poker face

so in the end last night i met up with my pilot friends robert and victor who'd we'd met on our way through this town last week. we had some drinks and soon were deeply embroiled in a very serious game of poker with some locals. i have never played poker before for real, i don't know the rules, i don't know how to bet, i don't know how to keep a poker face. i do know, however, how to spend other people's money - robert gave me 200 belize dollars (around 50 pounds) to bet with which was pretty exciting stuff, especially when it all got changed into proper poker chips. these guys were all pro's and not used to playing with some oaf from england. somehow i got first deal. great. they instantly all had a go at me for not dealing properly (how was i to know you should keep the cards so close to the table so nobody can see them?), but on the 3rd attempt i seemed to have got it right. i actually had a really good hand but being a total novice i didn't really know that and also didn't want to go in for the kill on my first go.. maybe not the done thing and all that. i kept trying to ask robert for help, all the other guys were like shut up, stop it, you cheat! so i soon learned to keep my mouth shut and look vaguely like someone who knew what they were doing. a good skill to have i think, in belize, and in life in general. weirdly i actually won a few rounds and came out at the end 52 dollars up (which i got to keep, though i gave the other 200 back to robert). not bad for a total beginner, but it could have been that because it wasn't my money i didn't actually care what i was doing with it after a while, so lots of caution was thrown to lots of wind. the game ended rather abruptly when a huge row started between victor and some local who had built the table himself and felt therefore he should have a monopoly on making all the rules up. victor has lots of money so just kept buying chips as he kept losing them, and because there was no maximum buy in agreed upon, the other guy got really peeved with this cos they all don't have as much money as victor. i could see both sides of the argument, but duly kept a poker face, apart from a few times when i had to stifle some laughter at the ridiculousness of the entire situation. i seriously thought it was going to end in punches and testosterone flying, but there was just some severe stomping off instead. turns out this guy is always starting fights round the poker table. victor then accused the banker of not giving him the right amount when he cashed in, but i think it was just that victor was fairly drunk by this point and couldn't see what notes were what.

we then made our exit (quite swiftly) to a bar over the bridge in santa elena called happy's. this is owned by a guy from taiwan, who ran for president of belize in the last election here, and was a former pool champion. i was slightly scared and in awe of him. until he asked if i wanted to sing karaoke. i politely declined, though then backtracked as i didn't want to offend a potential future president (who knows, he might run again), and said if he wanted to then we should. we didn't. phew. then me and robert thought it would be fun to challenge him and victor to doubles at pool. we bet 2 dollars on this (i didn't want a rerun of the ruckus at the poker bar so kept the stakes low). amazingly, as mr taiwan was the absolute best pool player i've ever seen in real life, me and robert won. i think mr taiwan didn't take it properly seriously, we're just small fry to someone like him. i asked him to teach me how to play like him (by this point i was obviously hoping for a role in his future belizean government so was buttering him up), he said he would. we drank some tequila and victor talked business with some locals (he's always talking business, god knows what business though).

we then left this bar and headed back the way we'd come. for some reason, robert decided it would be a good idea to drive over the small rickety wooden bridge which was closed due to the river being so high. there were quite a few obvious signs that it was closed, like traffic cones, and a 'this bridge is closed' sign, and some people sitting on the bridge fishing off it, and some fallen branches on it. however, none of this deterred robert who ploughed over the poor little bridge, taking out one of the guy's mountain bikes on the way. i was astonished at such strange behaviour and made him stop the car. we peeled the bike from under the front wheel and i made robert give the guy enough cash to buy a new one as it was a total write off. jesus, even by my standards this was all getting somewhat deranged. victor then sped off in the van and i had a big go at robert for being so stupid!

all in all quite a night. anyway, am having a peaceful day today with no major incidents so far. there is still time though.... more poker maybe? tomorrow i get out of here back to guatemala for some normality i hope.

i have heard from abi, who is safely ensconsed in las vegas, she has had a burger king and a pizza so far (hmm, i practically had to fill in an application form with her if i wanted to eat junk food, i see the worm has turned) (not implying you are a worm abi, sorry, wrong metaphor i think). she has also been to the mall and generally chilled out.

over and out

salsa sarong

chapter 3..... abi has left for america this morning, maybe with a big sigh of relief, who knows... but it is definitely the end of a small era in our lives and she will now be reading this in some other part of the world, thinking oh my god i'm so glad i'm far away from that psycho..... here are some things i will miss abi:

mosquito panic!
panic about the temperature!!
only joking, these were legitimate panics, and i'm just being mean. i would say they are definitely more valid panics than me having monkey panic or cave panic...

so here are some actual things i will miss:
laughing at a table tennis ball with a human face and sticks and leaves in its mouth!!
laughing at things that aren't funny to other people or even to us, but we've lost the plot so they are
OMFG! so totally psyched right now. totally bi.
NNNNNGGGGGGGG!
termite hair!!!
hola, se vende cabron?
butterfly stickers! did you know stickers could get that exciting?
the would you rather game
the fatkins diet
the coffee bean dance!!! and the i'm a potato dance!!!!
discussing our manifesto to save the world from it's own greed and laziness
watching that video where i get squashed by a massive wave
playing keep or delete! biddly bing biddly bong!
the mackenzie minute!!!!!!!!!!!!

ok, enough reminiscing for now. it's probably not a good spectator sport. anyway abi have a totally cool psyched time in el canyon grande and also in new zealand and australia and singapore and hope you meet some ace people and don't fall over in your walking boots in the canyon!!! xxxxxxxxx

to update on our last bits of adventure together:
sunday
was belize independence day. we got the boat over to san pedro, the big town on the island to our north, called ambergris caye. it's bigger than caye caulker, there is traffic there and more people, and it is hotter. we wandered around and ate a bacon sandwich and got hot and saw some independence day procession preparations (that's quite hard to say), then got the boat back and hung out on caye caulker again and ate food some more.

monday
we went snorkelling on a boat trip off the island. this was really brilliant. here is a list of what we saw (in no particular order of chronology or importance in case any of them are reading this):
turtles
a little nurse shark (we touched his stomach it was sort of light and airy and a bit bobbly. we though it would be not like this, so that was interesting. perhaps he hadn't eaten much that day)
a manatee!!! (aka a sea cow). so cute, it was just swimming along all on its own
an actual hammerhead shark (i swam away very fast at this point trying not to panic in case he sensed my panic and came and ate me. he was at the bottom of a deep bit and swimming the other way so i don't think he saw us, but it was pretty scary).
lots of coral
lots of really cool colourful fish, some of them were snapper but i'm not sure about the others

we drank rum punch on the way back to caye caulker and listened to reggae music on the boat. one of the other passengers, an australian, suddenly was very drunk and in the process of trying to throw the leftover salsa in the sea, actually threw it on top of me and in my drink which was very funny. we went for a drink with her after this, but she was actually too drunk to speak very much, and she wandered off after a while to talk nonsense to some other islanders.

we went out for dinner that night and bumped into the other people from our snorkel trip, so gate crashed their dinner which was fun. for us anyway. then we went to a bar/club at the other end of the island with them, and met some people who worked for a different snorkelling company, who told us that the one we'd gone with were not as good as them, and they were run by an english lady who didn't care about the islanders and just came here to make lots of money. i felt a bit bad then, but we weren't really to know. as a passing comment, the guy that told us this was called steve wright, which made me laugh as he wasn't like steve wright of middle england radio 2 fame, but more like a cross between mr t from the a-team, and snoop doggy dogg. ha ha. (sorry mum and dad you won't know who those people are probably).

