09/07/2014
I left early this morning on a minibus bound for Flores. I booked through a company outside of the hostel so had to get on a separate minibus to Shay and Ofir. As my luck would hold it, I was last on and this meant I had to be in the temporary fold-out chair for the 8-10 hour journey. This was made worse by the fact that my ribs were still killing and everytime the bus stopped it would pull on my core muscles making it one long and uncomfortable journey!
The bus ride was one of my most boring yet. No one spoke to each other and it wasn't until the end that I met Yannick from Germany. We both ended up staying in Los Amigos, which I believe had links with Zephy Lodge. The hostel was good with decent showers and ample amounts of hot water. We decided to look for street food as I was on my last quetzals at this point as I knew I was the leaving the country in the next two days. We managed to watch the sunset across the lake and eat these cold burritos for only 80p each, which came with everything from guacamole to chili.
Having had dinner, we headed back to book our Tikal tour for tomorrow before playing pool and a quick beer prior to bed.
10/07/2014
This morning we slep in until around 10am and had a late breakfast, basically brunch. We opted to do the Tikal tour in the afternoon as the mornings were notoriously misty at this time of year. This also meant that we would see the sunset too.
We paid 100 quetzals (£7.50p) to get there and back (an hour drive each way) and a further 170 quetzals to get into the park (this included a rip-off 20 quetzals to stay in the park an extra 30 minutes. The day was actually a lot better than I was expecting. Our guide was informative and we learnt more about the UNESCO World Heritage site and the pre-Colombian Mayan history of area.
We spent a good 4 hours or so looking around various temples, taking pictures and seeing the varied wildlife - from bats to monkeys, before finishing on top of Temple IV for sunset. This sunset also happened to be one of the best I've ever seen. Imagine being in the middle of the jungle, the local animals calling each other, while you sit 30m up overlooking the canopy below, which was laced in a mist that gave a distinct depth to the landscape. For miles around all you could see is jungle. Simply amazing.
After sunset, we scurried back to the minibus where we would be taken back to the hostel. We repeated the same dinner pattern as last night mainly because it was cheap.
Tomorrow I'm leaving Guatemala and going into Belize!
No comments:
Post a Comment