Oh Peru, how we missed you!

After an epic 40 hour bus experience, we found ourselves back in Lima, Peru where each of us spent a summer studying. For Tori, it was exciting to finally come back to some place that felt familiar. We knew just where we wanted to go, how much it cost to get there, and all of the local delicacies. Score!

We stayed at an upscale hostel in downtown Miraflores, a ritzy neighborhood on Lima´s coast. We could walk to the cliffs overhanging the beach from our hostel...yes, we splurged. Hey, it was Christmas! Strolling about on Christamas eve, we discovered a small spa where Tori could get a manicure and pedicure and Stew could get a massage, all for under 30 bucks. Double score! We left feeling all jazzed up and ready to celebrate the holiday.

Our Christmas preparations included going to the grocery store: bacon, tropical fruits, and mimosas were in order. On Christams day, we slept in...quite the luxury, and also quite easy to do after 40 hours of bus travel. Luckily, Stew´s parents sent down a Christmas package (with express instructions to maintain closed until Christmas morning) with Tori´s parents. It might have been outrageously tempting to carry around for 2 weeks, but it was definitely worth the wait to have a package to tear apart on Christmas morning. We got some awesome goodies, too: earplugs!!, dino flashlight, headlamp, bottle-opening ring, plus some very cool National Geographic maps from Stew´s grandparents...it was a great Christmas!

We spent most of Christmas day eating fruit salad (if you ever come across something called a Pepino Melon, go for it) and bacon, drinking mimosas, and hanging out with some of the folks we met at our hostel. For Christmas dinner, we got to meet up with one of Stew´s friends from his studies at Lima, Jamie from Los Angeles (see earlier blog posts from our drive across the country). We had a great meal at a mediterreanean resteraunt that happened to be open...bizarrely enough, all the chinese places were closed. So much for a traditional Jewish Christmas.

The day after Christmas, we made for Huacachina, our favorite little oasis in the world. It´s an itty bitty town in the middle of the desert on a lake...a genuine oasis. We´ve been hanging out in the sunshine since we arrived. Not a bad way to spend Boxing Day.

Ecuador: stuck in the mitad with you!

Ecuador (all at once)
Sorry for the lack of updates in the last two weeks or so: we´ve been traveling willy nilly with Tori´s parents throughout Ecuador and haven´t had any time to post on the blog. Right now we´re about to leave Ecuador and go to Peru for Christmas, but there´s a lot that has happened since we last posted.

From Panama City, we flew to Colombia and then to Quito, Ecuador. This was momentous because it signified the end of Central America and the beginning of South America. Also, we got really good plane food and Stew talked his way into an extra meal. Plus, we tried all of Colombia´s beers on the plane for free, so it´s almost like we´ve been there.

We met up with Tori´s parents in the immigration line in Quito. It was pretty thrilling to see family after such a long time, plus we got to cut in line. It was probably the most joyous celebration to happen in a 30 minute immigration line at midnight. The next day we took a tour of Quito with the weirdest hippie-spiritual- new age- Incan hating -Ecuadorian ever. He also showed us the equator, and told us some weird hippie stuff about it. Still it was really fun and we loved Quito.

The next day we flew to the Amazon. We stayed in a lodge that was quite a trek from Quito: we flew, took a bus, took a boat, took a hike, and then took a final canoe. It was great, and secluded. From our lodge, we could see big rat like animals named agouti, caimans, tamarinds, pygmy marmosets, and lots of other cool stuff. Like birds, but who cares. Birders are lame-oids with pocket protectors. We went on daily excursions in which we saw anaconda tracks, river otter, big trees, giant smoked toads, tiny poison frogs, crazy lizards, sloths, a gajillion monkeys of a half dozen types, tarantulas, insects, whip snakes, and Austrians. It was a heckuva good time.

Next, we hit the Galapagos, because we hadn´t seen enough animals yet. We found them. More marine iguanas than you could in a stew, more sea lions than you could ever possibly cuddle, lots of land and sea turtles doing it, blue footed boobies (also doing it, but dancing better), frigate birds (trying to do it), penguins swimming cutely, fish doing their thing, flightless cormorants not flying, dolpins playing, and natural formations. These include lava, beaches, giant stone outcropppings, darwin´s toilets (places where the water rushes onto stone beaches and then flushes like a toilet), and others that instead of flushing, shoot up like a whale spout. Also, the cruise director chose our family to lead the Neptune Day celebration as we crossed the equator: Tori´s dad was King Neptune, God of the Sea, and Tori´s mom was Queen Neredia, his beautiful wife. We were pirates, along with Tori´s brother. We got free drinks. It was riotous. Stew, apparently, also knew the cruise director from his days as a sailor on the Pacific.

We returned to Quito, where we saw museums, an orchid farm run by a crazzzzzy senile old dude, the wonderful pool and spa at the hotel, and bar district known as Plaza Foch. It was fun and we recovered from our hectic travels and prepared for some more hectic shopping.

