Flores and TIkal

We caught the bus from Lanquin to Flores, another nice 8 hour bus ride.  This bus ride was very uneventful (finally), the weirdest things being a ferry trip across a river that would have been 30 meters wide (no bridge?) and the bus being washed at a petrol station while we waited.... We arrived in Flores without accomodation, so being the lazy people we are, we were led to the nearest hotel by a dodgy guy named Eddie. Eddie preceded to sweet talk his way into booking a tour of Tikal and our bus ride to Belize....and Kris a first class bus ticket to Rio Dulce....If we had only known.....

After a 4:30 am start we get to TIkal in the early hours of the morning.  We walked around the grounds for a couple of  hours, getting to play with a tarantula, seeing lots of cool animals including woodpeckers and monkeys, and of course the temples. Thank god we went early, by lunch time it was pretty warm. Our guide was really knowledgable about the Mayan people and their beliefs which was really interesting. We learnt about blood letting, beheading, sacrifices (both volunteered and not, if you volunteered they medicated you with local paralysing/anaesthetising plants, however if you had done something bad, look out) and the past time of the kings which was apparently, sitting on top of the pyramid, not eating or drinking but taking halucinagenic substances and performing self peircing to achieve a state of enlightenment.... now if only Eddy's bus company had been as good( they were 45 minutes late for pickup - which meant we missed the promised sunrise on top of the main temple and walk through the jungle).....It was still a great tour though.

Just for you Ceda....

We got back to Flores and found some lunch, and ran into a girl named Sanne - who we had gone to school with in Antigua. We went for a swim off a small jetty (Flores is a small island in a big lake) which was lovely, and were entertained by a crazy, drunk, stoned Mexican Alaskan who was singing and playing some spanish tunes with a bongo bashing buddy - including an odd version of la cucaracha - the lyrics included something along the lines of  the "cochroach cannot walk anymore because he isn't smoking any marijuana". After a stop at  bar for happy hour - 2 beers and 2 mojitos for $5 - we hunted down some dinner.

A little immature I know, but.....