tuesday
hangover. (for me anway - abi went to buy me a coffee which i was very grateful for!). we got the boat back to the mainland, and stayed in a swanky hotel in belize. swanky by belizean standards that is. cold buffet for lunch. had a swim (nice), watched cartoons, and discovered how funny family guy is, cannot believe i have only just discovered this. i drifted off and woke up to what i thought was abi crying (at my imminent departure i presumed) - it was actually her laughing her head off at family guy, they were all being sick on the floor from drinking too much medicine. brilliant. we were in a strange mood with it being our last night together, tired and slightly apprehensive about our next bit of travelling i guess, so we didn't exactly take full advantage of all the hotel had to offer. which was a bowling alley, a gym, a casino, and the calypso night club. it was pretty much a ghost town / hotel, so there wasn't exactly much of an atmosphere even with all these amazing things on offer. we ate some dinner and watched cartoons and read our books.

wednesday
today. took abi to airport, got cab back to bus station, got on chicken bus (still no chickens i'm afraid clare..), am in san ignacio, it's been raining all afternoon. i'm going to sit and drink a beer or something now and probably talk to myself a little bit now there's no abi... i'll be back in guatemala on friday to start my spanish school, which i'm really looking forward to. here's hoping my brain still works though...

xx

interesting random fact

part of one of the star wars films was filmed at the tikal ruins in guatemala where we went last week. it's apparently a bit where a spaceship (mothership?) hovers around and then chubaka is standing on one of the pyramid ruin things howling or something. does this sound familiar to any of you die hard star wars fans? let me know if so.

shoes on a wire

current location- caye caulker, an island off belize. very beautiful. really taking advantage of being on a beautiful caribbean island, by umm, hanging out in our air conditioned room, reading our books, writing this blog. basically we are english and it is hot, not a good combination. we are going to venture out this afternoon and go snorkelling or something when it's non the midday sun and mad dogs and englishmen etc etc

so after our night out in guatemala, and consequent missing of the bus the next day (nb not our fault as explained in last blog.... clearly nothing to do with hangovers and lack of sleep..), we got the same bus the next day, by a clever technique of arriving at the bus station an hour before scheduled departure time. good learning curve. bus took a while to cross the border due to high percentage of israelis on it who had to get taxis to the bank and get photos for their visas which they needed to enter belize. people in belize are very very friendly, this is quite unnerving at first, as you automatically assume that if someone is that friendly then they have ulterior motives, or are trying to con you. generally this isn't the case, though i'm sure that does happen too. so we were suitably on guard against this. checked into martha's guest house in san ignacio (small town 10 miles from guatemalan border), no sign of martha, lots of ants though. they had formed a long line in our bathroom and were marching around the place. we ignored them by watching tv; i seem to have developed a weird obsession with the cartoon channels so we watched some yogi bear, transformers, and pink panther. must be part of my extreme escapism from real life plan. then we went out for some food but via a bar called faya wata (fire water). faya wata is i think a local and very strong and crude version of rum. we had some guinness, it was vaguely similar to real guinness, but not as good. then some local beers called light house.

then we met some americans who are living here, robert and victor. they are opening their own business here flying people around belize in their ultralight plane (robert was in last month's national geographic adventure magazine, he has flown pierce brosnan and ben stiller in his plane, and an american astronaut called peggy something). they were very hospitable and friendly and took us out for dinner to a place up the road, and bought us drinks. then they offered to drive us to some mayan ruins via a river we could swim in on the way. given we had drunk a bit by now, and it was late, and we didn't want to get axe murdered, me and ab went to have a meeting about their proposition, and decided there was a small chance they could be axe murderers, so we politely declined. we told them it was because we didn't want to get axe murdered, and they agreed that that was fair enough of us to be so sensible. given their measured reaction to this, we went for another meeting and decided that they couldn't possibly be axe murderers as they wouldn't have reacted so calmly to being accused of being axe murderers if they were, plus lots of people seemed to know them, so if there was blood on their hands they'd find it hard to get away safely. so we did a u-turn and agreed to their offer and went off to be axe murdered in their jeep. in the meantime some man we had also met whose name we didn't catch as he was a bit hard to understand, had dropped off some ice cream for us at our hotel, one portion of 100% chocolate, and one of sweet corn. we had in fact requested this, but didn't think he'd seriously do it, so we told the hotel man he could have it as we were going out to be axe murdered.

we went to their ranch in the fields outside san ignacio. (en route we saw the ultralight plane in its hangar which was coo)l. it's a really beautiful wooden house, with stables and horses and a man called ali who looks after them (the horses), and a dog called whiskey. the little horse called picasso tried to bite me but it was ok, i think he was just hungry, so i gave him some oats. then we looked at loads of photos taken from robert's ultralight, which were amazing. they were taken by someone called marius who takes photos for national geographic, and has done a photo book of lithuania, and is making a book with them of photos of belize. then they decided there wasn't enough petrol to drive to where we were going to go, so we just stayed at theirs drinking beer and looking at pictures of flying.

the next day we drove to the river and swam in it. think it would be nicer there when it's not been raining, as it was a bit muddy, but it was good for the hangover to have a swim in a proper river in the rain. en route we kept seeing shoes hanging from electricity wires over the road, apparently this means drugs for sale. interesting fact i thought. on the way back we stopped for lunch at a place that is owned by francis ford coppola, robert is friends with him too.... other things of interest were: we saw a bright green fluorescent snake crossing the road, and we had a smoothie with an amazing pink fruit in it called a pitahaya i think (siobhan you really should look into importing this for innocent, it's totally amazing). that evening we did more hangover recovery by eating burger and fries and watching cartoons..

friday
got the chicken bus (so called as it's the cheapest way of travelling around and thus sometimes has chickens on, they are old school buses from america, so not good for leg room or air conditioning etc, but was only 7 belize dollars for 2 hour journey = about 1.25 pounds) to belize city. en route ab checked her camera and the photo memory card that she'd taken to be converted to cd that morning was broken which would have meant losing all the photos of antigua, tikal, the volcano, panajachel, harim and willy etc etc, so we jumped off the bus in belmopan to formulate a plan. luckily we found another branch of the same photo shop and a nice man helped us sort it all out. the photos were in fact still on the card but hiding in the recycle bin, and when we had called the photo man in san ignacio he had deleted them from his computer, so it was all very nearly a disaster. when ab discovered they were still there, she was very happy and we went for rice and beans to celebrate. then got back on another chicken bus to belize, then taxi to the boat, then boat to the island.

saturday
independence day, but nothing seems to be happening. we're a bit over other countrys' independence days, plus maybe it's not politically correct for us to celebrate it, when surely it was independence from the english? will investigate this, as i might be wrong and it might be something to do with a battle for belize between spain and england or something. got to go watch more cartoons now...

israeli sandals

monday 15th september, guatemalan independence day (see independence day hula hoopers, left)

enough of the boring sitting around eating cakes and reading books and learning facts about guatemala - we decided to go and look for some random adventure instead. we found a bar on the lake front of flores, and waited for stuff to happen. soon we got talking to stephen, a tour guide from belize, and his friend jessica who is from america but lives in belize too. they were on holiday here. they told us loads about belize, which was very useful as we were going there the next morning. we learnt that 20th september is belizean independence day, it seems we're doing some sort of inadvertent independence day tour. stephen had brought his own cd of belize music, and made the barman put it on. then we got a cab over the river (after lots of negotiating, aka shouting, about the price) to santa elena to go to the casino, something we haven't yet done here, or anywhere ever in fact for me. i think abi has a serious gambling habit, so she was quite at home there. we ordered nachos, stephen complained that they were too small. belize and guatemala are not friendly to each other at all, there is some sort of ongoing border control dispute, whereby guatemala seems to think that they own belize even though they don't. in fact the map of guatemala in our hostel includes belize on it as though it was all one country. i would have thought guatemala had enough problems to deal with without trying to fight with belize as well, but who knoes. we saw a man in the casino who had won a toaster from the tombola type game at the exit, he looked very proud, and we hoped his family would be suitably impressed. we played the poker machines for a while, i thought i'd done pretty well as i had won 25 credits, and only put in 10 quetzals. turned out 25 credits does not equate to 25 quetzals, so in fact i was a loser, but i can see how people get addicted to gambling, like abi.