Early the next morning, we hit the road in our familiar van with our weirdo guide through the mountains to a town called Otavalo. Along the way, we met with some of the top weavers and leather makers from Ecuador. We did a lot of shopping and came away with some amazing deals on leather goods. Stew got new boots, Tori got a new jacket, and everyone got christmas presents. The next day we hit up the real market in Otavalo proper, and the shopping was taken to a new level. Anyone who didn´t get a present in leather, got one the second day. We bargained our pants off and got some new pants for 3 bucks a pop. Word.

On the way back, we stopped at a shaman and got rebalanced. There are, we suppose, some advantages to having a weirdo tour guide. Tori´s mom got a cleaning ritual, which entailed getting spit on and fire balls blown around her. She handled it like a champ, and came out smelling good if damp. Due to the snow storm, Tori´s family was stranded in Quito for an extra day, which we thought was great. We had a fantastic time with Tori´s family and miss them already. Stew can´t wait to see his parents in a couple of weeks in Chile. Anyone else want to come visit us, too???

Since they left, we flew to Cuenca where we stayed in a hotel room sick for two days. We did manage to get out and see a great museum run by a bank (sidenote: is the phenomena of great museums run by banks unique to Latin America or does it exist elsehwere?) situated next to huge incan ruins on a hill over the city. Today, we managed to get out of Cuenca (Ecuadorean Andes: lusher and quainter than a farmer´s daughter) and are now heading south to Lima. We´re six hours into our 30 hours bus tour and are taking a break at an internet café in a bus station until our next bus leaves at 11 p.m. Yay buses! Soon we´ll be in Lima and ready to celebrate Christmas.
Merry Christmas, Happy Channukah, and maybe we´ll updated before the New Year!
Love,
Tori and Stew

TAN BRONZEADOS (SOOO TANNED)

As the title to this entry suggets, we´ve been having a blast in the Panamanian sunshine for the past few days.

Since our last entry...We spent one more day in Boquete so we could enjoy some of the natural beauty in the surrounding mountains. Boquete is known as the land of rainbows, so we figured we´d try our chances at catching one. Success! The combination of strong sun and frequent drizzling rain is perfect for rainbows. From our hotel, we hiked up the road to a trail called Bajo Mono, which we translated as Short Monkey, for no apparent reason (we found no monkeys, and the trail was NOT short). It does, however, make a good nickname for Tori. There were interesting rock formations on the various cliffs overlooking a valley filled with trees, coffee plantations, gardens, and a rushing river. Further along, we came to a waterfall, too. If we had continued we would have come to a castle, but our guide book didn´t make it seem worth it and we had already walked a long ways. Plus, we really watned to go eat at one of the several strawberry themed restaurants we had passed along the way.

The owner of our hotel, Maky, arranged for us to go to San Blas Islands (an archipelago populated by the Kuna indians in the Carribbean between Panama and Colombia) the following morning, but we had to rush to get there in time. From Boquete (in the mountains of northern panama), we had to take a bus to david (1 hour), wait for a spot on a bus to Panama City (everyone was returning from the celebration for independence day) and eventually take an 8 hour over night ride. We arrived at 3 a.m. and waited until 6 a.m. for a guide to show up in his jeep. His jeep was overflowing and we were far from understanding, so we told him to eat it and got ourselves a bed instead. At that moment, neither of us were willing to go on a three hour ride through Panama´s backcontry jungles in makeshift seats in a Jeep´s trunk. It is hard to be patient after an overnight bus ride and the only sleep is what you get on the bus station floor. Plus, the driver was a jerk....we just weren´t having it.

After a day in Panama city, during which we saw pretty much everything we wanted to that wasn´t mysteriously closed, we were ready to try for San Blas again. This time, with a different travel agent, things worked much better. Instead of 8 people in a jeep, there were 4 in a super nice totally pimped out massive pickup truck. Score. Double score was that the only music the driver had were nineties hits (Britney, Destiny´s Child, etc) and Bob Marley. Stew was in heaven...anything is better than reggaeton. After the three hour truck ride through the wilderness, the pan american highway stops and one has to off road through Indian country, take a dug out canoe through another tribe´s territory, and eventually get into a larger dugout with an outboard motor that takes you way out into the sea.

Still, San Blas is more than worth whatever hassle is required to get there. One feels almost guilty witnessing such pristine and perfect beaches....we hope that hordes of tourists and resorts never discover these magical isalnds. Being that the Kuna indians restrict the number of people that visit each day, maybe they´ll remain pristine forever, but we´re hedging our bets.

