Well hello there,
I hope everyone is doing well at home. Things have been a bit crazy here. Some of you wanted crazy, so here it comes...but first, I will update where I left off last.
On Monday, we took a boat at 7 am from San Pedro on Ambergris Caye to the mainland and caught a bus in Belize City to El Remate in Guatemala (which is near Tikal). The bus ride was ok, VERY hot, no ac, bumpy dirt roads a lot of the way (so lots of warm dust coming at you!) We got through the border no problem, although some people on our bus werent so lucky and were left behind. We met this older guy (from Texas!) who lives part of the time in Guatemala, but we didnt like him. Supriginsly for living abroad he is very closeminded. We got to El Remate and aside from two other people, were the only ones in the hotel!! This is not the high season of tourism in that area.
The hotel was AMAZING!!! It was like a little oasis. We had hammocks outside our rooms, it was great. There was a fruit garden on the grounds and trees shaped like animals, and it was all on a lake. That evening we walked around the 'town' (a street) and I bought two shirts. We went down to the lake and saw TONS of animals!! We saw all of the moms and babies of the following animals-chickens, pigs, horses and goats. The babies were SO cute!! I fed some of the horses grass, I wanted to hold a baby piggy but I couldnt get close enough to them. After walking around we went back and had dinner in the hotel, and it was sooo good. They even had an entire vegetarian menu!! This was a miracle for me since I have had such a hard time finding food so far. The food there was very delicioso. The hotel is rated as a 'green' resort. For the definition of green, refer back to email number 1.
The next day we got up at 4 something (am!!) to head to Tikal for the day. Oh ya, have I mentioned that it is crazy hot down here? It is literally 100 in the shade (In Guatemala). I have never felt heat like this, it is horrible, but I am adjusting. So anyways, we went to Tikal and on our little bus on the way there met a cool guy from Ireland name Connor who is traveling through Latin America until September! He has been to every continent except Antarctica, meeting people like him make me feel like a very novice traveler!! We also met kinda a weird girl from Spain, she was a bit different... As we drove to Tikal, the sun was rising and the sunrise was absolutely beautiful! Like nothing I have ever seen before, the sun looked like a big ball of fire in the sky, with no other colors around it, just the ball of fire. It was really crazy. Unfortunately we didnt get a very clear picture of it because we were driving in a car. But it is definately a sight I will never forget. We got to Tikal and the four of us (weird Spain girl, Irish Connor and us) went through the park together. At the entrance to buy tickets there were guys with massive guns, which they didnt even have at the border! A little overkill if you ask me, but apparenlty they are very protective of Tikal and are afraid of what those out of control tourists might do!!
Tikal is amazing. We got to the park around 6 am or so. Which was great because it didnt feel like you were being cooked alive. It was prob only (only!) around 80 or so. The park was pretty much empty, we had it to ourselves for the most part (perk of going in the off season). There are howler monkeys in the park and they sound like screaming banshies (sp?) or something. Or for any of you who have seen I am Legend (the Will Smith movie) they sound like the rabies people! It was cool, but if i was in the woods in the dark it was scare the crap out of me. We saw a couple and a baby!! Thanks to a guide that pointed them out to us. I have a moderate fear of heights, which is getting better due to all of the high related attractions I have had to go on while traveling. But the pyramids/temples here are VERY steep, VERY high and the steps are prob around 2 feet high. I dont have a good history on stairs ( I tend to fall and sprain my ankle a lot on them...) so I walked up on my hands and feet, everyone thought it was funny because it took me FOREVER to get up because I took it so slowly. But hey, better safe then sorry right? People have fallen off and died from these things! The view was amazing. It is crazy to think that these things were built thousands of years ago without tecnology, it is just amazing and crazy to think about as you look at them and look down from the tops. We were in the park till around 3 that day. It got ridicoulisly hot, over 110. We were glad we got all the temples done BEFORE it got that hot, some crazy people showed up as we were leaving! Oh, and I killed a spider (a tiny, tiny baby spider) and everyone gave me crap saying it was a senseless death. They eat animals!!! haha.
