Slideshow links are fixed!

The links have been fixed on the Mexico and Guatemala slideshows. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Mexico and Guatemala Slideshows

Here are our pictures from Mexico and Guatemala. These are uncut so take as much or as little time as you would like to enjoy them and read the captions below each picture for explanation. Simply click on the location link below and then click on the gold button that says "View Slideshow." Enjoy!
Yucatan, Mexico
Chichen Itza, Mexico
Ruta Puuc and Uxmal, Mexico
Campeche and Chiapas, Mexico
Palenque, Mexico
Western Guatemala
Tikal, Guatemala

Guatemala

Our last activity in San Cristobal was a horseback ride to San Juan Chamula, which is a Mayan village just outside of the city. We thought it might be one of those nose-to-tail-mosey-down-the-trail affairs but it was actually really cool. We took a collectivo to a field in the middle of town and they had 3 horses saddled there, one for our guide and two for us. We mounted up and rode the horses through the edge of town (including some busy traffic areas) and then up into the hills. We were permitted to ride a fast or as slow as we wanted to. Our guide seemed to like trotting speed but Matthew and I preferred (as seems logical) to either walk or gallop (easier on the rear!). He let us gallop ahead of him and we were really clipping along on the dirt road. We rode through several villages that were very humble. Lots of Maya were washing their clothes in the creeks that flowed through. At one point a dog ran out in the street and was chasing Michelle’s horse. She charged on at full speed but the dog suck right to the horse’s front hooves for several yards. Eventually he gave up. It was pretty exciting!

We arrived at San Juan Chamula and spent an hour in the town. There is a really bizarre church there that was built to be Catholic but is now far from it. The place was filled with smoke and the floor was covered in pine needles. There were little groups of Maya people kneeling in front of rows of candles and chanting loudly in front of statues of saints. They offer bottles of soda (supposed to chase away evil spirits) and we even saw one guy sacrificing a chicken. It was really, really strange. The ride back to San Cristobal was nice. Our guide took us on a trail through a wooded area and we passed some Maya boys herding their sheep. The horses were actually pretty responsive except towards the end. They seemed to get crabby and tired and Michelle’s would kick every time she tried to get it to go faster. So after that great adventure, we were very sore, our butts especially. The saddles were wooden with a thin piece of leather "padding" so we took a pretty good beating. The experience was well worth the pain though!

The next stop was over the border into Guatemala, in Quetzaltenango (a.k.a. Xela). This area was very mountainous and covered in pine forests which didn’t look all that different from the scenery we are used to at home. We liked the perfectly cone shaped volcanoes that are visible from most places in Western Guatemala. Quetzaltenango was our first taste of Guatemala chaos. Guatemala was way more hectic than Mexico. The bus "terminal" is basically a big line of old US yellow school buses that pull through a garbage landfill (there is a street under there somewhere!--see picture to the left) and pick up passengers. It was most disgusting place we visited, aside from a few public bathrooms. There is little organization. You just ask around for which bus is going where you want to go and people tell you where to get on.

We did have some wickedly good hot chocolate in Quetzaltenango. A place called Café Luna serves chocolate, melted in milk and topped with whipped cream and cinnamon. Michelle also got her first taste of pupusas, a Salvadorian food that Matthew had on his mission and loved. They are little corn pancakes with cheese, meat or beans inside and topped with some pickled cabbage and hot sauce—pretty good!

Our biggest adventure in Quetzaltenango was trying to leave. The morning we made our attempt we got on a bus around 7 a.m. and made it about 10km out of town when everyone had to turn around and return because a teacher's strike had blocked the road using people and concrete barricades. It was lucky that we made it back into town because the return road was blocked after we passed through so had it taken longer we would have been stuck in the middle somewhere! Anyway, we got back to the bus terminal and another bus said that they were going another way so we jumped on that bus but the other way they were going to go was blocked too so we had to get off of that bus after it had driven for about 20 mins and take a taxi back to our hotel. It was a pretty wild experience! The chicken buses here go about 90 mph whenever they can and they pass on the highway (or streets through town) very precariously. For some reason they seem to always pick the blind corners to attempt passing. This is all with the baggage guys climbing in and out of the buses while we are going down the road!