as we were leaving the casino, toaster-less, to find another bar, who should we bump into but pervy touchy-feely tour guide alquilino, from tikal..... we were initially pleased to see him as we now had an entourage of 3 new friends to hang out with for the night. however it soon became very apparent that him and stephen were not getting on at all, it was literally like animals prowling around each other with heckles up. anyway we tried to ignore this and have a chat over a beer at the bar next door, which was quite empty and slightly gay, which is fine, but just added to the sudden weirdness of the situation. we also tried very hard to ignore just how touchy-feely alquilino was being, in hindsight we should have slapped him, but we were quite concerned with keeping things non-confrontational between him and belize, so had our hands full already, so to speak, as did he. after a while of trying to make interesting chat with jessica via all these underlying issues, who was very nice, we all left and walked back over the river to flores, thinking there must be some independence day things going on.

en route over the bridge, stephen was doing some howler monkey impressions, which only vexed alquilino more, as he had done a fairly good howler monkey impression in tikal the other day so obviously did not appreciate being outdone by a belizean tour guide on home turf. turns out alquilino is fairly rich by guatemalan standards, as he claimed to have spent 3000 quetzals in the casino (around 100 pounds), and clearly frequented it quite a lot. he is also quite fat, which means he must have enough money to regularly eat too much, which again is rare over here. his english was also very good, thus he'd paid to study it well. good detective work. anyway there weren't any drinking establishments open by this point, so we headed to the bar we'd been in earlier, which we thought might be open - it also wasn't, but fortuitously some drunken men were sneaking out of the bar just at this moment, so alquilino (in his one moment of usefulness of the whole escapade as he was the only spanish speaker among us), negotiated that they could open their shop up round the corner and serve us some beers. after much macho seeming negotiating, this was agreed upon. the men seemed to be mute, but were just very drunk. the man who opened the shop was so drunk he could barely find the beer in the fridge even though his shop was the size of a shoe cupboard and the only thing in it was a fridge with beer in. there was more guatemala v belize strangeness about the price of the beer, stephen seemed to have an inbuilt need to bargain the price of literally everything, like a form of tourettes perhaps. i suspected some weirdness about to happen, so stepped in to pay for all the beers which alquilino didn't like either and questioned me severely as to my intentions. calm reigned after a few minutes, only to be shattered by a huge bang. we jumped, well as much as possible at this stage of proceedings, which wasn't very far. we all turned to look down the little alley to the side of the beer-shop-bar, to see a completely drunk guatemalan trapped underneath his motorbike behind a little bollard, just lying there like a tortoise on its back. we did what any responsible person should do in this potentially serious situation - laughed our heads off, for a long time. the few other guatemalan drunk-mutes helped him up, god knows how, and soon he had joined our 'party', but was too drunk to speak and maybe had suffered some sort of motorbike-bollard crash post traumatic stress disorder, so it wasn't long until he was off careering down the road on the bike again, cleverly avoiding either pavements or oncoming vehicles. calm was restored for a while. 10 minutes later calm was again disturbed by another crash. if the first one was 5 on the richter scale, this one was around 8.5. we did actually jump this time. on peering round the same aforementioned alley, we saw a huge pile of bricks and lots of smoke and dust swirling around the place. alquilino went into tour guide survival mode and marched down the alley, to see what the damage was this time. meanwhile a horrendously drunk guatemalan stumbled past him and into the 'party'. we took this opportunity to make a quick getaway from the insanity to our hostel which was round the corner, accompanied for security by stephen and jessica. alquilino spotted us retreating and chased us for as long as his fat little legs could carry him, but we were safe by this point.

on returning to the scene of the weirdness the next morning, we saw what had happened. basically the very drunk guatemalan had driven his van head on into the wall of the alley which had consequently collapsed into the alley. a couple of men were sweeping things up, and surveying the damage. if i spoke better spanish i would have given them a witness statement, but as it was we giggled and took some photos, and thought good job we're leaving this morning to a whole new country, and headed to the bus stop.

1.5 hours later - location - the bus stop. when a bus ticket in guatemala says it leaves from flores at 7am, don't be fooled into thinking that this means that the bus will leave from flores at 7am. it could leave from santa elena at 6am actually, or flores at 6.30am, or santa elena at 7.30am etc etc. so we trudged back to hostel los amigos, our nice friendly hostel, and went back to the usual routine of lying around, eating, reading.......... groundhog day part 2. i found a guitar so played that for a while, it had a string missing but i improvised around it. an israeli came to listen so i did the duelling banjos theme tune for a while until he went away again.

that was tuesday, we got the bus yesterday in the end at the correct time, it's now thursday, and we are in belize, and having good fun. there is more adventure from last night to be written of, but as a consequence of that adventure i am too tired to write about it now, so i will leave you with that cliffhanger. if you're at work and bored you can send in your suggestions.

apparently belize is twice the size of wales. i'm not sure wales has as many ants as belize but if anyone has any stats on that, do let us know.
xx

maya bee and lord chocolate

we finally left poptun on friday, on the right bus later that day. i attempted in the meantime to beat josh again at table tennis back at finca ixobel, and got him to about 21-19 which was my best effort. i then had to go and throw myself in the lake again to cool down, and again got attacked by the reeds. all getting a bit groundhog day. we then sat in hammocks, read books..........

got to our accommodation in flores on friday night, switched on the light and the fan and immediately there was a power cut. went and sweated out on the balcony and watched lightning circling around the lake. there are loads of dry storms out here, due to the humidity i guess, it´s brilliant watching the lightning and we have spent many hours trying to get good photos of it so far. flores is a little town on the edge of lake itza, in northern guatemala, el peten, the same state we were in when in poptun. this state is a 3rd of the whole of guatemala, but only 3% of the population live here. after sweating for a bit longer, and thankfully getting electricity back we went out and had dinner, and practised our crap spanish on another hapless guatemalan waiter. i think my spanish is actually getting worse weirdly, or maybe it´s just that at first i picked up quite a few new words and phrases and now i´ve lost the ability to progress beyond that so i feel a bit stuck. my small brush with the past tense the other day gave me renewed hope but since then i´ve not had to use it. i have enrolled on a 3 week spanish school on the other side of this same lake in a few weeks so am very excited about that - i get around 6 hours of lessons a day, and also get to help in the rainforest community projects and maybe make shampoo from local leaves, but perhaps i dreamt that bit. will let you know. (website if you want to check it out is http://www.ecobioitza.org/escuela/home.html)

saturday
went to visit tikal, an ancient mayan ruin site. very interesting. we had a great local guide called alquilino, which in italian means the eagle apparently, and he was indeed quite predatory, and touchy-feely. but very knowledgeable so all that was excused. it was nice to learn lots of new facts as you may have noticed they have been somewhat lacking recently. the mayans were around for ages, from around 3000bc to 1690s ad i think. they had queens as well as kings, very forward thinking and gender equality minded. they built pyramids, but not as burial chambers like the egyptians, theirs are solid, and they buried people nearby. the 9 large steps of their pyramids represent the 9 layers of their underworld. they had 13 layers of actual world apparently. they did human and bird sacrifices too, though not any more. the mayans had a heiroglyphic style writing system, but the spanish conquistadors destroyed all the maya literature apart from around 3 books which are in various places around the world depending who discovered them. so nobody knows exactly why the civilization died out or exactly when. there were some stelae (stones with inscriptions on) at tikal, from which they have been able to decipher around 50% of the meanings, but not all.

