Guatever

Flores turned out to be a very picturesque town with colonial architecture, winding alleyways and colourful houses located on a small island in the middle of a lake. We happened to arrive during a local festival celebrating some Saint, but it seemed to be more of an excuse to blow up fireworks for a fortnight rather than pay respect to religious deities. After sunset every night the explosions would begin, most of the time sound was more important than appearance and for the finale a kid would strap a wooden frame on top of himself, and proceed to run around like a bull with fireworks and crackers firing off him straight into the crowd of panicked onlookers. We stayed in town for a few days, swimming in the lake and enjoying the crazy festival but the main reason people come here is because of it's proximity to Tikal. We got up before sunset one morning and stayed the entire day until sunset walking around the ancient Mayan temple city. I've seen a few temples by now, but I think this is my favourite one so far, mainly due to the fact that we were pretty much alone the entire time, surrounded by dense jungle with birds and monkeys all around us.

After this my Dutch travel companions and I left Flores and headed for Semuc Champey now joined by a New Zealander called Georgia. We got to our extremely relaxed hostel Utopia by the side of a river in the middle of nowhere after a long trip by minibus and pickup truck. We chilled her for a couple of days, went on a pretty daunting trip swimming and climbing in the nearby caves by candlelight and then hiked up to the beautiful natural pools and waterfalls. Then one morning I woke up early and felt like going solo again, so I left the girls a dramaqueen note and got on a series of different road vehicles finally arriving in Antigua. Antigua was yet another very picturesque, colourful and colonial town. It was once the capital of Guatemala but people moved when the city was destroyed in an earthquake, who would have known living on a faultline surrounded by volcanoes could be dangerous?

I wandered around the cobblestoned streets and markets during the days and crawled around the pubs by night. The girls caught up with me after a day and we all went on a very long daytrip to an active volcano which had erupted just a few days earlier, it took a lot longer than expected and the driving felt slightly dangerous at the best of times but once we could see the river of lava flowing down the side of the mountain it was all worth it. My next stop was the small town of San Pedro by the side of Lake Atitlan and once again the Dutch girls caught up with me. I planned on staying a couple of days, but quickly realised how easy it was to get stuck here. Despite the multitude of activities available I did absolutely nothing during the days, just lounging by the hostel pool, swimming in the lake and drinking way to much cheap alcohol.

After celebrating Australia Day hard I decided it was time to get out of this evil circle and took a day off drinking, this proved to be a bad idea as I quickly got very ill with a high fever, a cold and a terrible cough. I took this opportunity to get out of the country which had given me a lot of amazing memories and caught a minibus down to El Salvador.

UnBelizeable

I arrived in Belize City early in the morning, and decided I wanted to head straight out to the the island of Caye Caulker. Unfortunately I brought the same bad weather with me from Mexico which wasn't great considering the islands are famed for having the largest barrier-reefs in the northern hemisphere and optimal snorkelling conditions. However if the weather was the same as in Mexico everything else couldn't be more different. The tiny country lodged in the middle of Central America is the only one not to speak Spanish, with English being the official language in Belize, although sometimes the broad Caribbean accents could be harder for me to comprehend than Spanish.

Even if the weather was pretty lousy for most of my stay in Cage Caulker, the people were friendly and I walked around the relaxed "Go Slow" island a few times, between colourful wooden houses, eating delicious lobster dishes and occasionally washed it down with some local rum or beer. Towards the end of my stay here even the weather turned for the better and I could actually enjoy the fantastic snorkelling, seeing all kinds of different sealife including some pretty intimidating sharks and massive stingrays. After almost a week I decided it was time to head out of Belize and caught the ferry back to Belize City with Nicky, Sophie and Eva, three Dutch girls I met at the hostel. We then caught a very cramped minibus across the Guatemalan border and eventually to the small lakeside town of Flores.

Yuca-Tan...

We decided that we wanted to make it up to the beaches in Yucatan for New Years and therefor caught a monster of a busride, over the mountains and through the rainforests for 40 hours. At one point we had to stop and wait for more buses, as the Mexican drug cartels had been holding up the buses, and apparantly travelling in convoy is safer, allthough I think a bunch of machinegun gangsters would just rub their hands at the thought of hitting the jackpot and robbing three buses at once. Finally we got to Playa del Carmen unharmed, managed to find a hostel which wasn't fully booked, then decided to make the most of the day and go snorkelling with turtles at a nearby beach.

That night my luck kind of turned for the worse, so far I haven't really had any troubles, but after a big night out I got a taxi back to the hostel to get more money and when I got back in to head back to the club, he drove me for a while, and then locked the doors and told me to hand over all my money. I didn't want to get into an argument in his cab, so handed over the money then he unlocked the doors and pushed me out. I was so annoyed and looked for a stone to throw at his car as he drove off, but couldn't find one in time, so then I stood in the middle of the road with two rocks, holding up every taxi, hoping the same driver would come back and I could at least get some revenge by smashing a window and running. Police must have got wind of this crazy gringo stopping traffic with stones in his hands as soon I heard the sirens, dumped my rocks and saw a group of policemen running towards me. They tackled me to the ground, and started handcuffing me, but when I told them my story and that I wasn't American, they became a lot nicer, asked me where I was staying and gave me a lift back.