Once we left Quetzaltenango we went to Panajachel on Lake Atitlan. This is a large lake that is surrounded by volcanoes so you get the effect that you are in a big bowl. It is very beautiful there and the weather was just about perfect. We sprung for a hotel room with cable TV, the first we had seen since being at home. It was nice to kick back and watch a few movies in the evening. We took a boat trip to Santiago de Atitlan across the lake to check out their market day. The boat ride was very pleasant on the way to Santiago as the water was perfectly calm but on the way back the wind kicked up and we had some pretty sweaty palms as the launcha smashed over one big wave after another. Some of the Guatemalans in the boat even thought the fiberglass was flexing a little more than it should. We also took a day trip to Chichicastenango, which is known for hosting Central America's largest Maya crafts market. It definitely lived up to its reputation. We saw tons of weaving, painted masks, jewelry, machetes, pottery, etc. The weaving is one of the notable crafts that the Maya women do, so we bought a brightly colored handmade piece for a souvenir.

Antigua is known for its churches. It used to be the capital of Guatemala but in 1790 was hit by a huge earthquake that nearly leveled the entire city. The capital was subsequently moved to Guatemala City. After the capital moved a lot of the churches remained in ruin because there weren’t enough people to fund their rebuilding. It was interesting to walk around and see so many great buildings just laying in ruin, yet they still maintained their charm.

While in Antigua we took a tour to Volcan Pacaya, which is one of the three active volcanoes in Guatemala. We hiked with a group up to the spot where lava was issuing and the smell of melting shoe rubber was in the air. Like in Hawaii, people are permitted to go as close to the lava as they want. The heat was really intense and there were even some hikers that were roasting marshmallows over the cooling lava. We were a little more conservative than some in our group but Matthew still got some great shots of the lava flowing. (more pics in the slide show) This time we had a tripod so our photos are better than those we took in Hawaii. The volcano hike is always a winner. There is nothing quite like watching liquid rock!

On our way from Antigua to Cobán, we made a quick stop over in Guatemala City to change buses. Guatemala City is supposed to be one of the most dangerous cities in Central America so we didn’t linger long. Our cab driver dropped us right in front of the bus station and told us to go directly inside and keep a good eye on our baggage. We followed his instructions and left unscathed. The bus trip to Cobán was reminiscent of the one we discussed earlier between Palenque and San Cristobal de Las Casas—constant turns. Luckily we were well armed with Mexican Dramamine so it was much more pleasant. Cobán was a nice city, though it is situated in the middle of nowhere. We took a day trip to Semuc Champey (which in one of the Maya languages means “river that goes underground”) and the Lanquin Caves. Semuc Champey was absolutely beautiful! It is a river that flows underground for about 300 meters and a dozen pools have formed on the land bridge over the river. The pools are crystal clear, a beautiful blue color and the water is the perfect temperature for swimming. There were even lots of little fish in each of the pools. We spent four hours swimming from pool to pool on this beautiful river in the middle of the jungle. Unfortunately we don’t have any pictures of it because it is a high theft area and since we would be swimming we didn’t want to get the camera stolen. I found this picture on the internet so you can get an idea of the beauty.

The Lanquin Caves were very large but not largely impressive. They have suffered a lot of damage at the hands of the locals so they weren’t like the pristine protected caves you see in the US. It looks like there have been lots of fires burned inside them, so the cave formations are covered in black soot and many of the more delicate formations have been broken off. The highlight of it was the large colony of bats that live in the cave. You can here them squeaking and see them flying around the whole time in the cave. Michelle only came out with two bites on her neck.

Flores was our next destination. It is a town in northern Guatemala on an island in the middle of Lake Peten-Itza which we used as a base from which to explore Tikal. Flores was nice…nice and hot, so we spent every afternoon on the docks of the lake swimming with the local boys and some fellow travelers.

