Mexico 2011

It's always a bit hard to get motivated to do anything after a long travel day. Today was again one of those lazy days.. We just walked around the city a bit, ate, bought some souvenirs and got our laundry done.

The local revolutionary group EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) is pretty visible in here, they even have their own supportive souvenirs shop.. Now I have an EZLN coffee mug again. :P

We also made a plan for the rest of the trip. From here we will fly to Mexico City via Tuxtla Gutierrez, then take a bus from the airport to nearby city of Cuernavaca, stay there for a couple of nights and return to Mexico City three nights before our flight home. There's an archeological site of Xochicalco nearby Cuernavaca, that one we should visit..

For tomorrow morning we booked a horseback riding trip to a nearby village. We did that two years ago with Timo, but Laura hasn't so.. More horses. :)

Damn it's cold in here at nighttime. There are no heating or insulation in the houses and temperature drops to almost 0C at night.. Pile of warm blankets and the temperature can be survived, but the downside is that even the cats suffer of the coldness and come to sleep under our blankets.. By the way, there are five or six of them in the hostel.. :P

Now it's 10:30am and temperature is climbing towards nice and comfortable +26C.. Much better.

Yesterday we also visited a local doctor.. There is a Mexican pharmacy chain which has a low-cost medical consulting available in the pharmacies. Laura has been busy playing banjo (spanish baño pronounced as banjo = toilet) all the time after some Guatemalan water and after a couple of days we though it would be better to get some medicine for her.

The 1.83€ doctor seemed to be professional, and Laura got some antibiotic pills, re-hydrants and some other stuff, all costing around 5€... Now she's getting better already. Earlier we were thinking of taking a hostel room with "2 beds and one banjo"..

Today has been a long day.. We took a shuttle bus from Antigua to San Cristobal de las Casas in Mexico, and did not know exactly how long the bus would take. Different websites showed durations between five and twelve hours, and seems like the later was closer to truth.. Ten hours and ten minutes in a relatively uncomfortable minivans (changed bus a couple of times) and we finally arrived to San Cristobal. On the way there was snow on roadsides. Even local people were photographing that, so I guess it isn't very common.. And damn it's cold here. Something like 10-15C and it has been raining heavily earlier. :P

Well, at least our hostel room in here is great, we have a spacious room with a big private balcony.. And unfortunately we also have a cat, who moved into our room as soon as we opened the balcony door. Seems to be quite attracted to humans..

Yesterday was spent by climbing to Pacaya, an active volcano between Antigua and Guatemala City. First a minibus ride of about one hour and then we started climbing to the mountain. The steep climb was about 2.5 kilometers long, and eventually all of us switched to horseback riding as the climb was really hard... And besides, horses are fun.

Activity level of the volcano varies, and unfortunately there were no hot lava streams at the moment.. Just some hand-warm lava and a really hot smaller crater where we were baking some marshmallows and sausages. The air coming out from the crater was hot enough to light fire on wood.

There was also a cave on the lava, and inside the cave the temperature was sauna-like. Too bad we didn't take beers and towels with us..

Getting down from the volcano wasn't an easy task either, running or sliding down really steep hills in knee-deep lava gravel.

Today has been a city exploring and souvenir buying day. Laura found a new Mayan bedspread to bring home, in addition to some postcards, a shoulder bag made of coffee-sackcloth etc.

So far we haven't done much anything else than just walking around the city. The city is really small, so it took just a couple of hours to get to know it all.. Now resting in the hostel and thinking what to do next. :)

Seems like Guatemalan buses are just fine. In the morning we took a bus from Puerto Barrios to Guatemala City, and the 5 hour bus ride was very comfortable on a modern double-decker bus. As all the local long-distance buses here, this one stopped halfway so we could grab some food from a restaurant. The bus company seems to take security pretty seriously, there was a security check when boarding the bus and the bus was always guarded by armed security guards.

As Guatemala City is as unsafe as it is, we didn't feel like going anywhere from the bus station. In these countries it's actually comfortable to stay near heavily armed security guards.. The bus station was protected by a dozen of guards armed with pump-action shotguns..

We waited for two hours on the bus station and continued to La Antigua Guatemala on a minivan. The 45 kilometers trip took like 1.5 hours, as it seemed to be rush hour in Guatemala City and getting out of the city was really slow.

Eventually we reached Antigua and booked ourself into a nice hostel. Antigua is totally different than Guatemala City or Puerto Barrios. It's an UNESCO world heritage site, a beatiful colonial town which is supposed to be perfectly safe and it feels like that. Relieving after those two other cities.. :P

Tomorrow it's sightseeing day, and on Saturday we should climb to Volcan Pacaya, an active volcano next to Antigua.

Heh, by the way, Laura had been searching for me and Timo earlier somewhere in Mexico, asking hostel reception for "Dos hombres grandes" and actually got understood. :P

Today we visited a nearby Tropical rainforest conservation area. There was a "nature park" made mainly for American cruise ship tourists, but at the moment there are no cruise ships in the area so the park was closed. By our local friends we managed to get in there and had a nice walk in a peaceful rainforest, swimming in a dry waterfall for a while.

Too bad we didn't see almost any wildlife in the forest, at least not anything larger than insects. There was a lot of birds, but they stayed in the treetops out of sight. I spotted a snake on a tree, but it was also pretty far away. On the way back we stopped by one of Saija's student families, having local lunch with them.

