Archive for the ‘Travelling’ Category
1 Comment How Time Flies
Our last two full days were spent on holiday. Two days of total relaxation with nothing to worry about other than when to eat dinner and whether we needed to get another bottle of rum. Read More…
And The Winner Is …
In keeping with the England team, laziness has overcome us this last few days. Unlike England, I feel we have earned it.
Rushing Around Guatemala
I don’t know whether it was the relative comfort compared to the previous few nights but our accommodation in Rio Dulce was one of the nicest places we have stayed for a while. A nice big bed (for a change), a mosquito net which didn’t hang round your face making you feel like a mackerel on a bad day and, lord be praised, hot water! El Tortugal, if you ever end up there, is the place to be. Talking to the people that were running the place was fascinating too – a couple in their 50′s from Texas who had bought a yacht a few years previously which had become their home, meaning they could pitch up wherever they liked (within watery reason) and stay for however long they chose. Having stayed for five weeks at the hotel, the owners asked if they’d look after the place while they went away so here they were, chatting to the guests and generally enjoying their lives. Very inspiring. We met a couple of English girls in the evening, sunk a few beers and had a really great time.
Sadly, time waits for no man (or woman) who’s this close to the end of their travels and staring working life in the face and, by lunchtime the next day, we were on our way again, this time managing to experience that rarest of things when travelling like this – a whole minibus to ourselves! The driver didn’t stop to collect anyone else or wait around to try and coerce bystanders into accompanying us – he just loaded up our bags and drove us to our destination. Bizarre.
We did pause half-way to collect what appeared to be the driver’s three daughters but they were no problem at all and were, in fact, quite a lot of fun, squirting water at each other and playing games. The journey, predictably, did take much longer than we had been told, however, and by the time we were dropped at our hotel in Lanquin, the six and a half hours of bumpy track had rendered my rear end almost completely numb and non-functional.
Our hostel was a crushing disappointment. Many gringos, drab food, nowhere to sit and eat it – these were all problems we could deal with. But the staggeringly stark and depressing wooden room which smelt of stale cabbage combined with the long, dark, outside walk to the shared toilet and bathroom convinced us that one night here would be enough.
Early next morning, we set off for Semuc Champey, choosing to avoid the organised tour (which included wading through caves filled with water, tubing and leaping off bridges into rivers) and simply hitching a lift on the back of a truck up the 9km track, through the jungle, to the river.
Semuc Champey is a stunning part of the country, where the Rio Cahabon has carved out a tunnel under a long section of limestone which has thus become a bridge over the river, which receives some of the river water, creating several turquoise pools on top. We began by struggling up one of the steepest climbs of my life to a view point high in the jungle-covered mountains where we could look down onto the bridge and take some photos. The pools, once we got to them, were stunning but a little too cold for my liking so I settled for dangling my feet in for a refreshing hour after our sweaty climb.
As we left the park, we noticed a nice-looking hostel set in the trees and, once we saw the rooms, decided to book in for a night. The place was like a different world compared to El Retiro in the village and we spent a pleasant evening sipping beer and talking to a French couple and an American guy who spent a little too much time trying to convince me of God’s ‘good news’.
Once again, we checked out after one night and headed off in a minivan, this time to Flores, in the North. The van, having done the usual tour of the town and return to base, filled with some extremely amiable chaps and chappesses, and everyone got chatting as we leapt and bounced along the unmade road to Coban. You do meet a lot of people on these trips and it’s not often that everyone in the van gets on but this time was different. By the time we limped into Flores, after nine hours of the five hour journey, we’d all had as much fun as it is possible to have during such arduous trials and agreed to meet up when we visited Tikal after a day of rest on the Sunday – maybe God’s good news had sunk in after all?! One of the highlights of the trip came during a short ferry ride across a river in Sayaxche. The ferry carried around 20 vehicles, including a huge truck, itself carrying a bulldozer and was powered by a simple outboard motor operated by a ‘Dude In A Tin’ (as the Aussie contingent described it) – a man sitting in a round, metal, errr, tin which could swivel to enable steering of the enormous cargo.
We were actually booked to stay in a hotel halfway between Flores and Tikal in a small village called El Remate so our journey had another, exhausting leg which, inevitably, involved dodgy collectivos and interminable waiting whilst they filled the van with passengers. Still, it was worth it and we found our hotel to be suitably junglified and very comfortable.
