Hi there!
Welcome to my first ever blog. For those of you not on Facebook, this will be where I post my news for the week along with some of the photos I’ve taken. Hopefully, I can also post links to articles or news that will give you more info. I wrote this entry on Sunday but it has taken me a while to; a. get a decent internet connection and b. learn some blogging basics... I hope you enjoy.
D
So, it’s Sunday today and the church bells are ringing here in San Ignacio, Belize. The sun’s shining, the birds are singing and all is well with the world. Last Sunday I was in not-so-sunny Uckfield spending time with my sister and her family before I headed off for seven months.
Since then I’ve been bouldering at the Castle Climbing Centre in London, flown 4000+ miles, spent a day on a Guatemalan bus and visited some Mayan ruins. It has been an eventful week.
The flights via the US to Guatemala where uneventful and, well, the bouldering is only really interesting if you’re keen on that sort of thing. So I’ll cut to the chase.
It had been six years since I was last in Guatemala and all the locals had told me that crime and gang violence had increased. This did nothing to help my existing paranoia about being robbed. In the capital, I took taxis instead of the local buses and on the bus to Flores I hugged my bag like either it, or I, were a frightened child.
Ten hours on a bus can be very boring. Ordinarily I’d sleep through such a long length of inactivity but fear, and the dark chocolate bar that I’d smuggled into the country, kept me awake. The bloke sat next to me was not the talkative type. I’d said hello when he’d got on but received no reply. He was a big fella too. He would have taken up half my seat if I hadnae used my pointy elbows to keep him at bay. My anticipated chatting to the locals on the bus would have to wait.
At the end of my mammoth bus ride waited Flores, a beautiful island town at the edge of a lake in the north of Guatemala. My journey was not well planned and I arrived at night. Greeted by taxi drivers that buzzed around me like excited mosquitoes, I pushed my way past, in a hurry to retrieve my larger backpack from the hold at the back of the bus before someone else nabbed it for themselves. It’s only a twenty minute walk from the bus station to the hostel I had chosen but wandering around in the dark, laden with possessions in a strange town is not advised. I took a taxi.
View from Flores at sunrise
In the daylight, and went not weighed down with fear and backpacks, Flores is beautiful. I spent the morning taking pictures of the sunrise and the scenery. The mist rising off the lake and surrounding hills made the long journey the day before worthwhile. Bizarrely, some of the local people were out for an early morning jog and some for a swim. I’d never seen this before. Last time I was in Guatemala I went jogging a few times. The quizzical, amused looks I received from the locals made me think that running when you didn’t need to was something they considered at the very least odd, if not totally insane. The joggers of Flores looked well-to-do though. Perhaps an affluent lifestyle has led them the same leisure activities as the rest of us.
