Antigua to Tikal. We left Antigua in the misty morning. Sitting in the tiny domestic airport in Guatemala City, no coffee, 4 very strange looking folks walk into the waiting room. The men were tiny with tiny voices and plastic cowboy hats. One woman was small with a VERY strange voice and the other was large with the ugliest dress I've ever seen and a big neckbrace. Both the women had black scarf-bonnets on their heads and they all spoke some very unrecognizable language...so...4 Mennonites walk into a waiting room...
The prop plane ride over the jungle was nice, short and smooth and we landed in Santa Elena where a big sign with Mr. Muzzy on it waited with a van to take us to Tikal. Our guide, Berta, was already quizzing us on jungle flora and fauna...see de big hill ova dere sticking into de lake? What does it look like to you? Ah ah ah...an alligator? Berry good! An hour and a half later we pull up to the park entrance (actually, the entrance was an hour before that) and we beg for some coffee and breakfast before beginning our 3 hour tour with guide...5 hours later we dragged our weary butts into the lobby of the Tikal Inn again and collapsed. Berta tells us our entrance fee to the park is still good and we can go back later in the afternoon if we like....right....
It was pretty amazing. Spider and Howler monkeys with their babies swinging through the trees, agouti rummaging along the jungle floor, the blue headed mot mot and chatty oropendulums along with a long list of other tropical birds. And then there were the ruins! Oh my oh my! Well worth the trip. Right out of the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Muz got lots of photos and only dropped a lens once (he was younger then, only a few days before his birthday)! As I looked over the edge of one of the temples down into the dense jungle, I was grateful we didn't have to climb down to get it. Needless to say, by the end of the walk we were templed and ruined and ready for a nap.
We awoke the next morning to parrots and toucans having breakfast, screeching and warbling. Shelley grabbed her binoculars and headed out of the Inn onto the big clearing around the visitors center. Muzzy moved more judiciously to a chair by the pool where he saw just about as many birds with much less movement. There was actually a yellow-breasted woodpecker making improvements to its house right there in front of us.
We headed back to Flores in the afternoon...a quick stop for the night on the little island in the lake and then a bus to Belize City the next morning.
We spent about an hour at the Guatemala-Belize border. You have to actually get off of the bus, with your stuff, stand in line to get an exit stamp from Guatemala, and then walk across a bridge into Belize, get another stamp, and then wait for your bus to come through the border as well. We bought a couple of breakfast burritos, and boom boom...on our way to Belize City. The roads were instantly 150% better, the language changed from Spanish to English, and we were dropped right at the Caye Caulker Water Taxi...grabbed our bags and bought a couple of round trip tickets and were on our way out into the Caribbean on a 60+ person boat skipping over the seas passing reef after reef at about 50 mph.
An hour later we landed on Caye Caulker, found a place to stay and began slowing down for real....
More later, maybe....
Muz and Shell
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