Our day of rest was relatively unremarkable, save for a trip to a nearby biotropic reserve which claimed to be home to a bewildering array of animals including howler monkeys and snakes. We got out of bed too late though and that, coupled with some adrenalin-pumped Guatemalan lads who insisted on running screaming through the reserve, frightening any potential fauna back into the jungle meant that the most exciting things we saw were some ants – and a lizard. You can’t win ‘em all.
Tikal is one of the largest Mayan cities to have been discovered and, as such, is one of those places which can get overrun with tourists. So, as usual, an early start is required. We arrived at the park at 6am, met up with our new vanfriends, hired a guide and followed him off into the jungle, unsure as to whether he would be of any use. He turned out to be absolutely brillant and really made our visit worthwhile, showing us various plants and animals including the tree used for making chewing gum, pepper trees, monkeys, woodpeckers and some of the biggest ants I have ever seen as well as explaining all the various temples and structures which are scattered throughout the park. Climbing up some of the steep edifices revealed some incredible views as many of the temples are much higher than the canopy of the jungle and can be seen poking out of the vast surrounding landscape of nothing but green.
Our guide left us to it, we spent a while wandering around on our own and have now returned, sunburnt, sweaty and exhausted to the hotel. The others are off to Belize tomorrow so we have decided to join them and spend a few days on the beach in Caye Caulker, an island just off the Caribbean coast. There may well be beers (it is my birthday next week) but I feel we have earned them.
The fat lady is beginning to clear her throat in preparation for some vocal exercise – we have been travelling for 28 weeks and only have a single week to go. No more long bus journeys. No more getting up at the crack of dawn. No more touristy tours. We are going to relax.
Anniversaries And Football
Simon Barnett is a changed man.
The World Cup has begun and he has missed an unprecedented 15 out of the 17 games played so far! What has become of this once football-obsessed idiot? He’s travelling. Man. He’s got a wristband and a beard to prove it.
We spent Thursday on a scooter, whizzing from one end of Roatan to the other, stopping in the main town to buy some fresh snapper straight from the processing plant. Annika managed to burn her leg on the exhaust on the way so, when we took a break in a posh resort, the sea water produced an interesting grimace as she waded in for a swim. Ointment applied, lunch consumed and other supplies (including some more rum) purchased, we scooted home and fed ourselves a gorgeous feast.
We’re seven hours behind UK time here so the World Cup games kick off quite early – we missed the opening match as it started at 8am but I managed to pitch up to the Sundowners bar by 12.30pm, just in time to see the useless French struggle and fail to put anything past the Uruguayans. The game was pretty unremarkable, save for a few amusing shouts of “Out of bounds” and the like but was made memorable for me by a guy from the US asking me who won the South Africa/Mexico game earlier. “It was one all”, I replied. “Yeah, but who won?”, came the baffling response, summing up my feelings regarding people who don’t really like football pretending that they love it just because the World Cup is on.
Once the final whistle blew, I headed off for the dive shop and did my third dive of the week, really getting into my stride now. In the evening, for the first time in ages, Annika and I drank a little too much and both of us woke up hungover and abandoned our plans to go and watch the Argies at 8am. It was never gonna happen really, was it?!
The England game had to be seen though, especially as we were playing the USA and the bar clientele was mainly from that part of the world. I was slightly disappointed at the level of whooping and yee-hah’ing in the event and the atmosphere was rather subdued overall. Still, I won some money on the result, correctly predicting that we would struggle to win, despite looking quite good for the first 20 minutes. So that was nice.
As soon as the game was over and the money was in the bag, we scampered off down the road, did our last dive of the week and sat down to enjoy the last sunset of our week of holiday in Roatan.
On 12th June 2004, two friends from university found themselves in a drunken embrace which, to everyone’s surprise – particularly their own – turned into an actual proper relationship. So this was our 6th anniversary. We found a nice restaurant down by the sea and raised a toast to the wonder of us – with water melon juice as we were both still hung over.
Our last day on Roatan began at 6am as we had a very long way to travel and had no idea how to get there. Livingston, in Guatemala, was the stated goal and so we took a taxi to the early ferry to begin our quest. Thirteen hours later, we checked into a motel-style dump of a place in a miserable town called Puerto Barrios, admittedly having made it to Guatemala but having fallen an agonisingly brief boat ride short of our target. The day featured two taxis, three buses -of decreasing comfort levels – a ferry and a collectivo (a minivan stuffed with locals). The last bus in particular was a killer – one of the old American school buses with rock hard seats and thumping music which wasn’t quite loud enough to prevent my exhausted mind from going to sleep, despite the low comfort levels and the torrent of sweat that was cascading down my back.