we wandered around oo-ing and ah-ing at the lovely temples and wildlife (this site is in the rain forest), and climbing up temples etc and looking at amazing views. wildlife-wise, we saw spider monkeys, howler monkeys, leaf cutter ants making their houses again, a spider in a web. this is the first time i have seen monkeys in real life, and i was pleased when alguilino said they never come down to ground level but just live at the tops of the trees. they are vegetarian, which is also nice and made me warm to them a bit more. weirdly, they weren´t dressed in human clothes drinking tea in someone´s living room, and advertising pg tips. the howler monkeys had an argument at one point, and the noise they make when arguing sounds like a tyranosaurus rex from jurrasic park. it´s very loud and scary. but they were still at the top of their trees. on the bus on the way back a puma crossed the road but i was half asleep so didn´t notice it.

we went back to a little town called el remate on the other side of the lake from flores where we were staying for the next 3 nights. it was deadly quiet, just a couple of streets by the lake, with the ubiquitous lightning. there was nothing really happening so we ventured out to find an internet for something to do. as the one we found was closed, we went to ask in a hostel over the road, and the nice lady, called rudi i think, that worked there walked us to another one off the beaten track. en route we asked her if there were any parties happening for guatemalan independence day (15th sep) in the village, and she invited us to one. this cheered us up, so we met up with her later on to go to the party. don juan picked the 3 of us up in his transit van. don juan was obviously the man to know in el remate, he had a hotel there, and was very kind and fatherly and everyone in the village knew him and said hello when we drove past. to use the title don here is a mark of big respect. we drove around the same bit of street picking various people up in the collectivo (this took some time as there is no such thing as timekeeping or punctuality in guatemala, we just sat in the taxi outside various houses until after around 5 or 10 minutes some people emerged ready for the party). there was a friend of rudi´s called jenny, and some younger boys and girls, one of whom we nicknamed chico loco as he was a bit strange. eventually we got to our first destination, a little village called cahui, away from the lake. they were showing a presentation on a big screen on the local basketball court, about global warming and its effects on the earth. the powerpoint presentation kept breaking as i guess the IT equipment wasn´t up to the job, but the children all sat quietly and respectfully watching the same bit over and over again, and waiting while the presenter tried in vain to fix it, until at one point he started singing the song himself as the soundtrack kept stopping. rudi told us that cahui doesn´t have running water due to its poverty. we were amazed and totally touched that somewhere so remote and struggling and poor itself should have time to instill in its children such a global and responsible conscience. i could have cried in fact but didn´t want to freak out our hosts.

after this, it was time for dancing, which we didn´t partake in as the only people who were dancing were half our age at least, and much better dancers than we could ever dream of being. they must learn it here, or it´s just part of their culture, like salsa and spanish people. it wasn´t that it was very complex dancing, just that they were so elegant and cool. we would have looked very stupid, for so many reasons. lots of local boys came over saying quiere bailar (do you want to dance) to us, and one of don juan´s friends called ugo just would not stop asking us to dance, and i felt really rude saying no for the 100th time, but it was the best thing to do, plus he was fairly drunk and dancing on the spot constantly. rudi warned us against lots of the men that came over, she said really it was only safe to dance with either don juan or ugo. we then left that party, and went off in the collectivo to find another one, which we did in another little town called ixlu. this one was a bit more happening, and jenny found a man to dance with. it is very very traditional over here, even the young people, even when drunk. they only dance in couples, there was no groups of either just boys or just girls dancing, the girls basically wait until they are asked. there is no drunken snogging or fighting, it´s all very civilized and well behaved. at one point chico loco was in a bit of a ruckus with some other chicos locos, but it died down without any trouble at all. don juan said it was because he´d been drinking. we wondered what they´d think if they went to central london on a saturday night and saw what happens to english people when they´ve been drinking... ugo had disappeared by this point, probably he´d danced himself into the ground somewhere. jenny was not impressed with her boy she´d been dancing with, and rudi had danced with a boy who seemed to be about 12. we got in the collectivo again, and don juan dropped us off back in el remate. it was all good fun, and really interesting to see some guatemalan nightlife and really kind of them to take us along.

sunday
we left el remate as we wanted to be a bit nearer the independence day action in flores. this is to celebrate independence from spain on 15 sep 1821. we found a nice hostel in the centre of town and lay around reading books and sweating and trying to cool down by drinking smoothies. i read a book about guatemala, see appendix 1 for what i learnt. we wandered around in the evening looking at the celebrations in the town. lots of traditional costumes, dancing, hula hooping, little bands playing, general festivity. i tried to take a subtle photo of the hula hoop troupe waiting to do their thing, but they spotted me and started posing and loving it, which was really funny. i´m never sure about taking photos over here as sometimes they really don´t approve, especially if it´s of children, as there are urban myths of western travellers trying to kidnap guatemalan children for selling on etc, so it was reassuring that they seemed to actually love having their photos taken. maybe only on festive occassions though. we watched some lightning over the lake, and there was a huge storm, complete with thunder and rain, well in to the night.

monday
is today. we are lying around, sweating, drinking smoothies. ventured out to find a cash machine, but it didn´t work, then we gave up as it is too humid to do anything above the call of duty. abi has gone to lie down to try and recover. i´m going to read my book, memoirs of a geisha, going well so far.

appendix 1
facts i learnt from reading a really good book about guatemala yesterday:
around 40% of current guatemala is maya, the other 60% something called ladino, which is often a mixture of some mayan race anyway, but is more what they would call ´pure´guatemalan. the maya are still racially discriminated against, and given the worst jobs, and paid the least money. 80% of guatemala lives in poverty, and of that, 66% in extreme poverty. 2% of the population own 60% of the land here. guatemala has a history of very corrupt leadership, often supported by the usa who monopolized most of the land here for growing bananas for the united fruits company from the 1940s onwards, and kept the mayan race very oppressed. they had a civil war for 36 years from 1960 to 1996 roughly, which involved left wing guerilla movements rising up again the right wing military government. the worst of this was in 1982 when general rios montt was in power and ordered a ´scorched earth policy´which basically involved wiping out entire villages in the remote parts of guatemala to prevent more guerilla groups revolting, but in reality often just wiped out villages of non-political mayans. he was overthrown eventually, and there have been more enlightened leaders since then who have tried to clear up the human rights´atrocities and bring the perpetrators to justice, often unsuccesfully though. eventually the u.n got involved, and some peace accords were made and the country is now trying to sort itself out. there is 70% illiteracy and not many children make it to high school. domestic violence is the norm, there is no gender equality to speak of (weirdly as the ancient mayans seemed to be quite into it), they get married young, around 17, and there is a strong sense of family and community here and often a few families live together in one house and share all the responsibilities. generally the men go out and work and the women look after the house and the children, and also go to sell handicrafts and food in the markets or towns nearby. this is more the mayan people, the other more well off guatemalans may have jobs in towns and cities as lawyers, business men etc etc. despite their violent and unstable past, the people are generally very friendly and welcoming, and hopeful to make things better in their country.

