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.