven't forgotten too much in the last few weeks.

Belize is a beautiful country. I can't believe how much we have seen in 2 and a half weeks. We are definitly coming back here for more adventures one day.

Cockscombe and Hopkins

We spent 3 nights at the Cockscombe Basin Wildlife Sanctuary (aka Jaguar Reserve). We stayed in a little room that had bunkbeds and no electricity. It was the same price as camping, we we were happy to have a solid roof over our heads. There was no food available at the reserve, except for pringles and snicker's bars (which we had our fill) but we brought food with us and cooked it in the communal kitchen. Although we were the only ones staying there so it was more like a private kitchen. We hike almost every trail in the park, swam in 2 waterfalls, took inner tubes down the river and saw lots of birds, bugs and frogs. We only saw prints of the 4 legged animals (like Jaguar, Puma and Tapir) but it was cool to know that they're out there and close by. It was so quiet, we only saw a couple other tourists, we felt like we had the whole place to ourselves. One of the highlights was Ian spotting a scorpion on a bush on our way to the bathroom (toilets were outhouses across on the other side of the park headquarters, I wouldn't go alone in the dark). But not only was it a big scorpion, it was eating a tarantula!!! Totally freaking amazing.
After sweating our butts off in the Jungle for 3 days, and knowing that we'll be inland Guatelama for a few weeks as well, we decided we needed some beach. We took a taxi from the reserve to Hopkins, an awesome little quiet town. It's about 3km long, but basically just one road parallel to the beach. We stayed at a place called Tipple Tree Beya. It was right on the beach with hammocks out front. Perfect! We didn't have very much cash so we had to stay cheap (no bank machine in Hopkins) so we ate sandwiches and only bought 1 very big bottle of rum. We didn't really do anything except walk on the beach, swing in hammocks and drink rum with coconut milk and mango juice (my new favourite drink). We did go out for an authentic Garifuna (the name of the culture along the carribean - an african slave ship wrecked and they mixed with the local indigenous) meal. We had fish and very filling banana dumplings in some thick sticky gravy. Ian ate so much he held his tummy for a few hours after. I swear those dumplings expanded in you stomach.
We are in San Ignacio right now. A little city not far from the Guatemalan border. We took the chicken buses here this morning. That's always an adventure. Chicken buses are old school buses converted in to public transport. They stop and pick every one and anyone up along the way. Ian had to stand for over an hour this morning. He was a gentleman and let me have the seat. He has better balance than I do anyways, you have to have good balance the way these buses hurtle along the road. Eesh, it's hard just to stay in the seat, never mind stand. It's all good fun anyways.
We've have planned 2 tours while we're here (probably spent too much money, but when in Rome or Belize...). Tomorrow we are going to see Caracol, some more Mayan ruins. Apparently Caracol was more powerful than Tikal, and defeated them twice in war. It's supposed to be a real indication of how advanced the Mayan Empire was. Then we'll go on a quick Jungle treck and swim in a waterfall. Wednesday we're going to a place called Actun Tunichil Muknal, where we hike through some caves and see the bones of some sacrificed Maya. Apprently we get to walk over them too. Cool!
Thursday we're heading into Guatemala and straight to Tikal for some more ruins. Hopefully I'll get to update some more pictures before we leave Belize. The internet is pretty fast here, although it did take me an hour to load up those pics. If anyone is on Ian's face book, you can check out our photos there too. It takes just as long to load up an entire album on face book as it does a few pics here. I'll keep putting a few up on here too... stay tuned.

Cockscombe Basin Wildlife Sanctuary

Scorpion eating a Tarantula, just one of the fun things spotted on our way to the bathroom at the reserve at night.

We found a Jaguar track! Yay, they are really out there! We didn't see any Jaguar's though.

We went swimming in an awesome waterfall. It was so refreshing after a long and very very very sweaty hike. Ahhhhh....

Caye Caulker

Our Snorkelling guide cuddling with a Nurse Shark. Elisa Snorkelling.

The "Split" in Caye Caulker. It used to be a lot bigger but then a hurricain blew through and cut the island in half. We snorkelled to the other side then took this picture.

The doc at Igancio's Cabanas where we were staying. We spent may hours kicking it in the hammocks and drinking that oh so good and oh so cheap Belizean Rum. We bought a machete so Ian has been keeping up with a steady supply of coconut milk to mix with our rum. Yum!

Cousin's Wedding

My Cousin, Greg, and his new wife, Kathleen.

Me, My Great Aunt Dorrie and my Mom (we're waiting for the shuttle to go to the weeding. The resort is so freaking big, you just couldn't walk some places).