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.
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