Tikal was the highlight of the trip. It is the site of a ruined Maya city hidden in the deep jungle. We decided to take the “Sunrise Tour” and felt like it was well worth it. We left the hostel at 3:30 a.m., drove the hour to Tikal National Park, and then we walked 20 mins or so and climbed one of the temples from which we watched the sunrise. There was so much fog and cloud cover that we didn’t actually see the sunrise (which is not uncommon) but it was wonderful to be in the jungle just as it was waking up. We could hear howler monkeys in the distance, fabulous green Amazon parrots were flying all over the place and several other birds were joining in singing. It was really magnificent. In addition to the impressive pyramids we were able to see three toucans, several howler monkeys, a spider monkey and tons of green parrots. This site was our favorite because not only did it have incredible architecture, but the setting and the wildlife made it even more mystical. It was absolutely incredible!

From Flores we took a direct bus to San Salvador, El Salvador to catch our flight back to the US. The bus ride took 11 hours and had no A/C and this annoying hole in the ceiling that let the sun beat down on you, but we made it safe and sound. In San Salvador, we enjoyed more pupusas right on the street so Matthew was able to live one of his dreams that he’s had since eating pupusas in Australia on his mission.

Merida to San Cristobal de Las Casas

We ended up staying six days in Merida because it is a great place to take day trips from and the city is very beautiful. It´s only flaw is the heat and the heat wouldn´t be that bad except there are very few escapes from it. When it´s hot in the U.S. you can go to the mall or maybe you have A/C at home or in your car. Either way, there is some way to get some relief. Here, however, very few buildings have A/C so when it´s hot...it´s HOT. Aside from that we had a great time. Merida has the feeling of a European city with its busy Plaza Principal and colonial architecture but you only need to wander a few blocks from the center of town to remember you are in Mexico. Many of the buildings there have had dozens of coats of paint and you can usually see several of them as the new layers have aged. It creates a beautiful atmosphere of unique textures and colors.

We did a full day trip out to the city of Izamal dubed the ¨Yellow City¨ due to being mostly painted in yellow along the streets. It is an old colonial town that was built in the middle of a handfull of Mayan pyramids. There are still three huge pyramids situated right in the middle of town amidst houses and buildings. Some people in that town literally have Mayan ruins for their back yard! It was super hot of course and we probably drank about 3 cold sodas each while there to try to cope with it. We hit the best restaurant in town for a splurge and it was a nice experience. The centerpiece of the town´s focus is a HUGE monestary-cathedral that is raised about 50 feet above the streets since it was built literally on top of the largest of the old Mayan pyramids, using it as a base or foundation. It was really cool to see and interesting at how the Jesuits came in and basically did whatever they wanted to the Maya peoples that were here first.

The Ruta Puuc was also a full day trip in which we visited five ruin sites in one day (Labna, Sayil, Xlapak, Kabah and then Uxmal). The extreme heat and humidity put somewhat of a damper on the experience but nevertheless it was incredible. We figure it was well over 100 degrees F with the sun in full strength and about 40 percent humidity. The ornate Chac-Mool (Mayan rain god) masks are all over most of these sites and for good reason, it´s hotter than hell with the lid on and very dry in those parts of the Yucatan. There are no rivers or lakes in the Yucatan, but around 3000 cenotes which they had to rely on for their water.








This leads into our next day trip which was a tour to a couple of picturesque cenotes out in the middle of nowhere. They are basically caves that are full of ground water. Some of them have stalactites and small black catfish in them, and tons of bats and birds overhead. It appears that most of the wild animals out there well know that fresh water and releif from the blistering heat can be found in them. On the tour we went snorkeling in two cenotes. The water was crystal clear, regular swimming pool temperature and about 40 deep from the surface. They are actually caves so they go way deeper than we could go snorkeling but they are sometimes explored by cave divers and are kind of mysterious. It was the best possible way to take a break from the Yucatecan heat and also a fun adventure.