i thought my brain had melted in the heat so it´s reassuring i have remembered all those facts. while i´m on a roll, here is appendix 2, the inca trail speech i did all those weeks ago:

mis queridos portadores
estoy hablando por todos nosotros
muchas gracias por llevar nuestras bolsas por todo el camino inca, y gracias por toda la comida deliciosa y el agua caliente para lavarnos y el te por las mananas
fueron la motivacion para nosotros por sus sonrisas y aplausas, y recuerden que los amamos
nosotros recordamos vuestros nombres, espero que sus nombres estan correctos

and recorded here for posterity are all their names:
marco (head chef), ronald (sous-chef), juvenal (head porter), claudio (waiter), martin, amilcar, benito, isidro, edilberto, eduardo, felipe, wilfredo, balerio, calletano, eber, elmer, francisco, florentino, amilcar, elder, juan, juan, justino, cecilio, paulicarpio, isidoro.

we sang cecilia by simon and garfunkel whenever cecilio appeared. benito was easy to recognise as he had a cool moustache. as was martin as he was very smiley. it was quite hard to get the names right after my speech as it was in the dark and i had been using my not very foolproof method of recognising them by their trousers or shoes or what hat they were wearing... but victor was standing behind me and whispered any names that i couldn´t remember, so everything went ok.

how to post on this blog part 2

ok, so that worked as you can see. you just click the comment thing on the bottom right of that day´s blog and write a comment, and then fill in the letters for the security measures, then click name/url, and put your name in, or choose anonymous if you wish to be mysterious.

i await your comments.

how to post on this blog

hi everyone, or noone, depending how many of the population are reading my blog

just to say, i think i have managed to change the settings of this blog so that it´s much easier to leave a comment now, it should be that you don´t have to log in, or have an account etc etc, but that you can just publish a comment by clicking the comment thing. i might try it now by sending my own blog a comment.

roger

bamboo mangle

hi again all, so soon. this is because we came to get our 10am bus from poptun to flores, to find out actually it´s a 4.30pm bus. we are jinxed with travelling at 10am basically.

i have received some comments along the lines of i can´t believe you have so much time on your hands to do all this blogging, so i would like to respond to this. there are many reasons, firstly i can type at 80wpm (words per minute), so it really doesn´t take long. secondly, it is as much for me as it is for you dear readers, ie a record of everything i´m doing for me to read to my peruvian grandchildren one day. (i keep a separate journal for more private unpublishable thoughts obviously). thirdly, we do have quite a lot of free time you know, it´s not all go go go out here. it rarely is at the moment. fourthly, i´m secretly hoping it will get spotted for its literary genius and published and make me my millions. fifthly, i thought perhaps that you would like to know what i am doing out here. sixthly, i don´t have a sixth reason but just wanted to see how the word sixthly looks as i have never used it before.

having justified my actions, i shall continue.

sunday - we travelled back to antigua for the night, nothing especially exciting or memorable happened.

monday
travelled to a place called rio dulce to the east of antigua, a large estuary-lake place. got a little boat over the lake to our accommodation, a place called hacienda tijax, little lodges on stilts. nice but as mentioned before, quite a few bugs and strange noises of things pinging around in the water, on the roof etc. we basically did nothing really, swam in the little pool and ate food etc. i wanted a banana split and to watch the tennis final, so had a minor tantrum that i could do neither of these things, but soon recovered from this.

fact about rio dulce - someone told us some pirates had killed some people there recently, but i seriously think he must have dreamt it as it was a very peaceful place.

tuesday
got a little boat tour around the lake, down to a town called livingston, on the coast. our boat driver seemed very young and a bit moody, he drove the boat really fast which was exciting. he told us a few facts about the lake and flora-fauna, but realised we weren´t really understanding him so he pretty much gave up. we stopped en route at a few little islands where there were herons and cormorants (we think that´s what they were). then stopped for a little cave trip, our guide walter gave us some torches and we walked through some jungly type terrain to a cave, which went quite far underground and was pitch black and full of bats flying around and giant shrimps in the water, and a crab or 2. was really interesting, and he explained it´s a community project to earn them some money, and that it was found by a man who was on the run from the police for trafficking drugs, he hid down in the cave for years, and his family brought him his dinner, and nobody ever found him. but while he was down there he discovered that it produced really hot water, so there was also a hot spring nearby, it was too hot to get in really and smelt bad. but interesting story behind it which we appreciated.

had pancakes for breakfast in livingston and wandered around the town. it´s completely different to the rest of guatemala, much more caribbean, mainly black people, called garifuna but i can´t remember what this means. wandered to the beach which was very dirty, chatted to a really cute little girl, i gave her a pencil and some paper, but she didn´t want the paper. it is really really hot in this part of guatemala, total change from rainy panajachel, so we sweated lots. good excuse for an ice-cream though. back to rio dulce and more swimming and food etc.

wednesday
went on a jungle trek from the hotel, they have made a load of indiana jones style jungle bridges so you can walk around and look at the jungly type things with a guide who tells you what they all are. some termites went in abi´s hair which was funny and also a bit scary, they didn´t bite her but it just looked a bit horror film to see her with crawly things on her head. we saw a salamander, a giant blue butterfly, some huge ferns, lots of trees with funny names producing strange fruits, a flower called dogs bollocks, a flower that closes all its leaves when you touch them and which also puts you to sleep if you put it under your pillow. also a plant calles tres puntas which you can boil into tea and it cures malaria. our guide said it tasted really bitter, which maybe what they put in malaria tablets as they are really bitter too. she said malaria is very over-exaggerated as an issue and the locals don´t take malaria tablets and it´s just a money making thing for drug companies. i think she may have a point, we didn´t see any at all, and also wouldn´t all the locals be dead if it was really a huge problem? we saw a tourist tree, so called as its bark goes all red and peels off when it gets hot. also some petrified tree trunk bits from when it was a sea years ago, and a long line of ants carrying bits of leaf to make their new house from, and a rubber tree, there is a rubber plantation there.

later that day we got the bus to a town called poptun, to stay at a ranch type place called finca ixobel. we´d gone for about half an hour when suddenly all the bus drivers (there were 3 of them for some reason), stopped the bus got off and went to someone´s house and started squashing what looked like huge bamboo shoots through a mangle, with the help of a local old lady. we were totally puzzled as to why they would want to do this when they had a bus to drive. a man came along with a machete, and poured the juice from the big sticks into bottles, and then they bought them off him, and it all made sense. they were basically just stopping to buy a drink, which anywhere else would be a couple of seconds, but here they had to make the drink as well with a mangle and some trees. very amusing.

anyway, finca ixobel is an amazing place, it is owned by an american lady whose husband also owned it with her, but in 1990 he got shot and killed in some sort of guerilla / drug related event. this area of guatemala, el peten, was where there have been lots of guerilla uprisings in the past, i think it´s probably got lots of good guerilla hiding places, as it is very jungly further north. the guerillas pushed the settlers over the border to mexico years ago, but they have started coming back since the situation has become better and less tense. the guerillas used to occupy the privately owned fincas for drug factory type purposes i think, and i suppose that´s what happened to the american man. anyway, it´s really an idyllic place, lots of little cabins, and tree houses, really great food, and everything you eat and drink you just write in a little book and pay for it all at the end. it also has table tennis, and hammocks and a lake to swim in. it also has internet, complete with huge tarantula. (laura, i was about to start reading your blog when it happened, so i haven´t done that yet, sorry). i was sitting at the computer, and abi was sitting on the table behind, and suddenly she said wow! (in the style of harim and willy from panajachel), lu you´re not going to like this, just stay calm, stand up and move to your right and don´t look to your left whatever you do, and no sudden movements. i had come out in a cold sweat at this point, and followed instructions, apart from the bit about not looking. wow, a real life massive tarantula crawling along the floor to where my feet had been........ ugh. he was quite slow and docile when viewed from a distance, and apparently they really won´t bite unless there´s a good reason, but it was pretty scary to see one so close. we went back later and he´d gone, and from then on we did area checks of wherever we were in case he came back.

