Guatemala!!!! PartII

San Marcos La Laguna:


So I guess I left off at Lago Atitlan. Sunday we left our beautiful lakeside paradise so Nitivia could make it back to work on Monday and Maria and I could do our kamikaze mission to see the Mayan ruins at the ancient city of Tikal, which is very far north, almost to Belize. We hoped to only have to do one overnight on the bus but it quickly turned into two because the only bus line that answered the phone on Sunday only did overnight trips.

We caught our bus out of Guate at 9pm and arrived to Flores at a very brisk and dark 4:30am. There was only one guy who was waiting with a van to take tourists to Tikal and although he charged us a lot, there wasn’t much to be done. It worked out well though because we made it to Tikal shortly alter the 6am opening time and ended up in a group tour with what appeared to be mostly South Americans (there was an English group as well but there were lots of them and few Spanish speakers and since we said we could do either one, we went with the Spanish group).

In the main square:




Fun fact: I used to want to be an archaeologist when I was like 10 and I read books and was fascinated by the Mayan Indians. Hence my strong desire to travel an obscene amount for a day of touring.

The view from the highest temple:


Our tour was informative, but it’s hard to absorb much after not that many hours of sleep. Tikal was one of the biggest cities the Maya built, and one number I do remember is that only about 15% of the structures from the city are currently visible. We did a lot of climbing up and down pyramids which absolutely killed my legs (I was surprised at my out-of-shapeness until I realized that I live in a country with no stairs). It’s definitely amazing to see what was built by these people hundreds of years ago and really only increases my curiosity to see more :)





That evening we ate dinner and hung out till our second 9pm bus, which again arrived at 4:30am. Thankfully this time we were able to go back to Nitivia’s and sleep for a couple more hours. When I did get up again, I discovered another volunteer friend online and in Antigua, so of course he berated me to wake up Maria and get down there since it’s not far from Guate. So we did.



Antigua is similar to Granada in Nicaragua, but much more developed (they have a McDonalds!) and tons of gringos!! Very pretty though, and all we really did was eat nachos and walk around.



After a lovely afternoon, we made the trip back to Guate, made dinner, and slept a couple hours until another 4am wake-up for our Ticabus ride to San Salvador. Although we generally had fantastic luck on this trip, our only bad luck came in trying to get to the Ticabus station in both Managua and Guate. Both times the taxis we called did not show up, leaving us either desperately calling taxis or standing on the side of roads at the crack of dawn hoping one would stop. But we made the bus both times so no worries.

Back in San Salvador, we went to an anthropological museum which was interesting because we don’t hear a lot about the indigenous groups that were in Nicaragua but it looked like many of those that were in El Salvador also made their way to Nicaragua.



Maria and I calculated that we spent almost 60 hours on the bus during this 10 day trip (240 hours), ergo we spent about one quarter of the trip on a bus. So I’m back in hot and windy Nicaragua (I won’t even describe the amount of dust I found upon returning home!). I’m busy preparing to leave yet again, this time to work at a student summer English camp for a week. Should be fun and interesting, and I’ll definitely have some good stories to share when I get back.