After coming back from Tikal, we walked around the grounds of the hotel. Kristina was on a tarantula hunt. There are apprx 150 tarantulas on the grounds. There were golf ball sized wholes all over the lawn (where they hang out underneath) and as I was walking on it, I started to freak out, envisioning a tarantula coming out to get me with its fangs out and front legs up. So I ran off the lawn, haha. For those of you who dont know I am TERRIFIED of spiders. I have severe arachnophobia. But pobre Kristina wasnt able to find one. Thank god. After the failed tarantula hunt we walked down to the lake and talked to some locals. It was really cool. So pretty much no one speaks english here, like not even a few words. I have been doing all of our communicating in spanish almost 100% of the time. It has been cool though, lots has come back to me, and there never has been a time where someone was like what? or confused as to what I was saying. A few people have commented on how suprised they are at how much I understand and speak the language. Now I cant wait to take spanish again next year in grad school! I really like life in Guatemala, at least of what I saw of it. Life is very relaxed and slow.
The next day, we got up early yet again because we had an 8 am flight to Costa Rica. And thus begins our first very crazy day.... I have been very suprised this entire trip that nothing crazy has happened because crazyness tends to follow me wherever I go. But, Central America finally slapped me in the face and woke me up to reality in a very big way reminding me that I am traveling in developing countries and nothing can go perfectly, after all, its me! So here begins that day of hell that refused to die....
So like I said, we woke up early, well, actually a hotel person woke us up because he thought we were going to Tikal and we were going to be late. We werent, our taxi was coming about an hour after the Tikal one, but thankfully he woke us up, because the alarm wasnt turned on and we would have missed our flight! oh ya, and when he knocked on the door, it scared the crap out of me (it didnt even wake Kristina up, but I am the worlds lightest sleeper) and as it woke me up, I fall out of bed onto concrete! It felt nice, a warm wake up call. That woke her up. I forgot about speaking spanish to the guy because I was half asleep and he only speaks spanish, so it was an interesting couple of minutes there till I became conscious. Oh, and as Kristina was walking the path back to the main entrance of the hotel she saw a tarantula just hanging out in the walkway. Thankfully, I had cut through the garden and missed it. She said it was really little and she wasnt sure if it was alive, so she nudged it with her shoe and it put its front leg up and waved it around. She said it looked like a baby. I am SO glad I didnt see it, I would have freaked out. So, a crisis was averted, we got up on time and made our flight, and I didnt see a tarantula.
We flew from Flores, Guatemala and had a three hour layover in Guatemala City, which seemed to go on forever. But our flight eventually came and we got to San Jose fine. We had a private shuttle taking us from the airport to Monteverde, around 4 hours away. All was fine until about 45 minutes into our journey. Keep in mind, we left at 630 am, it was around 345 at this point. I was in and out of sleep when we pulled into a parking lot with a local eatery. Kristina said the car had been making really bad noises. So the guy gets out to see what the problem is and pulls out a broken belt that was sitting on top of the engine. Not good. So Kristina and I go and eat, he says he has to find someone else to drive us because the car obviously is going no where. We were fine because we were hungry. so we go and eat, the food was pretty nasty. it was fried and bland. After about an hour, we go back to our driver and he says that it will be at least another 45 minutes until our driver gets here. So we wait. The food we ate made me not feel very well, it was greasy, but I was ok. Oh, and there was a little husky puppy there with a guy that I got to pet, it was sooo cute and little!!
So the new guy finally shows up and we get in his van and everything is fine until about 45 minutes or so into the trip. We hit a bunch of traffic. He says the highway is being worked on and its down to one lane (for both directions) but he says we are close to getting through it, maybe another 20 min. We didnt really care because where we were stopped there were a bunch of fireflys flying around! It was really awesome, its like little fireworks flying everywhere, it really is a neat site, they put of a ton of light when they are in groups. Anyways, we eventually start moving, then we stop, about 30 seconds later. We only had 2 kilometers to go (I guess a little less then a mile, but I could be wrong), and it took us hours, and hours...and hours...and hours to get that distance. Prob about 3. It was horrible. We were pretty much in the same place for that whole time. The guy didnt speak any english, so I was talking with him in Spanish the whole time about a lot of different things. Everything from 9/11, school, the construction on the highway and a ton of other stuff. It was weird to have real conversations in a different language, it usually had been just to get what I needed, information or whatever, so that was cool. So anyways, after about three hours, we get through the mile stretch and stop at a gas station to get food. I really was not feeling well at that point so I got some 7 up and crackers and ate some rolaids, it helped out. That is, until we got to a road that is worse then the Oregon Trail, seriously. We turn off on to this 'road' that is total dirt, in