the people that were staying at finca ixobel too were as follows- a lot of israelis, they seem to travel to this part of the world a lot after finishing military service in israel. they didn´t really know why this phenomenon happened, maybe because it´s far away and cheap etc. they were very nice anyway. there was a group of american girls on a sort of summer camp trip, their chat consisted mainly of things like - oh my god, like, when i washed my hair just now, it like looks really shiny for some reason, and like when i looked at it in the mirror i was like wow my hair is like really shiny right now, like i really wonder why, dya think it´s like because of the water out here or like i don´t know what... there were also a whole barrack (is that the correct collective noun) of american army boys here for a few weeks from their station in honduras. they are training the guatemalan army. to do what we don´t know, or why. we questioned josh and rich, 2 of the soldiers, about this, and tried to tie it into some sort of starbucks-guatemala-conspiracy theory, but basically they didn´t seem to know what they were doing either. they hung around all day, talked about shooting stuff, then went out in their helicopters at night, doing secret army type things... was quite surreal to be in the middle of all this american - israeliness, where nobody really knew why they were there, but everyone was having fun which is the main thing.

thursday
i had challenged josh to table tennis in the bar last night (having seen his skills at playing darts i thought this was a safe challenge), so we met up at lunchtime for the big match. basically i didn´t get a game off him, though it was fairly close sometimes. he said of all the girls he´d played i was the best. i told him not to patronise me please, and we exchanged insults for a while, all above board of course, as i would not want to say the wrong thing to a u.s army officer, sir. then we swam in the lake which was nice though lots of swampy reeds kept grabbing my legs which i didn´t approve of. ate lunch, sat around, played cards, did a jigsaw, read our books, basically did nothing at all. it´s very tiring, so we sat in hammocks for a while drinking beer. then more table tennis with our israeli friends, again we lost (doubles this time), but they were still suitably impressed. for added challenge we turned the light off and played with head torches on for a few points. then drank some rum and beer in the little bar and played more cards etc etc etc.

friday
here we are, waiting for our bus, but going back to the finca for some swimming etc, as there isn´t much in poptun itself.

competition answer!

it's the moment you've all been waiting for, the announcement of the competition answer of what happened to us 2 saturdays ago...

and the answer is - in a nutshell - we missed our flight from lima to guatemala, and had to buy a new one which was very expensive. (the other option was stay in lima for 4 more days, which believe me you would not want to do).

in a non-nutshell, and to make a short story longer, here are the details (look away if you are not interested and just want your prize money, which actually has been embezzled by the guatemalan government, sorry!):

got a taxi to the airport at 6am, got to airport at 630am - flight left at 1030am so we were the first people to check in for it. had leisurely airport breakfast, looked at the shops leisurely, went leisurely on the internet, because obviously we had loads of time, having arrived so stupidly early for our flight. got in immigration queue at 10am having done all these leisurely things, and realised boarding time was 10am, but thought it would be ok as it can't possibly take that long to get through immigration. well it can, and even if you tell 5 different airport officials that your flight leaves in 10 minutes, this doesn't seem to get you fast tracked through, they just kept saying you'll be fine, and we kept believing them. we strained our ears to see if they were announcing our names, but nothing was announced. got through immigration at 1022, sprinted to our gate... to be told el avion se fue. i thought this was a joke, but quite clearly it wasn't. we ranted and raved in english and spanish but nothing helped. so we very very very unwillingly bought a new flight, which went via el salvador, where we had a nice bagel and milkshake (trying to make this into a positive) and sprayed some nice perfume on ourselves from a duty free shop to make things seem better. waited 3 hours for our connecting flight, which was only another 30 minutes. abi closed the blinds on the plane saying she didn't like flying at night much, and i prayed that the turbulence was nothing to do with the recent hurricanes on their way to new orleans. some fat men sitting to our left laughed at me when i yelped at a really bad bit of turbulence. we whispered to each other that there seemed to be an obesity problem in guatemala and gave them evil looks. on landing abi undid the blinds and said guess what i saw out of the window lu?? ooo what do tell me? a massive massive storm and loads of lightning!! great! what a day. in case you don't know, flying is my absolute worst thing in the world.

anyway, it isn't nice to be re-living the most awful day of our trip yet, so i will stop here for today. would have blogged yesterday but a massive tarantula crept into the internet room so i suddenly had to leave very quickly, screaming. adios.

black sabbath, yeah, wow!

hi everyone. today´s update. in backwards order from friday as far as sunday. just to confuse you.

friday
went to panajachel, a town on lake atitlan to the west of antigua. aldous huxley (not to be confused with bill huxtable of cosby show fame) referred to this as the most beautiful lake in the world. he obviously hadn´t been to lake windermere, or lake titicaca, or lake victoria, or perhaps any other lakes ever. or perhaps all that acid he took to inspire the doors of perception messed with his perception of lakes. we got off the bus at 10am and it started raining at 10.01am, and it didn´t stop until who knows when. if we had to sum up our time in panajachel it would be rain, cakes, rain, tuk-tuk, rain, lunch, rain, dinner, reading, rain, rain, rain, sleep, rain, cakes, rain. had a strange little room in a hostel-hotel type thing (motel?), watched some tv, bumped into our friend charis from antigua which was nice. went to the circus bar in the evening for pizza, it was touted in the footprint guide (which we have renamed the footsh*t guide for it´s unfailing ability to be really rather unhelpful) as a really friendly, warm, cosy place for food and music. it did have really good pizzas, and there was a brilliant band doing traditional latin american music, but the staff seemed to be all mute-deaf types. there were some really good posters of circus things up on the walls, my favourite was titled something along the lines of captian willy and his amazing trained sealions. the second band the singer was some zoned out gringo singing supposedly in spanish, but the gautemalan drummer couldn´t keep a straight face, so we figured there wasn´t much integrity to this performance, and ordered an ice cream to get through it, then left.

as a footnote panajachel is the sort of place where tourists go to visit and then end up staying there as it is so idyllic, and then they open up little coffee bars and make photo albums of their journey there from texas, usa, or maybe they sell little bracelets they´ve made or just generally hang out with their pot bellies and greasy beards, re-living the 80´s, or whatever decade they started coming to panajachel as youths. they speak spanish like tourists still, yet believe for some reason they are locals. it has a couple of main streets with various shops, restaurants, hotels, stalls selling weird food or aforementioned bracelets. we gave it around 5 out of 10 by the end of day 1 there. purchase of the day was some coloured pencils to liven up my journal, and my life in general, which they definitely did. did i mention it rained a lot?