Our room was incredibly hot and stuffy, however, and I was glad of my forty winks on the bus as it was around 35 more winks than I managed overnight. So off we set at 7am for the boat trip across the bay to Livingston on our way to Rio Dulce. After having rushed around town trying to get money in the sweltering early morning sunshine, the lancha (a small boat with a motor) sped it’s way across the water, producing a cool breeze which felt like manna from heaven. But all too soon, it was all over and we docked on the other side.
Livingston was a nice little town, half populated by Garifuna people, descended from African slaves that had revolted in St. Vincent and been dumped here by the British. After breakfast, we decided it was nice enough to stay and booked a room, before heading out for what was billed as a nice walk to some waterfalls, along the beach.
When we reached the beach on the other side of the peninsula, a local character began to speak to us about the rubbish on the beach. “I never see ma home town looking like dis”, he lamented, casting a hand towards the mountain of broken branches and plastic bottles and other junk which lined the narrow strip of sand which lay ahead. It did look pretty dreadful and when he informed us that it had been blown in by the storm that came through a fortnight before and was as bad as this, if not worse, all the way down to the waterfalls, we accepted his kind offer of a lift in his boat to avoid having to clamber over it all. Of course, it was something of a money-making scheme for him and he did overcharge us but it was interesting talking to him. He knew of Brixton and had some friends there apparently, which didn’t seem that unlikely to me – I could easily imagine him wandering down Electric Avenue on a Wednesday afternoon.
The waterfalls were more like a series of small pools but afforded us the chance to cool down for a while which was much needed and, after lunch, we began the long and rubbish-strewn walk home. The beaches are covered with plastic bottles, shoes, old pill bottles, polystyrene, toys and the like, the smallest items gathering at the points where small streams run out into the main river, covering the surface completely and creating an odd, solid-looking surface on the crap-filled water. It was into one of these well disguised pits of horribleness that I unwittingly stepped, realising just too late to regain my balance and plunging in up to my waist (on one side at least) in the stuff. It was not, I’m sure you can imagine, pleasant.
A nice cold shower washed it all off when I got back and a good couple of hours sleep crept up on me unexpectedly when I finally laid down. It had been an exhausting few days and I had to stop. Dinner was a lovely local fish curry but went by in a daze as I was so tired.
Onward we trudged and next morning we took another boat up river to an isolated place buried deep in the jungle called Finca Tatin. Run by an absentee dad who’d left his energetic son careering around the place, looked after by an American couple who’d been travelling for 11 years (!) the place was really quiet (bar the Israeli contingent and the hyper child) and so relaxing. There were plenty of activities available for us to do but we managed only to sit in the hammocks outside our hut and read all day. Heaven.
This morning, we took the same boat further up stream to Rio Dulce, at the opening of a large lake, where we are staying for yet another single night (again, in a wooden hut) before we go to Lanquin to see a place called Semuc Champney inland tomorrow. We’ve decided to cram as much of Guatemala in as we can as we are now only two weeks away from the end of the trip and we have factored five days on the beach in Belize at the end to recover. It really is all go.
Roasting Roatan Means No Tan
We have come travelling to the hottest place on the planet. At least, that’s how it feels to my English whiteboy body!
The average temperature of any given day since we arrives in Honduras has been around 34 degrees – and it only drops to the high 20′s at night. The new theme of the trip is sweating.
We started our first day in Copan Ruinas nice and early in order to try and avoid the hottest part of the day. We also thought that arriving at the ruins of the ancient Mayan city of Copan at opening time would prevent the experience from being ruined (no pun intended but pun plaudits gratefully accepted) by the usual hordes of tourists that these places tend to attract. How wrong we were – on both counts!
The short walk out of town to the entrance to the ruins was done slowly, the heat of the day already beginning to be felt, even at 8am. Once inside the compound it became clear that in this area, out of season really does mean out of season – there was virtually no-one there! It is a truly incredible site and, after wandering around for a couple of hours, I decided that it was one of my favourite ruins of the trip so far. The area of the city that we saw was used for ceremonies and the like and is exceptionally well preserved in places. It must have been an amazing thing to find, hidden in the jungle, hundreds of years after the whole place was abandoned, the Mayan people who lived here having plundered the land so indiscriminately that they destroyed their environment and could no longer feed themselves. I was sure that their demise reminded me of something similar in the modern day but, for the life of me, I could not recall what it was.