Next we headed down to the city of Campeche which is on the Gulf of Mexico. We thought this might provide some relief from the heat but were gravely mistaken. The heat was absolutly unbearable there and the water was pretty gross and there were no beaches in town. The city is famous for it´s pirate history and it´s old sections of stone fort walls that still stand in parts of town. Other than staying in the Pirate´s hostel we saw little of it. We got out of town heading south as soon as we possibly could. We are completely baffeled at how people can exist there in that kind of heat. Not our kind of town.

Palenque was MUCH nicer. We stayed in a nice place in the jungle about a mile away from the Mayan ruins of Palenque. This place was a beautiful change! Michelle was kept awake at night by the howler monkeys that start up around dusk and keep at it until around 3:00am. There was wildlife all around that place. We had a little cabin right beside a swimming pool and there was a wild fish pond right next to the pool in which there were turtles and Jesus Christ lizards sunning themselves most of the day. For those of you who are not avid Jeff Corwin fans...we´ll explain how the Jesus Christ lizard gets its name: when they are scared or feel threatened they run away on their hind legs and usually over the surface of water. Since they can literally walk on water, well, that´s where it comes from. We were able to scare a couple of them right over the top of the fish pond! The gekos were our friends since they ate the insects in our room that Michelle was afraid of. The place was crawling in these cool little guys but they are a nice addition.

The ruins of Palenque are absolutly amazing! They are our favorite ruin site yet. They are perched high up in the jungle and are riddled with running creeks and small waterfalls. There are many impresive carvings and the famous observatory tower that it´s most well known for. The whole place was like looking at post cards wherever you turned. We got lots of great pictures at these sites but we are still trying to find an internet connection fast enough that will allow us to post them here on the blog.

The bus ride south to San Cristobal de las Casas was the worst either of us have ever experienced. It follows a picturesque winding mountain road for five solid hours and dispite the beauty, neither of us really enjoyed any of it since we were very motion sick and ready to lose it the WHOLE way! Needless to say, we stocked up on the Mexican equivalent of Dramamine that same evening in San Cristobal de las Casas for futur bus rides in the highlands.

San Cristobal has beautiful mountain scenery and good weather with high temps reaching only to the 70s-80s. There are lots of trees and a lot of the sidewalks and streets are cobblestone. The architecture in general, has more of a colonial feel to it and there are definitly way more foreign tourists here than anywhere else we´ve seen in Mexico. There is a very strong hippy presence here and our hostel eminates a strong smell of weed most of the time. (You don´t even have to buy it here...you about get a free buzz just going to the lounge)...if we were into that sort of thing. You can definitly sense that this area was the center of the Zapatista movement in the mid 1990s. There are tons of machine gun wielding Mexican military personel patrolling the city and we´ve seen a fair amount of Zapatista graffiti and souveniers (i.e., masked dolls holding machine guns...a bit disturbing!). We even passed an operating Zapatista training school on the way into town. There is also a much larger Mayan presence here as we get closer to Guatemala. Every time we sit down to eat in a restaurant or on a park bench or even just walk down the street Mayan children and old women thrust their souveniers in our faces and beg us to buy them. There are also lots of beggers just sitting along the sidewalks. The poverty is very apparent.

The architecture here incorporates much more wood and even some of the big cathedrals have wood floors and ornate wood ceilings and carvings. Overall it´s a beautiful city and it´s easy to see why there are so many other travelers here too.

The food for the most part is nothing like what we Americans think of as Mexican. It´s always served in very small portions and the taste is nothing to look forward to. We have discovered that the reason why they serve soft corn tortillas with EVERYTHING is because if you mix everything on your plate together in one of them it magically becomes edible! (Strange but true...unfortunatly this is only a very recent discovery on our part).