saturday
got up and had breakast (my favourite time of the day). got a boat to san pedro, a town over the most beautiful lake in the world. it was a little boat, ideally for around 8 passengers, but with 12 of us on. we set off, overweight, and did a tiny little circle, and then re-docked. a man ran along and put a tub of petrol on board. then we set off again. it was raining by this point. we dropped a few people off en route, and got to san pedro around 1, planning on eating then watching the guatemala v trinidad & tobago world cup qualifier. we wandered around some strange grassy paths, through fields rife with rabid dogs, and horses munching trees, or grass, or stray tourists, saw a few machetes, wondered if maybe we´d missed a turning, then found a place to eat. we ate some nachos. san pedro by this point was making panajachel seem like new york to us. it was even more gringo, drop-out, ´travellers´ paradise´, complete with tie die long skirts and smelly dreadlocks. it was exactly what i used to imagine when people said to me i´m taking a gap year and going travelling. a conversation at our lunch stop between the bar man and some local yokel gringo extrordinaire - ´hey man what time is it´ ´it is now. it will always be now. there is no other time it could be other than now´ ´yeah but man, what like o´clock is it?´ ´it´s like 2.30 on your planet, whatever that means´

enough said i think. we left on an earlier boat than planned, and were overjoyed to arrive back at panajachel which we now rated at 10 out of 10. we found the guatemalan equivalent of hard rock cafe, and watched the 2nd half of the football. it was a draw 1-1. we spent the rest of the day getting drunk with 2 locals, harim and willy (not the one with the sealions). they explained how important the match had been, and that had guatemala not got their goal in the last 2 minutes, they´d be out of the qualifiers. we were shocked at how close our new adopted country had been to being knocked out, and discussed in (lost in translation) depth the different tactics of guatemalan football versus trinidad football. guatemala are better basically, but don´t have good strikers, their goal was pretty flukey. we then covered such topics as english-irish relations, career prospects (they were both still studying), languages, religion, churches, spirituality. after a few hours of this, the chat descended into talking about bands that were from england or america that we knew, and it literally went like this: guns n roses? yeah we know them, wow, they´re ace. yeah! michael jackson. yeah wow yeah! the beatles? yeah, wow, the beatles! the stones? yeah, wow! coldplay. yeah wow! yeah coldplay yeah! we ate pizza with them, then left them, very happy to have met some REAL locals and gained a little insight into guatemalans mindset. they were really friendly and sweet. wow!

sunday
we went to chichicastenango market. it´s around 30k north of panajachel, and has an amazing market on a sunday- food, textiles, jewellery, etc. its name means place of the nettles, though i didn´t see any. i checked my dictionary to see if this was a mistranslation, but it is correct. it has a central plaza, where the market mainly is, and 2 amazing churches on either side of the plaza. it was a special day in the mayan calendar (of which there are many, look on wikipedia for further information), so there was lots of incense burning, and candle lighting, and kneeling, and chanting. the main church, of santo tomas, was the most amazing church i´ve been in for a long time, maybe even ever. it was very old, plain white walls, a huge wooden altarpiece, and various figures of jesus around the place, but not overwhelmingly so, and no gold or silver to be seen. it smelt amazing with all the incense, and there were wooden blocks with candles on the floor in the aisle, with rose petals on them too, and various men and women in traditional mayan costume doing their version of hail marys. in a little side room was another mayan man doing a sort of tarot reading, with little red pebbles, counting them all out and putting them in little piles, then shuffling them all around, and counting them again, and putting them in little piles again, then telling somebody something in spanish. the whole experience was surreal and amazing, and we decided it was definitely a special moment.

we then went and bought things in the market, to exorcise any vaguely religious selfless feelings we may have been having. purchase of the day for me was a little toy cat made of traditional guatemalan textiles, and for abi a little traditional guatemalan textile bag. i went to a museum of local archeological finds and maps and things, which was nice, mainly as it wasn´t crazily busy like the market. i was the only person in it, so took full advantage of this by getting my dictionary out to look up all the words i didn´t know from the displays, without worrying that people might see me doing this and give me strange looks. the word for nettle is ortiga.

we went back to antigua for the night after all this fun. on our little bus there was some strange muddle with our tickets, and we had to have a slightly stressful conversation with our driver afterwards, but it was useful as i had to learn the past tense, so i now know how to say ´but when we gave you our ticket you said it was all ok´.

to be continued as we have to go and eat our dinner now. just so you know we are now in a place called rio dulce, staying in a jungle lodge hostel place, by the lake, it has a pool and jacuzzi, but it is really hot and there´s a few bugs around the place. it has a tv, but didn´t manage to show the murray-federer us open final which was a shame, but i think it was a bit of a walkover, which is also a shame, mainly for murray.

more to come, and competition answer too!

x
ps tomorrow night at 2000 our time, is guatemala v cuba, which i think if we draw or win we are fine, so it will be quite momentous if so as i don´t think we´ve ever qualified for world cup. it´ll be around 1pm england time, so watch it if you can and think of us.

witness relocation

dear readers,

just to clear up some confusion (take note in particular mrs pickles and rachel mackenzie), our current location is GUATEMALA, a small country at the top of central america which borders belize, honduras, el salvador and mexico, not ANTIGUA, a small island in the west indies, which borders mainly just the sea. we have been staying for the last week in a town called ANTIGUA, in GUATEMALA, thus the misunderstanding i presume. just to be sure, when you are emailing me from HALIFAX, is this the one in NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA, or WEST YORKSHIRE, THE UNITED KINGDOM?

yours pedantically,
senorita pepinillo
of unknown address

human barbeque

middle-aged comment warning - weather update - it´s absolutely chucking it down here today, a good thing as it´s been very humid for the last few days. we feel this is blogworthy as it has been a big topic of conversation, almost as much as it would be in england.

here are today´s non-weather related updates on the last few days

as there has been a disappointing response rate to the competition, we are not revealing the answer yet. clever marketing technique to make sure you keep reading... talking of which i finally finished a book i bought in buenos aires, the beautiful and damned by f scott fitzgerald. it´s quite a good read, in the sense that it´s easy and readable, but nothing much more than that. i´ve now started memoirs of a geisha, it was a close call between that and the yehudi menuhin biography. i tried to sell my finished book back to the book exchange, they offered me 5 quetzals, which is around 33.3p, so i have just left it in the hostel games room. which incidentally doesn´t have any games in it unless you class beanbags and a selection of crap dvds, and the odd american on his laptop. there could be an interesting game in all of that actually. any ideas anyone?

tuesday morning we did a city tour, through antigua tours, owned by elizabeth bell, who is currently on sabbatical due to writing another book about antigua. i only mention this seemingly boring fact because she seems to be quite ubiquitous in antigua and has written many books about it, and also a few colouring books, so it was very exciting to meet her to buy our tickets. she was quite stern in fact and very officious and kept muttering about needing to finish her book. a man called alex actually did the tour, he´s from here, but is american and austrian. he was possibly the most knowledgeable tour guide we´ve had yet, he has a masters in mayan anthropology, and the amount of information he told us was so overwhelming that i only managed to throw about 3 questions back at him. i wonder if somebody had forewarned him about me. i was literally stunned and spent the rest of the afternoon trying to write down all my new knowledge. here´s a few facts for now-

*the main source of income here is guatemalans going to work in usa and wiring money back to their families via western union. after that it´s tourism, then i think coffee and sugar exports
*the word cuadra, meaning block, literally means quarter, as the colonial houses they built were so large as they couldn´t build higher than one storey due to earthquake proofing necessity, that one block consisted of 4 of these massive houses
*if you see a mayan (indigenous person) praying in the main cathedral to jesus, it´s not because he has been successfully converted to catholicism, rather that he is praying to the god of earthquakes, via jesus as a sort of sacrifice. the jesus figures here are therefore sometimes a lot more bloody than you would find elsewhere to make the religion more understandable over here as they used to do a lot of blood offerings. very like the merge between the andean religion and catholicism that we learnt about in peru, like putting a guinea pig on the picture of the last supper in the cathedral in cuzco
*life expentancy here is 80-90 years, and it has gone from being the 150th most desirable country to live in (out of 163 countries in the world), to in the top 50 in the past 5 years
*there was a large earthquake in antigua in 1976. the most damage to buildings from earthquakes are from ongoing minor tremors, rather than the actual bigger earthquakes. there are 2 types of earthquakes, one from side to side (which he said is like drinking 2 bottles of wine and then trying to go for a jog), and ones that go up and down, which are much more dangerous

this is merely a fragment of his knowledge. he said generally guatemala is getting much more modernised and the because of the influx of tourism, the parents can afford to keep their children in school which means they have more chance to earn more money in future, which is a very good thing. guatemala has a very bloody history of civil war, and death squads, and the usual central-south american corruption. one of the recent mayors (or presidents, i can´t remember), embezzled around 200 million dollars, and they can´t extradite him as they don´t know where he is. but things are changing, and politicians are becoming more accountable and transparent. (not literally, that would be weird).