After getting back home I slept for an hour or two while Laura, Timo, Saija and some locals went to swim in a nearby swimming pool. Not much more to mention about this day, we just had a dinner in a beach restaurant, a couple of drinks in a bar and came back home to sleep.

Running water is still a problem in the city, apparently the reason is a broken pipeline or something.. Now in the evening we are getting running cold water again, but not during the day. The second missing thing is Internet access, that's why the blog entries are coming late. No GPRS or 3G, and no working WIFI networks..

Tomorrow morning we will take a bus to Antigua, a mountain city on the other side of Guatemala. I'm pretty happy we found out that Litegua, the local bus company operates bus from here to Guatemala City and the same company then continues to Antigua. That way we can just switch bus in the terminal without actually having to get out of the terminal and navigate to another one in the highly unsafe Guatemala City. Only a direct bus to Antigua would have been better, but that doesn't exist.

Anyway, Antigua should be a nice and safe city, it's just the port and border cities and the capital that are a bit uncomfortable.. And that's nice for a chance. :)

Early in the morning we woke up, collected our stuff and took a taxi to the airport. Well, "taxi" and "airport".. The taxi was a golf cart just like almost every vehicle on the island, and the so called airport you have already seen in the pictures from yesterday. Check-in procedure could be called informal, there were no security checks or anything like that.

In a short while Tropicair Cessna Caravan came, slightly late of schedule, and almost immeditly took off again towards Belize International airport. We stopped there for a while and continued to Belize Municipal Airstrip, which was just that.. A short gravel road next to the sea, with two terminals the same size as the one on Caye Caulker.

We switched plane there and continued to Punta Gorda, shortly stopping in Placencia on the way. I guess taking a flight wasn't a bad decision, it was pretty fun and way more comfortable than the bus ride would have been.

In Punta Gorda we just sent some postcards to Finland and bought tickets to the ferry to Guatemala. Ferry was once again a bit of an overstatement, it was a small boat and crossing the bay to Puerto Barrios, Guatemala was a slightly wet trip as bigger waves splashed some water inside.

We came to Puerto Barrios to see Timo's friend Saija, who works here in some humanitarian projects and we are also staying with the same local family than she does. They have a separate apartment in the house which is pretty comfortable and cheap accomodation for us. Too bad there are some problems with running water in the city, so it's only available randomly..

When our boat arrived Guatemala, Saija came to meet us on the pier, we went to stamp our passports, find some food and later in the evening visited two local bars for a couple of beers, one of them built in an old cargo ship hull at the harbour. Puerto Barrios by the way is one of the biggest banana export harbours. Most bananas produced in the Central America continue their way to the customers through Puerto Barrios and there's Chiquita and Dole containers and trucks everywhere..

Unfortunately our movement around in Puerto Barrios is slightly limited, as the city is considered to be quite unsafe during night time and only trusted taxis can be used as transport. Even in the daytime it's better to move around in groups and as less as possible.. Guatemala in general is not one of the safest countries and Puerto Barrios is the gateway of drug and human trafficing to Honduras, ruled by criminal gangs. Not exactly a best vacation spot, but we should be moving to much better Antigua in a day or two.

Wonder why me and Timo never book any flights when sober. Some Cuba Libre glasses, and we didn't feel like an hour on a boat and five on a bus tomorrow would be a good idea. Especially because we would arrive Punta Gorda too late to catch the boat to Guatemala, and the hotel situation in Punta Gorda seems to be bad, there's no cheap hostels available.

Tropicair, a local airline is flying the same route with a Cessna in less than an hour flight time, so.. Even if the flight cost a bit below 100€ per person it saved us one traveling day, maybe 30€ bus/ferry costs and 20-50€ accomodation costs. So, tomorrow morning it's a Cessna flight. Hopefully they fly better than on the second link.... :)

http://www.tropicair.com

http://www.ambergristoday.com/html/archives/2008/images/vol35_st02_01.jpg

Today is our last day on Caye Caulker, tomorrow we should be taking a water taxi or a Tropic Air flight to Belize City and continue our journey down south to Punta Gorda. There we will stay for a night and then take a speedboat to Puerto Barrios, Guatemala.

Just before the darkness fell we walked to the airstrip with Laura, just to take a few photos and see the southern part of the island. There's quite a lot of local fauna around, like iguanas, land crabs and a million kind of birds.. Probably one of the iguanas scared us quite well by making loud noise in the dark jungle near the airstrip. Locals said iguanas can make pig-like sounds, so that probably was an iguana.. :)

Today we continue following the motto of Caye Caulker, Go Slow. Breakfast, dinner, getting our laundry done and that's it so far.

Earlier in the morning my laptop froze in middle of use and didn't boot anymore, just beeped. Beep codes signalled a system board / security chip error, which exactly wasn't a good thing in middle of nowhere.

I was mentally prepared to find and buy some cheap netbook in Belize City, but decided to see if I could do anything about this Lenovo X60s first. In a local shop we found a kit of small screwdrivers for tools, and after a small dismantling session outdoors the laptop successfully booted up. I guess it was a combination of moist air, dirt in connectors etc..

Pretty happy with my laptop now, wouldn't have been able to update this blog etc without. :)