the middle of no where. There are no houses, no lights, no nothing. Then he stops the car all of a sudden. Kristina and I started to really freak out because there literally was no one around, no houses, no cars no nothing and we were in the middle of the woods on this trail thing. He turns back to us and asks for my flashlight and gets out of the car. When he leaves, I tell Kristina to get out her elephant she bought in Belize, it is made of stone and has tusks and prob weighs a good 5 pounds or so. She gets it out and we wait for him to come back. He says he was just checking the tire and it is partially flat, and then he drives on. We were both still freaked out, but he didnt seem like a bad guy. Kristina asks how much longer we will have to be on this dirt road, because it was insanely bumpy, and he says for about an hour. When he says that I am just like oh god, I am never gonna make it on this road, I already felt sick and now I was getting car sick from bouncing to and fro. At this point my fear diminishes because the only thing that I can focus on is the fact that at any moment I keep expecting to throw up. I dont, this lasts for about half an hour. Then all of a sudden...out of nowhere, I puke ALL over the place, mainly all over me. I didnt realize I was going to, and tried to get it into a ziploc bag that I had a bunch of stuff in, but this was like volcanic eruption style and we were bumping and being jostled around the road so it just kinda went everywhere, and I just kept throwing up. I finally stop and go, Kristina, I just puked. She thankfully was in the seat in front of me and the headrest spared her from being covered. She turns around and goes really, how bad, and then looks and is like oh god and starts to gag, she sticks her head totally out the window as not to puke too. We tell the driver and he asks if we want to stop and I just say no, keep going. So I am literally, COVERED in my own vomit. It is everywhere. I grab a clean shirt out of my bag and just start wiping it off the seat and stuff first, and then get as much off of me as possible. I realize as I am cleaning that as I bent over when I was puking that a ton of it ended up down my shirt, which had now spilled into my bra and down my shirt. So literally, I was covered. I couldnt do anything but laugh. It was either laugh or cry. I kept looking at the back of Kristina leaning out the window gagging and I couldnt help it. And it smelled BAD. Shes like, I can smell the bile!!! It was bad, lol. So I eventually get it pretty much cleaned up, I had these little wet wipes in the bag I barfed in which helped. About 20 min after the incident, I realize my foot feels weird, I had puke all over my foot (which was in a flip flop) and I had sloushed it all over the floor. It was in between my toes, on my legs, ugh, it was bad and I was out of anything to clean it up with. So we had about 45 min left of the drive from the beginning of the incident, and I had to take my fleece off because it was covered in throw up, and I had to have the window open all the way and it was raining, so I spent 45 min in the cold, all wet from the rain and puke, all smelly and freezing. We finally arrive and I just wanted to die. I was so embarrassed, I puked all over this guys van and I was covered in brown and black throw up ( I had eaten beans, haha). The driver said it was un milagro (a miracle) that we finally arrived, he was right! We checked int the hostel and I washed off all of my clothes and myself and bag and everything else. The bag I threw up in had all the stuff that I carried around with me that I would need or might need during the day (band aids, clif bars, wet wipes, aleve, chapstick, my inhaler etc...) Well even though I had prob about $10 worth of stuff in there, I decided the bag was a lost cause, all covered in puke and all. But, my inhaler and dramamine (which I will now be using religiously from now on for the rest of the trip, it is anti-nausea medicine) so I had to dig in the bag to get them out. Trust me, even when its your own vomit, it doesnt make it any better. Well, after that I went to bed, I needed it. We had a looong day, 630 am to around 11 or 12 at night, and it was a bad, bad, day for me. I guess trouble comes in 3s).
So the next day (today) I got my laundry done because, well it was covered in nastiness. I was still sick, I think it was food poisining and car sickness combined, and I stayed in bed for most of the morning. We went to the Cloudforest around noon and did a suspension bridge tour. I was feel better by that point. The park was really awesome, very beautiful. But unfortunately, a torrential downpour happened out of seemingly no where, so we got SOAKED, through rainjackets. It was kinda cool after we were thouroughly soaked, we jumped in the puddles because we were already wet, so what did it matter? We then headed back after only a few hours and I went back to bed because I was feeling really sick again, and now we are watching a movie in our hostel. And thats about it, a low key day after yesterday. Tomorrow we take two vans and a boat to our next place, Arenal Volcano area. I will be thouroughly drugging myself as to hopefully avoid a repeat of yesterday.
Oh ya, and I forgot to mention in the last email that on Ambergris Caye, we met a guy who had a baby raccoon! The mom had abanoned the baby and so he was taking care of it. He was bottle feeding it and it was sleeping in his lap in a towel. I got to pet it, it was so cute!! I just had to mention it because I thought it was really cute and cool.
Ok, so thats it. Thanks for reading! Hopefully you enjoyed your dose of craziness.
Talk to you later,
Kimberly
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