El Yucatan

We are officially south of the border in old Mexico (that´s Mejijo for you Glenn Beck listeners out there). We got into Cancun Tuesday about 2 hrs late because they had to change some part on the plane in Denver before we could take off. This made us a bit nervous since we knew we had a reservation for our first night in Cancun at a hostel and we had no way of letting them know that we were going to show up late. We were lucky and they didn´t give our room away before we got there after all that time. Once we dropped our stuff off at the hostel we went out to walk around a bit downtown (not in the tourist part of Cancun but the real down town) to get taste of what it´s going to be like for a while. After looking around at a number of street food stalls we decided to pass them up and eat for the first time in a real restaurant serving Yucatecan food. Michelle already has had stomach problems since Boise anyways so we have to ease her into things slowly here. (The food at that place was not very good and quite possibly the source of Michelle´s first encounter with Montezuma´s revenge...not pretty).

The first thing the next morning we got on a second class bus bound for Valladolid which is a nice little colonial town about 140 kms due west of Cancun. The idea was to get out of Cancun in a hurry and get into the real Mexico right off the bat...Valladolid was it. The town has a central park which is one city block and across the street on the south side is the town cathedral (very typical of a town down here). The cathedral is huge for such a small town...so we think. Here we caught some of the Semana Santa procession which was basically a small parade of catholics carrying candles, signs, flowers and various other Catholic paraphernalia. They circled the square and entered into the cathedral across the street and there held some sort of mass.

The hostel in Valladolid is called Albergue la Candelaria which is an old house (over 200 yrs old) that has gone through probably a dozen changes from originally being a house for a single wealthy family to a nun convent to various other domiciles and now a hostel. The place was very cool and our room was the best in the house with as small balcony overlooking the park and with views of the big church La Candelaria (a different big church--they are all over the place here). It was super cool and the room only cost about US$20 per night!

While based in Valladolid we took a day trip to Chichen Itza which is the most famous, largest and most restored of all the Mayan ruin sites in the Yucatan. It was completely awesome! We will post all our photos and even the video we took of that day once we can find a decent Internet connection somewhere down here. About all we can find is dial-up and it´s not good enough to upload so many large files. Stay posted!

Chichen Itza was absolutely incredible! The stone carvings and architecture were enough to leave you speechless and there were tons of wild Iguanas climbing around on them, sunning themselves. There are also two huge cenotes (sink holes in the limestone bedrock that form large natural wells) in the site as well. These are swarming with lots of interesting birds. Matthew had no problem filling our 1GB camera memory card and wished he had about 3 GB. This is an absolute must-see for anyone that goes to the Yucatan!

The next day we took the 1st class bus (with movies, A/C and on-board toilet) to Merida which is the capital city of the Yucatan (around 1 million people). It is more like being in Europe than in Central America. The main square is surrounded by interesting buildings, especially the huge cathedral which is one of the oldest churches in the Americas. Merida was once the site of a Mayan city called T´ho and at the time of the Spanish conquest they tore down the Mayan temples and buildings and used the stone blocks to build the immense cathedral along with a handful of other churches near the square. One of them about a block north of the square even has a couple of blocks that still show Mayan carvings on them. (Click on the picture at the left to see the two carved stones in detail.) There are also a number of other interesting buildings around the square like the Palacio de Gobierno (Yucatan´s State Capitol bldg.) which has lots of large murals depicting the bloody history of the region. On the south side is the original façade of the Conquistador´s house with it´s statues of Spanish soldiers in armor standing on the heads of some dead Maya Indians. The whole square is very picturesque with many colors and bustling with vendors, street performers and Merida citizens. The vendors really try to push you hard to buy hammocks and other handmade stuff from them...but we´re going to hold off until toward the end of the trip so we don´t have to haul around more weight and bulk in our packs. The weather is very hot and sweltering with high humidity so we try not to carry them any more than we have to.

Today (Sunday) we went to church about 15 blocks from where we´re staying. Then afterwards we toured El Paseo de Montejo which is a famous street with lots of historic bldgs. lining both sides. The cyber infrastructure is somewhat less than desirable down here so we find ourselves spending more time than we´d like just looking for an Internet cafe that has a fast enough connection to load up the cool pics we have taken to share them with you all and to back them up for our own piece of mind. For now words will have to do.