into the wild part 4: homeward bound

back in time to: saturday april 10 – last part of our holiday to mexico and guatemala
so the lucybert roadtrip continued on from antigua in guatemala back towards belize. our first and totally unwanted stop was guatemala city. we were supposed to just bypass the city by getting on the ring road, the anillo periferico. there was one sign, oh good we thought, things are going to plan, and we got on the periferico. the road suddenly divided, we forked left, into some godforsaken zone of the city, from whence we couldn’t leave for an hour. this was exactly what we didn’t want to happen. we stopped literally on every corner to ask one of the ubiquitous policemen how to get out and on towards rio dulce. we went round in circles following directions partially remembered in our stressed brains, and the next hour was a hellish repetition of asking, trying to understand answers, stopping, looking at our inadequate map, reversing back down the street, asking again, driving off, immediately getting lost again. you get the picture. it wasn’t fun. we eventually extricated ourselves from the city thanking god we were still alive. guatemala city has a bad reputation, and lots of it is very slummy, there are policemen everywhere – thankfully for us, but who knows how trustworthy they are in matters bigger than direction-asking – and there are no street names, just numbers, and a distinct lack of signage. i have heard from one person that it can be a cool place to visit if you know someone there and know where to go and what to see. this remains to be seen, so i am not writing it off completely yet.

en route to our next destination, el castillo san felipe, just next to rio dulce, there were lots of guatemalans bathing and having fun in the rivers, there were a whole load of cyclists with bikes covered in tinsel and decorations heading towards guatemala city – perhaps it was a national easter ride or a pilgrimage of some sort. the numerous already jazzed up old buses also had tinsel on their bonnets. this cheered us up from our lost in translation frustration, and we bought some coronas and limes and put them in the ice box for later. we arrived at rio dulce and went swimming in the lake and looked at the castle, which interestingly had some cannons with english and french coats of arms on them, something to do with pirates from england, but i couldn’t understand the guide properly. rio dulce is a large river that comes in from the sea and turns into a lake too called lake izabal – i had stayed here last year with abi, it is a fairly nice place, but not as nice as the guidebook suggests. the town is busy and dirty and merely a place to get off the bus and get on a boat to one of the places on the water. we had dinner in town and an ice cream, neither of which were worth writing home about, even though that is what i am now doing.

the next day, easter sunday, we left and headed up to poptun to stay at finca ixobel again. this was my 3rd time there. you may remember it from earlier blogs – i saw a tarantula there and also there had been lots of us army boys there on some sort of secretive guatemalan army training mission – this time, there were no tarantulas or army, but we did meet an interesting character called brian. he was writing a book on mayan culture, and had, in his own words, discovered 13 new constellations which related to mayan architecture. he was sound asleep and snoring in a hammock when we first arrived but perked up and came to talk to us in his funny and slightly straitjacket-inducing way. he had written a book and self published it as nobody else would, it is called the cosmic mirror. he was in fact intelligent, that type of intelligent that somewhere along the line has tipped over into fantasy land detached subtle madness, and had used to be a jazz musician and composer (this explained a lot of the madness) and married to a german, who he said, exhibited increasing nazi like qualities after they had married which she had kept well hidden before the marriage. he had met a girl in antigua who had taken his book away to read and not given it back, it turned out he liked this girl and he updated us frequently on various aspects of his dealings with her. i advised him not to take the vengeful route he was proposing in retaliation to some strange thing she had done to him, but to sit and do nothing as that was the morally superior option. he found me the next morning to tell me he had thought a lot about my advice, and to date, it was the most sensible advice he had had. a compliment indeed from a mad man. he had also met a girl on a bus who had taken his email address and he had been checking his email religiously every day since then, but still nothing. he had met belize’s leading archaeologist who he had quickly written off as a phoney and denounced belize as a phoney country as half the streets don’t have names, and if you are looking for hospital street, you are supposed to deduce that that is basically the street with the hospital on. he had read lots of garcia marquez books and told me about one called endaira, which is ariadne backwards. he did know a lot of things, that’s for sure, but it became tiring listening to him.

other than this entertainment, we swam in the man made lake complete with reeds that creeped me out by brushing against my legs, we walked up a little hill, and through beautiful pine forest, past a dried up river, took some video of a donkey loaded up with firewood and his owner wielding his machete, they were both very friendly. we had an argument about pine cones (me and bert, not us and the donkey owner) – i insisted that you can use them to predict the weather, as their spines close up if it is going to rain, and also at night – i think i must have dreamt this once when young and ever since believed it to be fact – or is this in fact how pine cones in england behave? we put it to the test, and sat the pine cone in our room, the next morning it was exactly the same, but i explained to bert that that was because it had closed up during the night, but we had been asleep and not seen it and now it was open again as it was daylight, and promptly demanded the 100 dollars we’d bet on it. one night it was super windy and the wind blew into the room which always spooks me a bit. i made bert get up and put my guitar in its case in case it blew out of the window and got damaged. should’ve sneaked a look at the pine cone at this point but i was preoccupied with the wind and my guitar.

and that was the end of our trip to mexico and guatemala, we got home on tuesday 14th, quite impressed that our intended few days in the yucatan had turned into a 3 and a half week trip and not cost that much at all despite splashing out on a few luxury items along the way. on arriving back to belize there was a huge storm, we drove out to the hangar and sat on the car bonnet and drank beers and watched the lightning rolling around the sky. then realized we would be a prime target if it chose to hit the ground. then had an argument about how lightning works – i was sure it comes up from the ground and down from the clouds and meets in the middle, bert thinks it always just comes downwards as you would be able to tell if it was going up from the ground, and also if you were standing there it could go up through you. we have since researched this (in a really cool book that hermano jaime sent over, called 101 things you need to know – and some you don’t!) (their exclamation mark not mine) and discovered the following:

water and ice droplets in storm clouds bump around and become electrically charged. at the top of the cloud they have a positive charge, and at the bottom, a negative charge. sometimes the negatively-charged bottom is close enough to the positively-charged ground (or the top of another cloud) to be attracted to it, and electrical energy is released in a flash of light.

interesting huh (though it doesn’t actually say whether it goes up to down or both ways). listen to this about thunder too:

thunder occurs when lightning heats up the air around it. the air temperature suddenly rises to around 30,000°c. this incredibly hot air expand due to the heat, then cools and contracts, causing a shockwave which we hear as thunder.

other topics covered in the book include: how do clouds stay in the air? is time travel possible? where does the sun go at night? how do oysters make pearls? if you have any pressing questions, please ask me and i’ll see if they are covered in my book, otherwise i’ll keep a list of new un-answered questions and send them to them for a new book.

another interesting thing back here in belize was that a baby horse had been born, he was about a week old by the time we got back. very cute watching him trying to stand up from lying down position and watch him just walk wobblyly round and round his mum in the little stable.