The following day we got a short minibus trip up to Cancun and then disaster struck, as one of the straps on my backpack snapped. This is probably one of the worst things that could happen to me at the moment, as my backpack is carrying pretty much everything I own. I set off on a long mission to find anybody who could fix it, and after a few days search I found a girl in a shoeshop who said she'd give it a shot. Two hours of her hard work and my attempts at a broken spanish conversation later, she had done it, I tried to pay but she refused to take my money, so naturally I proposed and told her I would be back in a few years to marry her (If her reparations hold up...) A few hours away from Cancun is the former Mayan town of Chichen Itza, having been named one of the "Seven Modern Wonders of the World" it was overcrowded with tourists but nonetheless a very impressive sight with ancient pyramids and ruins, as we took a bit of time out to see some culture. Apart from that culture shock, Cancun was a few very hectic days, of beaching and large consumptions of alcohol, culminating with a huge New Years Eve party where a few hours after midnight, some random Scotsman came out of nowhere and punched me straight in the eye. This came completly out of the blue and wasn't exactly the start to the New Year I had been hoping for but it wasn't too bad and just left me with a sweet black eye for the coming weeks. Even the weather took a turn for the worse now and we went back to Playa Del Carmen only to find more rain. This wasn't exactly optimal beachweather so after a couple of days here, Tony and I were joined by Mexican Paolina and Kiwi Paul, a couple we'd been hanging out with for a while as we all decided to head south to Tulum. Tulum was a lot more relaxed than the American resort towns of Cancun and Playa, unfortunatly the weather was just as bad if not even worse. We decided to brave it out to the nearby ruins and got absolutly drenched in the heavy rain. We also went swimming in one of the many cenotes that the area is famous for, a cenote is a lake or waterhole which is filled from underground rivers and the water is amazingly clear and fresh. After this it was time to say farewell, not only to my newly found "Pauls" but also to Tony, my Australian travelcompanion who had been by my side ever since Cabo San Lucas more than a month ago. The three of them headed back west, as I caught a nightbus further south, across the border into a new country...

Merry Mex-Mas

We got to Mexico City and managed to navigate the metro system without too many complications, then as we were getting out of the subway-stop next to our hostel we collided with what seemed to be some sort of revolution. Riot police had locked the gates and protesters were trying to break the barricades. Tony and I weren't in a great position stuck in a tight tunnel with our large backpacks and immediately thought of worst case scenarios. It worked out fine in the end and we found out the demonstrations were due to a recent rise in the subway fare prices, from 3 pesos to 5 (roughly 20 US cents to 40.)

On our second night in town we found out that Mexican Football League was holding it's final at the local Azteca Stadium, so naturally we made it our mission to see that. We went with a couple of people from our hostel and managed to scalp cheap tickets outside the stadium and got in to an incredible atmosphere. The stadium holds a bit over 100, 000 people, is the only stadium to host two World Cup finals, the venue where allegedly the "Mexican Wave" was invented and the place where Maradona or God scored that infamous goal using his hand. Unfortunately the local team, Club America, lost and the lively atmosphere got kind of subdued, but all in all it was an amazing experience. We stayed in the city, which by some standards ranks as the largest in the world, for almost a week and had a great time, largely due to the fact we had an amazing guide in Gabriela, a Mexico City girl we met a few weeks prior in Cabo San Lucas. She drove us around the crazy traffic, and showed all different neighbourhoods and sights, even giving us some much needed culture at the Casa Azul, the former house of Frida Kahlo. Then we decided beaches were much needed again and took a long bustrip over the mountains down to the Pacific Ocean, and the small town of Puerto Escondido.

The town's name translates to "Hidden Port" and even if a lot of people have found it by now it really was a beautiful place. We intended on staying for a couple of days and then head up north, but due to Christmas holidays all buses were fully booked and we were "trapped." This turned out to be very fortunate as we could then have a great Australian Christmas feast, with six Aussies, seafood and alcohol galore, Secret Santas and me the token Swede. We ended up staying in this slice of paradise, fishing (didn't catch anything), swimming with turtles and just general beachbumming for a week before we all went our separate ways again and Tony and I could get a bus north towards Yucatan.
(In footwear related news I can bring you the sad message that the trusty flipflops which I have been using since my runin with the Mocambiquan law finally gave in after serving me very well. I decided to buy a new cheap pair in Puerto Escondido, which lasted me all of two days before snapping and therefor I opted to pay the expensive price for a quality pair which will hopefully accompany me for a long time to come!)