Real Live Volcanoes!

For as long as I can remember I have had one goal in life - well, many, but one in particular - to see into the heart of a volcano. Not just any old dead volcano, or even a crater with steam coming out of it, but to actually stare down into a pit of fire and smoke. As you can probably guess by this prelude, I can finally mark one more goal off my list and rest a little more content. From Coban we came to Antigua. Within a few hours the landscape outside the bus window changed from lush, temperate mountains to sparse, arid desert. Antigua is probably the most famous town in Guatemala, maybe even Central America, and for good resaon. Its colonial image has been preserved, from crumbling churches to cobblestone streets - there aren't even any trafic lights! As such, it is also infested with tourists, and its attendant crime. Our first night in town John had his shoes out on a ledge between our window and its iron-bar grating. Around 11 at night the proprietor woke us up and informed him that she had just got him shoes back from a robber who had snatched them!But onto the volcano. John opted out of the uphill climb, but I eagerly boarded a bus at 6am and set out for the tiny village of San Francisco at the base of Volcan Pacaya. The first hour we climbed through jungle, with the occasional spectacular view of valleys below, dotted with villages and surrounded by mountains and other (inactive) volcanoes. Then we emerged out onto the lower flank of the volcano's cone, covered with plants sparsely spread over the rich volcanic soil. Soon this growth was swallowed up by hard black rock, remnants of the most recent lava flow (I believe 2004, but they happen all the time, this being one of the world's most active volcanoes). From there the trail curved straight up the steep cone. With every step you would slide a half a step back. The wind howled, and smoke rose in thick plumes out of the summit above us. Finally we reached the top, and it was like stepping into another world. Rocks stained yellow and red jutted up like needles, out of which sulphuric gas bellowed and swept into our lungs; there were a stench and sound of coughing on every side. At the very top two demonic holes lurked, the wind and gas howling as it swirled up from them in shimmering waves of heat. I tried to peer over the smaller and suddenly felt as if I was punched in the face with a hand of fire and my nostrils stabbed with needles. Then the guide took me to the side of the bigger hole, and when the smoke momentarily parted, peering down, I could see the dull red of magma below. My goal was fulfilled.Now we are in Panajachel, another tourist town on the shores of Lake Atitlan. This has earned the reputation of being the most beautiful lake in the world, and with verdant green cliffs and three volcanoes surrounding its shimmering turquoise waters, I'm not one to argue. There are a number of Mayan villages surrounding it, and most of the Mayan people still wear traditional clothing, weaves of fabulous colors. In Panajachel however there are more hippies than Mayans, so the atmosphere is a bit Disneylandish at times. Still, one can't help but love being in a place as beautiful as this.

Water and Rock

I promise not to complain any more about the rain, for the simple fact that nothing can top our most recent drenching. On the bus ride south to Coban, it poured heavily the entire time, and despite the canvas wrapped around our rooftop bags, they got soaked thoroughly. So we're just learning to be wet now. At least it's very cool, actually cold, since we're up in the mountains. Although there is always a sense of oncoming death as the bus flies through fog and rain down windy mountain roads overlooking vast jungle-shrouded panaromas, the bus rides around here are amazing and some of the highlights of our trip. Today we went to two incredible places. The first was Semuc Champey. It's basically a limestone bridge 300 m long and covered by a series of cascading pools and waterfalls. The overhanging cliffs and jungle and the shimmering pools of emerald and blue make for some fantastic swimming.Most amazing of all is the fact that a river flows right through the rock underneath these placid pools; it cuts in at the top in the most frightening display of water and fury that I have ever seen, vanishes into a foaming chasm, and reemerges turbulently further down. We also went to some nearby caves, which looked like a chapel of flowing water and ice inside with all the stalagmites and stalagtites, which dripped with water and sparkled with quartz. Deep below our path you could hear the roar of a mighty subterranean river, and beyond the few lighted rooms we went through most of the cave is unexplored. Unfortunately it was all too soon time to catch the bus back.

Our $100 Dollar Belizean Day

After about four days of effort, we made it to Belize. The sea was so choppy that on the boat ride there my skull, teeth, and spine hurt from repeated compression - at one point I was flying a foot or more into the air at each bump and actually screamed out "Stop!" They did, for a moment, until the sadistic captain ordered the boat back to full speed. We arrive in Dagriga and took a bus to Belize City. All the music on the radio had been remade into Reggae; the whole country seems very Carribean. Quite clean too, relatively speaking, since the locals here don't through their trash out of bus windows like in certain other countries we've visited. We almost couldn't make it to Belize City because the roads were flooded from all the recent rain. Arriving there, we discovered that the islands we were heading to were practically shut down as well, with the bad weather expected to continue all week! Our hotel cost $60 USD, verus the normal $2 or $3 we had been paying in Honduras. It didn't take us long to decide to say goodbye to Belize. We left the next day, and to top it all off, they made us pay another $20 USD at the border just to get out of this crummy country! All in all our one full rainy day in Belize cost about $100 USD.

Guatemala is, thankfully, much cheaper and drier. Although it rained the first night we got in, ever since it's been cool and pleasant. We are in the town of Flores, which is on an island in a lake connected to the mainland by bridge. It's quite quaint and charming, and a good base to explore the nearby Mayan ruins of Tikal. Tikal is like the Disneyland of ruins; massive pyramids stretching to the sky in the midst of dense tropical rainforest. They even filmed "Star Wars" here! We hired a guide who was very informative (although he wisely abstained from climbing the steep steps up each pyramied), even pulling tarantulas from the ground with pieces of grass. We also saw toucans, snakes, and leaf-cutter ants. Needless to say we got a lot of good excercise hiking up and down all those steps and through the jungle. Now we are heading south, and it only seems to get better. Can't be worse than Belize, right?

Beach Bums

So many cities, so little time. Actually that's a lie - we have nothing but time, heaps of it, but unfortunately most of it is wasted on the actual "travelling" part of travelling. Case in point: We have been waiting for over three days now to get to Belize. You might think there would be regular traffic between Honduras and Belize but we have discovered, much to our chagrin, that almost none exists. We left La Ceiba and spent a day in Tela, proclaimed to have "the best beach in Cental America." Well, I guess if you consider trash on the beach, open sewers emptying into the water, and robberies at night by machete as unpleasant than you might disagree, but we found it quite nice actually. From Tela we went to the second largest city in the country, San Pedro Sula. For a big city it was quite nice, modern and lively, and we were able to find Chinese food and a movie in English. At this point we were ready to head to Belize, but it was just Saturday and the one boat in the country leaves on Mondays only. We considered heading back into Guatemala and finding a boat there but that involved a whole day of busses, so we decided to wait it out in Omoa, a tiny, pleasant beach town. We hiked in the jungle up a river to a waterfall, hung out at the beach, and spent the majority of the time in our room, since it poured rain almost unceasingly. Both of our guide books had led us to believe that this was the dry season, but not so, the crafty Dutch provider of our hotel informed us (she charged us a combined $18 USD for laundry!).
Okay, so finally, this morning (Monday), we braved the rain and set out for the port city of Puerto Cortes. We arrive around 8 and found the one and only boat to Belize under a bridge and paid a lot of money for a ticket. Then they shuttled all of us over to immigrations to get our passports stamped, but immigrations said no, the weather is too bad for you to go. So we went back to the boat, waited for some sun, and returned to immigrations (this time with eleven of us in the back of a Toyota pick-up, a common sight here but for which we nonetheless got pulled over by the police and ticketed/bribed). We got our stamps and then returned to the boat to wait a few more hours, and finally a little after noon, they told us that we would not be going after all. Apparently despite the now sunny sky we were not allowed to leave the port. Tomorrow morning, weather permitting. Fine, so we'll just go through Guatemala and find a boat there. Oops, too late, the immigration people took our passports and left with them before we knew the situation, so we're in this until the end. Perhaps the only bright point to this woeful tale was that they said we could sleep on the boat. Immediately afterwards we met a member from the local church, which we had tracked down on Sunday, and over lunch he lent us a nearby unoccupied house of his. It's filty, and there's no furniture or sheets on the soiled mattress, but it's free! Really a small miracle. So yes, despite the arduors of travelling, we pass through yet another storm victorious. And God willing, we'll make it to Belize tomorrow!

Why It's Called a Rainforest

After a night in a crummy hotel room back in "civilization" I awoke to puring rain. It looked as if a hurricane had landed right on the city of La Ceiba. Not wanting to stay in this particular room all day we braved the rain and set out towards the Jungle River Lodge. This is a place in nearby Pico Bonito National Park, a rainforest/cloudforest depending on what elevation you're at I guess. They promised a free night with one of their tours and that was good enough for cheap backpackers like us! But as we soon found out it was raining much too hard for any busses to make it out there. Nor would any person in their right mind want to be out there at the moment.We had to take a taxi and I think they were mighty surpised when we pulled up - apparently they had evacuated everyone else out that morning. We had the place to ourselves, along with a dog, a cat, and two parrots that could only say "hello." The lodge is right on a the Rio Cangrejal and I have never seen a more intense spectacle. The rain-swollen waters had choked and then flooded the channel, resulting in rapids too frightening to even look at. The water had risen over twenty feet; when we saw the river this morning I didn't even recognize it! We hiked a few miles in the rain the first day and got soaked. Today we did a canopy tour, where you climb up a hill and hook into one of many steel cable "zip-lines". You're about fourty feet up in the tree-tops, and slide down a cable at up to 50 mph. Feels a bit like being a monkey! The weather finally improved, more guests arrived, and we took off for the beach town of Tela. Now I´m hoping to finally see some sun.

Paradise Found

Well, it's been a few days since I've posted. This is because I've been without electricity, running water, a toilet, and floors. In other words, I've been living in tropical paradise.

To make what is in itself an epic adventure short, from Copan Ruinas we took a bus to San Pedro Sula, then to La Ceiba and finally to Nueva Armenia. The latter is a small coastal village and we had no map, just the name of an island and the promise that there was a man who could take us there. Well wouldn't you know it but we happened to sit right by a relative of his on the bus ride there! She also rented rooms and cooked dinner, so we spent the night and made ample use of our mosquito nets for the first time. At 4am we were awoken and carried over the open ocean in a tiny motorized canoe. As the sun rose we arrived at the tiny island of Cayo Chachahuate, crescent shaped and not more than one-hundred yards long. It is home to a Garifuna village (African/Caribbean Indian mix), and all palm trees, wooden huts with palm-leaf thatched roofs, and sand floors. No electricity, no running water, and no toilet (well, except the world's biggest toilet, namely the ocean). Surrounded by crystal-clear waters and the second largest barrier reef in the world, the snorkelling is phenomenal. It's actually one of thirteen keys and two larger islands that make up the National Martine Monument of Cayos Cochinos. The best part is that these islands are virtually unknown and ignored by tourists. It's completely authentic; never have I felt more a part of real island life. We played with the kids, ate home-cooked meals of freshly caught lobster and fish, and when a massive storm arrived we helped the locals haul the boats up on shore.I could also go on and on about the coral reefs and all the fish we saw but what's the point? You get the picture. The one drawback was the thousands upon thousand of jellyfish inhabiting the waters. I mean, there were literal walls of them! This distracted from the snorkelling a bit (except for one day when they had been blown away by the storm), but eventually we began to swim straight through the masses and endure the stings. One day we swam all the way to the main island, site of the one and only small resort here, and had to cross over a mile of open ocean, which took more than two hours. Once at the island we had to cross over to the other side and on the way up a dry creek bed passed within inches of a pink boa hanging from a branch. I thought it was part of the plant at first and nearly put my hand on it! Besides these many adventures my favorite thing perhaps was simply relaxing in the hammock with a book, or contemplating the unparalled sunsets or super-abundant night sky; in general just enjoying the slow pace of island life.

