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