we met a fellow english girl on the tour and hung out with her that evening for dinner, which was nice, as me and abi have descended to just insulting each other now that we don´t have to keep up the appearance that we are polite and normal and friends with each other. we have run out of conversation, sometimes it descends to me asking things like would you rather be a bus or a car? or a lake or a volcano? so fresh blood was very much appreciated. her name is charis and she´s travelling round for a few months before going back to london to find a new job. we found a place for dinner and ate nice food, and then massively overpaid as we got confused about tipping, and had to ask for it all back and then re-sort it out. the waitress didn´t seem to mind, though she had pocketed our overpayment, so must have been quite gutted when we asked for it back. we went to a bar next called monoloco (crazy monkey), and drank a few mojitos. a really strange couple joined us, and some strange boys bought us another mojito, but it didn´t have any alcohol in it, so we asked for some rum, but they wouldn´t give us any for free. we left in disgust.

wednesday me and abi went on a tour of a local coffee plantation. during this tour abi invented a coffee bean dance, to be premiered on our next night out. it´s quite simple but effective in summoning up the essence of the coffee bean. again, we learnt a lot of things about a hitherto unknown subject, coffee production. to summarise
*coffee beans are actually red
*when you squash them, 2 little beans appear out of each seed
*these go through a massively long drying and de-layering process, and finally get sorted by size and quality etc, and then get put in bags by a magic machine
*one of the sorting machines was called oliver the gravity separator
*coffee plants have white flowers on
*on their plantation they use 2 different types of coffee plant, one of which needs to be grown under the shade of a tree, which is from australia
*they graft the 2 coffee plants together when they are arround 8 months old then re-plant the hybrid plants out in the fields
*the school year is planned around the coffee picking season, so the children can spend their holidays earning money with their family. coffee picking season is from around november to march, and is all done by hand, hard work
*coffee grown higher up is more tasty
*coffee has 4 times as much anti-oxidant than green tea, and prevents certain types of cancer
*the bits inside the factory reminded me of the richard scarry how does it work book with all the really good diagrams of cross sections of like a timber mill
*abi saw a snake running off through the coffee field, it was yellow and black. actually ab are you sure it wasn´t a bee? or somebody wearing a bee-coloured hat (jen..?)

at the end we tried some of their coffee, it was really nice. i was quite hungry, so i politely asked a fellow tour attendee (german) if i could please have his complementary biscuit (as well as my own which i had eaten in one second) as it didn´t look like he was going to eat it. he let me have the biscuit and didn´t seem to think this made me a weirdo for asking. result. while we were finishing the tour we heard a loud noise, and then saw a helicopter, and then some rich looking people eating lunch. it turned out this was the wife of the plantation owner, senor roberto dalton, so we figured they must have flown in on the helicopter. perhaps from a different type of plantation in columbia we speculated......

we had lunch with our new friend charis, and her new friend will. we went to a really nice cafe on the square where we had previously over eaten some cake to the point of it nearly being another ritta sport moment. then we went on a tourist police accompanied walk to cerro de la cruz, a big cross on a hillside above the town which is a good viewpoint. you aren´t supposed to go there alone as it´s been the site of muggings etc. the tourist police were really sweet, and i asked them a few pertinent questions en route. we saw a few men with machetes, but i think they´re for farming or something, rather than tourist attacking. it was all very uneventful anyway, apart from i saw a few flies who had really big eyes, but they wouldn´t stay still enough for a photo, which was disappointing. after this we went for another coffee and some cake, much needed after walking for an hour wouldn´t you agree mum?

evening was dinner, a pub, a taxi ride home, for some reason we sang all the way there much to the taxi driver´s bemusement, but hopefully also amusement.

today, thursday, we were up early for a volcano trip. in hindsight this was fun.. our guide erwin, that may or may not have been his name, but we´ll call him that, took us on a camino loco, very steep and under bits of barbed wire and then ´skiing´down fresh lava scree. this involved basically flinging yourself down a really steep hill of volcanic rock, trying not to fall over. apparently this is fun in guatemala. then up the actual proper bit of volcano, (the first bit is through trees and greenery and proper paths and fields, as any normal hike should be). after a while, erwin pointed to some lava from 7 months ago, wow we all said, that´s recent, and duly took photos. great. then the terrain became very rocky and crunchy and precarious, but we figured all must be fine. then he pointed out some lava fall from ayer - yesterday! blimey we thought, not sure how we feel about that... but i suppose we should take a photo. then we carried on, and lo and behold there we were about 1 inch away from flowing molten lava. it was flowing unnervingly fast, and looking up to the top of the volcano we could see lots more bits of lava here and there smoking away nonchalantly, and lots of smoke coming out of the actual top of the mountain. to our other side we were encased in one of guatemala´s many clouds, so it was all quite surreal. our legs were actually burning from the heat, the soles of our feet through walking shoes and socks were getting scarily hot, and our guide was busy lighting a cigarette from the flowing lava. none of these facts made me feel at ease. a few dogs wandered around, sunning themselves on the edges of the lava flow. i have to admit, i did actually freak out a bit, and went into panic mode and started heading back the way we´d come, with a couple of dogs for security. nobody else seemed the slightest bit bothered at the blatant danger we were in and were merrily videoing the lava and posing for photos with burning sticks lit from it, and generally having a lovely time. abi absorbed some of my panic waves but generally in all things is more level-headed and sensible so didn´t descend into full on freak out mode. in hindsight i suppose it was an interesting experience, though not one i will ever ever repeat. the volcano last erupted in 2000 properly, and before that in 1998. you could see it splurged all down the valley, it had covered a small village, but no deaths as they obviously have volcano prediction technology here, which i should have taken some comfort in, but didn´t.

another postscript to the volcano escapade was that in our little group we had 1 really nice man from barcelona, he looked like a postman so i called him il postino, not to his face though. and 5 absolutely horrendous brats travelling in their university holiday, spending all their parents trust fund money and talking about their chalets and apartments in london yet bartering the price of a horse ride down from 120 quetzals to 100 (around 1 pound 50), who if they had fallen into the lava as an offering to the god of fire, would have been spat out again for being of no useful substance whatsoever. it depressed us to be in such close proximity to people of such foreign values and attitudes, who believe the world and everything on it is for their entertainment alone and consequently who live in total oblivion as to the existence and feelings of anyone else. they see guatemala as somewhere they can get a good price on a 5 star hotel and don´t consider any of the reasons behind why this is. after our depression, we came round to the view that to take a positive from a negative, as all good buddhists should do, we should be glad that we aren´t equally oblivious and are at least vaguely humane and aware of our surroundings and trying to learn about the country we are visiting rather than just travel blindly through it.

anway, still alive if slightly frazzled, back in antigua, hopefully the rain will have slowed down that vicous lava flow. my eyes are starting to fall out of my head from looking for this long at a computer screen. reminds me of being at work ha. actually that´s not that funny sorry. better go now, we leave antigua tomorrow for a weekend jaunt to lake atitlan, back on sunday for one night then on to somewhere else which i can´t remember right now due to having some hot lava stuck in my molten brain cells...

adios xx

inri by inti

so here is the answer to my inri question from inti, aka laura cook of pickles blog fame

The words were "Iesvs Nazarenvs Rex Ivdaeorvm." Latin uses "I" instead of the English "J", and "V" instead of "U" (i.e., Jesus Nazarenus Rex Judaeorum). The English translation is "Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews."