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?