Mayan Ruins and Chilling on the Caribbean…..Mun

G'day all,

Ok so where the hell do I start with this past week or two other than saying I’ve been flat out like a lizard drinking. Since my last update I’ve been to Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and today I’ve just arrived in Belize. After Costa Rica I decided to have a couple of days rest in a nice little colonial town in Nicaragua called Granada. Nicaragua was a new word to me as I only realized it was a country 2 weeks before I received my Nicaragua stamp in my passport. Granada is supposed to be one of the nicer and safer cities to visit in Nicaragua so that’s where I decided to go. I only spent 2 nights in Granada and found myself hanging out with a cool Canadian guy, Mike, who helped me out speaking Spanish along the way as the 4 words I know don’t get me very far. Our first day in Granada was spent accidentally walking around the Ghetto of Granada and our first impressions of this town were pretty dodgy. On day 2 we actually realized it’s a really beautiful town and we took the wrong street on the map. The town is full of these nice old colourful Spanish colonial buildings which line almost every street apart from the ghetto. Most of our time in Granada was spent avoided heavy downpours of the wet season rains, and heading out to explore in the dry patches during the day time. Granada was a nice but random little town but I sure as hell liked it better that my next stop, Managua. Managua is the capital city of Nicaragua and has a bad reputation for its violent backpacker muggings, especially outside the main bus station. I had to take what everyone calls in Central America, a ‘chicken bus’ from Granada to Managua which was an experience on its own. Once I arrived in the dreaded Managua I took a taxi to the front door of the ‘Tika Bus’ which is kind of like the Greyhound of Central America. My next stop was to head up to La Ceiba in Honduras but there was no bus until the following day. Once the taxi dropped me outside Tika Bus a gang of thugs were waiting for me. I got so nervous I walked past the entrance of the bus station and half way down the street before realizing I missed the building by about 50 meters. I had 3 guys on my tail bugging me and asking where I was going but luckily I power walked myself to the safety of the station before anything happened. I was relieved to see that they had a hotel inside the station so I stayed there and didn’t leave the building until my bus left the following morning. After a powernap I popped out of my hotel room for some dinner and ate with a nice Argentinean couple who were also too terrified to leave the building. As we were joking and laughing about the situation we heard someone yelling and screaming outside the window and banging on the door so we let security deal with it and decided to call it a night. La Ceiba in Honduras was my next stop where I stayed the night before catching the ferry across to Utila, one the Bay Islands in the Caribbean. My hotel was a shocker and I couldn’t sleep due to my ceiling fan sounding like a V8 and the bathroom stinking like bile. The following day was a thousand times better as arriving on Utila felt so nice and safe and I was surrounded by other backpackers again. Utila is one of the best places for scuba diving on the Caribbean and is also probably the cheapest too. My plan was to just chill out for a few days and do some diving but instead I ended up being talked into doing my Advanced PADI diving course and had an absolute ball. I did the course with a bunch of great blokes from all over the world and we partied every night and dived every day. The day I arrived on the island was the last day of this big carnival they have each year and the whole island was going crazy with parades, dancing, music, fireworks, and thousands of people lining the streets and beaches wearing beads. Although we were starting our advanced course the following day we still partied the night away and had a brilliant night. We did 7 dives on our course including ship wrecks, night diving, and 2 fun dives. Our first dive was our deep wreck dive where we went down to 30m and fed eggs to these crazy fish. The wreck was so awesome, it was a big cargo ship that sunk and we got to swim around and through it. After that first dive I was completely addicted again and each dive just got better and better. On our second day we did the night dive which was probably my favourite. We headed off on the boat at sunset and before we knew it we were 20m underwater with a torch and swimming around another smaller wreck in complete darkness. The feeling was unreal and I was in my element the whole 45 minutes we were under. It was quite funny watching fish sleep and the highlight was seeing a large eagle ray swim under us in pitch darkness. Each night after diving we all met up and had dinner together then hit the town (all 3 bars of it). The best of the bars was called Treetanic and I’ve never seen a bar so impressive in my life. The bar is actually built in the tree tops like tree houses with board walks and ladders joining all the different platforms together. On our last night I had a huge night with the scuba guys and I was suffering the following day on my fun dives. My buddy Jack and I were vomiting at the same time for the whole morning after we surfaced from each dive. Our first dive was a real task to get through but the second dive was much better. The highlight of the dive was when we went through a tight underwater cave almost scraping the walls as the cave zigzagged around. The funniest thing about Utila is the Caribbean accents. It seems like a scene out of cool running where everywhere you walk you hear ‘yeahhhh mun’. Sometimes the accents are so thick you have no idea what they are even talking about. I had a brilliant 4 or 5 days on Utila and Utila Dive Center was amazing. It was sad to leave but it had to be done and Michael, one of my mates from the course came with me. We had perfect weather every day on Utila but the minute we left the island we had non-stop rain again. Our next stop was the Copan Ruins in Western Honduras which were awesome. It took us one full day to get there finally and the following day we ventured around the famous Mayan ruins. I was pretty impressed with Copan being my first Mayan ruin site and they did a pretty good job preserving all the carvings after so many hundreds of years. At the entrance to the ruins they had these massive parrots almost pecking your eyes out at the front gate. Michael and I did a tour of the ruins but were much more impressed by the Tikal Ruins we saw 2 days later. The whole town of Copan was out of electricity and water for days so we decided to shoot across to Guatemala to some random town for the night before heading up to Flores. I’m not even sure what the name of the town was but we were the only foreigners or “Gringos” (as they call us over here) to be seen. As we walked down the street people were looking at us from every direction but they were just curious and we felt safe enough. At 5am the following morning we took another torturous chicken bus for the whole day until we finally reached the town of Flores in the afternoon. Flores is the launching pad for the Tikal ruins which are supposed to be the best Maya ruins of the lot. Flores was a nice little town on an island in the middle of a lake which is about an hour away from Tikal. The following morning we left for Tikal at 3am to watch the sun rise. Tikal is amazing in every sense of the word with its huge pyramid like temples strung out between a dense jungle full of monkeys, toucans, and tarantulas. For sunrise we climbed the largest temple and watched the sun come up over the jungle as growling monkeys growled in the background. Growling monkeys are their actual name and they actual do growl so loud they sound like an angry lion which was quite scary until you see how small they are. The temples in Tikal were much bigger than the ones in Copan and it’s on such a large scale it takes hours just to walk around them all. One of the interesting things I learnt was that the Mayans played this ball game with a big 10 pound rubber ball which was kind of a mixture of soccer and basketball. They took it so seriously that the winner of the game was often sacrificed because he became a god like figure and the game only goes for about 10 minutes until the ball touches the ground. We were at Tikal for about 5 or 6 hours and by the end of it we were so exhausted that we had a nap when arrived back at the hostel. After our nap Michael and I swam out across the lake to this island which didn’t look too far away. By the time we got there we were stuffed and a storm was coming through so we had to try to get back to the mainland again. Yesterday Michael and I parted ways and he went to Guatemala City and I headed to Belize to a much talked about island on the Caribbean called Caye Caulker.

Next stop…Mexico

Woodsy