The wheels on the bus go round and round

This is my effort of a quick summary of what I've been up to in the past couple of weeks; my enthusiasm for posting to this blog, as you may or may not have noticed, is rather sporadic.


After visiting Mike and Sol in the central highlands of Honduras, it was out to the Caribbean coast again - yippee!


First stop was a scummy coastal town, Tela; typical of many Latin American towns I've visited; situated in a wonderful location, and with so much potential to be a great place to live as well as for us tourists to visit, but where pollution (in the rivers, the sea, the air) and litter every where had beaten me to it. The river flowing through the town and out into the Caribbean was thick and green, with a layer of scum on the top, not surprising in itself really, though what was alarming was to see local kids playing in the river.


Anyway, it was then out to a Caribbean island, Utila, one of the Bay Islands, and a very popular backpackers hang out. It is in fact a very small island heavily devoted to gringos with rucksacks, and their pursuit of having fun and scuba diving. So, when in Rome.... have fun and scuba dive, right?


I spent a week there taking the obligatory course and getting the certificate to go scuba diving. If you've never scuba dived before, it is great fun - you have this really unique sensation of weightlessness, where you can stay suspended in any position with out moving, and even fine tune your depth in the water by just altering your breathing patterns. It gives you access to a whole other world which so completely different from anything else; diving is essentially a fun form of wildlife watching.


Though I really enjoyed the diving, I was not tempted, like so many other travellers, to stay on the island to continue diving. Maybe it was the lack of physical effort required in diving (it really is a lazy man's past time), or the fact that it was all about paying more money to take more courses to get a higher certification (kind of like the Church of Scientology right?). A week was a enough for me, some great new experiences, but time seemed to be passing too quickly on the trip calendar, so I decided a new country was in order.

My first few days into Guatemala I travelled with Mike (the fridge man) and Sol, who were on a short holiday from their time in Honduras with a side purpose to renew their visas exiting and entering Honduras to extend their stay there.

The route through Guatemala has been fairly unadventurous, by my standards anyway, but has taken in the typical 'must see' places:

• Antigua - a beautiful, almost perfectly preserved old city, full of rich tourists - kind of the Vienna of Central America. Within in minutes of arriving you are reminded of being back in a European city like Prague, or I'm sure somewhere nice in Spain. Its a quiet and safe city, in such contrast to Guatemala city; the most dangerous city in Central America situated just 40 minutes away (7 bus drivers have been randomly murdered there in the past couple of weeks, and the streets are now occupied by the national guard.)
• Lago de Atitlan - A big lake surrounded by volcanoes. Perfect. And the shore dotted with Mayan villages. The Mayans being the indigenous people that make up the majority of the population of Guatemala. Their first language is one of 25 of the different Mayan languages, and Spanish, for most, is a very distant second language. They still wear beautiful traditionally made clothes and make decent bread. They are however, the victims of much prejudice in Guatemala, and remain, in general, the poor uneducated class, and up until recently held no positions of power in local or national government.
• Quetzeltenango - A big city in the highlands, the most interesting city so far in Central America, with a young student population, and almost a cosmopolitan feel to it. I climbed a volcano while I was there, about 3700m, and was rewarded with views of a the smaller Santiaguito erupting ash below. Most of my time there however, was spent vomiting and going to the toilet, due to a bout of food poisoning from somewhere, a trip to the doctor revealed some nasty bacteria in the stomach.
• North of Guatemala - I have recently been travelling through to the north of Guatemala, through what can only be described as 'dinosaur country', dramatic mountains covered in tropical forest, with deep valleys, raging rivers, and almost completely unpopulated.