We left this morning and are back in La Ceiba. I have never disliked cities more.

Copan - Wow!

I woke up today with a slightly painful stomach, which was gone by lunch. It's a small miracle I haven't gotten anything worse yet, although ironically enough I probably got this case of "indigestion" from the nicest restaurant we've eaten at yet. So for dinner tonight we cooked our own meal, which was fun as it involved going to the local market. It's been a lazy, hammock-laying kind of day. The highlight was in the morning, when we went to the Copan ruins. Some of the best Mayan ruins in Central America (the best inscriptions and carvings bar none), they are all at least a millenia old and absolutely fascinating. Pyramids, altars, ball-courts, massive steps, all in the middle of the jungle. I have nothing whatsoever sarcastic to say about the place. Just wait until I finally get some pictures on here.

9 Hours, 7 Busses, 3 Countries, and 2 Borders

Today we went on an epic bus journey. To make a long story short, we wanted to get all the way to the ruins of Copan in Honduras. The only problem being that from El Salvador that takes at least a thousand hours, and I hate spending precious time on busses when I could be writing longer blog entries instead. So we decided to take a short-cut through Guatemala. It was hard to tell if this was a good route (or even a route at all), because our room only had one light that was too dim to read by (better than the bathroom, which had no light).

So we got on a bus at 7am (which took two busses that I'm not even counting to get to) in Santa Ana, and rode it an hour and a half north to Metapan. There we waited, looking for our next bus, until we were told that it was the same one we had just arrived on. So another thirty minutes later we were at the Guatemalan border (Anguiatu), and after thirty more we had survived immigrations. With no bus to our next destination in sight, we got invited on a "private" bus, which I am guessing was a pack of travelling elderly female comedians, because they all kept laughing at us. We squeezed on, backpacks on laps, and in an hour and a half arrived at Esquipulas, home of the most famous Catholic shrine in all of Central America! The next bus took about an hour before arriving in Chiquimula. From there a friendly local took us to a bus (for a tip) that was supposed to bring us to El Florido. Instead it left us in a town not even on my map, and we had to pay for another bus to finish the journey there. Another couple hours and a border later, we arrived at our last bus. It was a short journey but we got stuck behind a slow truck on a steep mountain down-grade until it decided to pass on a blind curve. At last we arrived in Copan Ruinas. This is a neat little cobble-stoned street tourist town. I'm just glad to finally be here.

My Stay at an El Salvadorian Resort

Before leaving San Salvador we were told never to go downtown (by a local no less). But since I'm from Atlanta and John's from L.A. we figured how bad could it be, right? Although this sounds like the set-up for a awful though much deserved experience, we had no problems and quite enjoyed it. We took a bus to our next destination, Izalco. I had heard stories about these things and was happily surprised to have my own seat. Then the bus stopped to pick someone up. And again. And again. It seems anyone could just wave it down, and before long there were two of us crammed into my seat for one. I was one of the lucky ones though, since most of the late arrivals had to stand for the two hour ride.