There was another, more residential area of ruins further down the road so we decided to head there when we’d seen the main part and it was this walk – merely 2km down the road – that began to hurt. We wandered through the jungle, looking at the ruins of people’s houses but by this point I was beginning to melt and the walk back nearly killed me. On our return, we devoured a rejuvenating lunch and spent the afternoon sitting in hammocks at the hotel, reading.
The evening was notable only for the entertainment of splashing around town looking for a restaurant that was open as it was lashing it down with rain again and most places had closed.
We’d booked another day trip for the next day – a visit to a local finca where they grow coffee and cocoa as well as a myriad of different types of fruit. The day began with me trying to quiz our flatbed truck driver, Alex – a local guy – about Honduras’ up and coming World Cup campaign as I’d promised to find out some info for my other website, The Real FA Cup. The ‘interview’ was quite hard work as we bounced along an extremely rutted road at breakneck speed on our way up to the finca and at times it was a struggle to remember all that he had said.
When we arrived, it was time to find an appropriate cowboy hat and, once again, climb onto the stupidest of the animal kingdom for a couple of hours of horse riding. I was informed that my steed’s name was, reassuringly, the Spanish word for ‘Lightning’ and I set off into their small paddock to practice driving him, for I am sure that’s the correct word. As it turned out, he only wanted to go left so we agreed that that’s what we should do and set off – left.
The ride, through coffee plantations and cardamom fields was pretty spectacular and my confidence on Lightning increased as time went on and, by the time we were heading back – having sat and watched helplessly, while three of our guides administered some much-needed medicine to an ailing bull in one of the fields – I was really ‘at one’ with him, even managing a proper gallop towards the end.
Exhausted, we all sat down to some superb food cooked by the finca owners family and then relaxed in the garden, talking to Alex about the political situation in the country at the moment, their ex-leader, Manuel Zalaya, having been forced to flee the country recently but promising to return any day and oust the new, US-backed regime.
The afternoon featured a tour of the coffee processing facility which was built in three years in the 1930′s and is incredibly rudimentary and an hour or two spent in yet another area of hot springs, soothing our aching muscles from the horse riding.
Next morning, we had to take a ridiculously early bus – at 5.15am – to try and make it to La Ceiba in time to catch the last ferry to the Caribbean island of Roatan. We made it, but only after spending a total of five hours waiting for various bus connections on the way. We arrived on Roatan at 6pm, the journey having taken nearly 14 hours – and there was me thinking that the long bus journeys had finished.
The last few days, and possibly a few days more after today, have been spent on the island as we are a bit ‘travelled out’ and need a rest.
We’d booked an expensive hotel for the first three nights and simply lounged around, reading for the first two days – staying out of the incredible heat and limping from shade to shade. Our hotel, as it turned out, wasn’t exactly the luxurious accommodation the price demanded though, so we’ve now moved to a cheaper place which has it’s own kitchen, allowing us some more freedom to cook some of the local fish and do some diving. However, our new place is buried in a woodland of mango and coconut trees and they are both in season at the moment. Every 4 or 5 minutes, a small rustling sound can be heard before one of the aforementioned fruits dislodges itself from its tree and demonstrates Newton’s 2nd Law by plummeting to Earth – stopping only briefly on the way down to thud onto someone’s roof before landing.
The diving on Roatan (well, strictly speaking ‘off Roatan’ I suppose) is absolutely superb. Most of my dives so far have required a reasonably long boat ride to get to the dive site but here, they are all within 20 minutes of the island which means less faff and more time diving. Our first dive was slightly ruined for me by my mask constantly letting water in, causing me to spend more time clearing it than looking at the fish. By the second dive, however, I had it sorted and really enjoyed the whole dive, seeing huge grouper, large crabs, some barracuda and a massive shoal or two of bright purple fish with white mouths whose name I can’t recall, some of which I nearly touched, they were so close! We even saw a turtle the previous day when we were out snorkeling. All in all, it’s a great place to dive and to prove it, Annika is, at this very minute, out learning how to deep dive (nitrogen narcosis, anyone?!) and we’re both off out again later.
Our future plans are still undecided as yet. We are going to spend another couple of days here but whether we’ll be here for England’s first World Cup game or not, I don’t know. There are a lot of Americans on the island and I have a sneaking suspicion the Yanks are gonna turn us over. Do I really want to be surrounded by them if they do? Hmmm.