Izalco is a small town at the base of a volcano. My guidebook mentioned a resort that included horseback rides up the volcano. Unfortunately it had no map and the town slanted up a hill. Noone seemed to know where this place was but finally we discovered it was only about another mile away. Luckily some local offered us a ride in the back of his truck for $3. The resort had promised an all inclusive package of room, dinner, and horseback ride for $25. The room was said to have a fan, TV, and shower. Well, it had none of the above. Technically it had a shower but the water was never on. We also had no sheets or keys and soon were locked out of our room . About the only thing they did have were spiders, big ones, and all over the room. They also had a pool but it was too green to swim in. Despite this though it was a beautiful place. We were the only guests there (that tells you something...) and toured the extensive orchard and surrounding countryside. Our "guide/bodyguard (who was 18)" took us to a river, which turned out to be a trickle of water. They had all sorts of animals, including a hawk crossed with a chicken and a gigantic rodent that ate fruit. They also had a baby boa that bit an old man who got it out for us. Dinner turned out not to be included, but they did have an American-trained chef who made some good grub. The next day we took our horseback ride, which was also not included in the price. The volcano was closed due to recent erruptions, so we rode out into the country. It was beautiful. My horse didn't like to trot and lagged behind, and since I don't speak Spanish I couldn't tell him to "giddy'up!" I got plenty sore and a sunburn, but it made the day worth it.

We left and took a bus over a mountain and past some volcanoes. The road had many twists and turns and the bus flew down it like a roller-coaster, only with semi-trucks coming your way on the track; the fact that the locals were screaming did not give me confidence. This country is amazing but unfortunately very polluted; the locals toss their trash right out the window! Now we are in the city of Santa Ana, which is actually kind of nice. I tried to buy a tortilla today and was given a stack of about thirty for a dollar, so I'm all set for the next few days. Hopefully I'll figure out how to get some pictures on here soon. Better go now and get back to my hotel before it gets dark...

The Initial Salvadorian Experioso

Well, I'm here. I arrived in San Salvador, capital of El Salvador, last night. It's been interesting from my first step on the ground. Even before then, actually. The plane was extremely turbulent, not up-and-down but side-to-side, like the pilot was drunk (quite possible). I looked out the window and realized those lights out there were about level with us, and no runway in sight. They never came by and told me we were landing, or to shut off all electronic devices, so I assumed it must be my iPod causing all the problems. I quickly shut it off and we landed safely.

Took a taxi to my guesthouse, Ximena's, which was difficult because I can't figure out the right way to pronounce X in Spanish. Nobody here speaks English, which isn't surprising, but even the staff at the international guesthouse seemed clueless. So my highschool Spanish, which invariably comes out mixed with Cantonese, is getting a healthy workout. I hadn't eaten so even though I'm told it's death to go out after dark here my hunger overwhelmed my caution and out into the wild I went. It was oddly quiet - too quiet - except for the occasional rifle-wielding guard. About the time a bum started trying to stop me by blocking my path I found a restaurant and ducked inside. Steak and fries - 5 bucks! I can say bucks because they use US dollars here. They also mix salsa with ketchup, which sounds odd but is quite good. I had intended to get right back before it got too late and really dangerous, but various young people kept approaching me so that they could practice English. I talked to a surfer, then a guy who had brought his dog and liked putting it on the table. He gave me a high-5 every five seconds. I am not exaggerating. Finally he fell out of his chair so I began talking to three other people, who offered me a ride home and thus probably saved my life.

San Salvador is much more friendly in the daylight. It's laid-back with a lot of trees, and there are giant hills and volcanoes surrounding the city. The people here are extraordinarily friendly. Case in point - my Uncle John arrived today (this trip was his idea originally) and wanted to go to church. So we looked up an address, took a taxi, and got left in the outskirts of town at somebody's house. They just happened to speak English and were leaving for church themselves, and offered us a ride. Once there we conveniently realized how tired we were and left to go take a nap. It only took a few hours of wandering, as we had no idea where we were. Gave us plenty of time to see the beautiful shanty-towns and myriad polluted rivers of the city. We stopped for a lunch of local exotic cuisine, pretty much an El Salvadorian version of KFC. The food is just as expensive as in the US, only here you get a waiter! Then I realized that for the comparatively imoverished El Salvadorians expensive fast-food like this must be for special ocasions only, hence the fine-dining atmosphere. We didn't tip though because, come on, it's still fast food. Now we're safely back and enjoying my favorite local tradition: the siesta.