There is no white whiter than the sand of San Blas. Even the ¨ugly¨ islands look like postcards. Most islands take less than 2-3 minutes to walk around, and only 90 of th 360 odd islands are inhabited by much more than palm trees. All the water is a perfect aqua marine with great visibility, coral reefs, sunken ships, and animal life. Turtles and lobsters can be caught (and released because turtles are only caught accidentally) right on the beach where we stayed. We stayed with a Kuna family that ran a teeny hotel of four rooms. Each rooms was an independent cabin with a thatched roof and planks laid above the sand beach. Apparantly, we chose the fancier hotel...most others in San Bas have only sand floors. The walls were made of a bamboo like grass and the windows were....just holes. Our cabin was decorated like Christmas. We also visited two Kuna villages and learned something of their history, though our guide was a bit of an idiot. He didn´t do much more than point out what different buildings were used for, so we had press him for more interesting

Typical cusine is fish, coconut rice, crab, lobster, pineapple, watermelon, and salads. Our last we had a huge feast and gorged ourselves on the abudance of the sea. Imagine -- a mountain of Caribbean lobster and crab, carrots and yucca, delicious salad, pineapple, watermelon...and a challenge from your hosts to eat it all. It seemed like the perfect way to encapsulate San Blas. The people there are so generous and so kind; the bounty of nature is overwhelming. It was definitely the place we found most difficult to leave.

Today we saw the Panama Canal. Stew was bored again...watching water move from one side to the other STILL isn´t interested. Tori was bored, too, but felt like it was necessary to see the canal. When people return from Panama, everyone tends to ask ¨how was the canal?¨without realizing that it is the least interesting thing in Panama. There are so many great things to do and see here...we´re sad to be leaving this country and all of Central America, but the time has come to move on to Ecuador, where we will meet up with Tori´s family! Whippee!

Panamaniacs

Since our last post, we´ve been cruisned from Costa Rica into Panama. We spent one more night at Tommy´s – we had to San Jose´s famous nightlife before leaving. We spent the day shopping and going to museums, and Tori even got a spontaneous $2 haircut. Later that night, we met up with Tommy and Susan at San Jose´s infamous Hotel Del Rey. It is a casino, bar, hotel, and fisherman hang out, but is most famous because almost every woman that walks in the bar is a prostitute. Prostitution is legal in Costa Rica, but only if the woman is over 18, self employed, and carries a card certifying regular health tests. As Tommy says, the girl has to be an ïndependent contractor.¨ It is an interesting system, and totally bizarre to witness several hundred prostitutes converge on a bunch of fishermen in a casino. We tried the slot machines, too, but lost both dollars quickly. We are not high rollers.

The next morning, we bid Tommy and Susan farewell and finally hit the road again. It was great staying with them and we greatly appreciate all of their generosity… In fact, we ended up staying in Costa Rica about three times as long as we had planned as a result.
We had both read parts of this book ¨What Happen,¨ which is a folkloric history of the south east caribbean people´s of Costa Rica, so we decided to visit the places that we had read about, namely a small town called Cahuita. Moreover, the part of the Carribean is known to have beautiful beaches…man that phrase is getting played out in this blog.
Cahuita, it turns out, does not have particularly beautiful beaches, nor is the town ¨cute¨or ïdyllic¨in any way. Maybe it was just the torrential, non-stop, clothes-soup generating rain, but that town was lame. Also, Tori got food poisoning. Thus, we left early, cursing Cahuita as we left.

We passed through Puerto Viejo, a similar town known for bigger parties and (yawn) beautiful, long sandy beaches. It was raining there, too, so we stayed on our bus and kept on toward the border with Panama. Once again, we walked across a busted bridge into another country, paying minute taxes along the way and getting confused between lines. Eventually, we got across, however, in time to realize we had just barely missed the bus to Bocas del Toro and would have to take a taxi with a family of missionaries. Yay, adventures!

Bocas is a series of small islands on the caribeña side of north Panama, discovered by Columbus on his fourth and final voyage. It means ¨Mouths of the Bull¨ for reasons that no longer make sense (to us) and have generated conflicting legends. There are no bulls, much less multi mouthed bulls. There are, however, beautiful beaches.

One of them is called ¨playa de las estrellas¨which means beach of the stars because it is covered in star fish of all colors. It´s pretty cool. We played in the wáter with them and took pictures. Some old tourists went by on a tour and we felt cool because we had gotten there on a local bus and hiked down the beach. For lunch we shared a plate of french fries and chicken fingers (the cheapest thing on the menú at the only restaurant near the beach), but really filled up on coconuts we found on the beach. Stew bought a machete for this very purpose, but had left it in the room. Thus, he practiced his technique of holding the coconut firmly in one hand and smashing it against a tree until it leaks delicious milk. Then, he splits it open with his hands he-man style. Tori finds this process hilarious. The coconut was delicious, but contained so much meat we couldn´t finish it.

The second night, we met some fellow travelers from the United States. Two (Megan and Zack) had just graduated from Indiana University and are doing a similar trip to ours, while the other two (Avery and Brittany) are current students at UGA on Thanksgiving Break. Thus, we had another opportunity to party like college kids, and spent the next few days touring the various islands and bars with our new friends (we never found the Ngobe Bugle, prounounced Nooblie Booglie). Likely, by now, there are already facebook pictures documenting our goofiness. We had to skip a couple of beaches because a girl died going to one recently in stormy weather. The seas were still rough, so we, like responsible travelers, decided that we shouldn´t take such unnecessary risks.

Thursday was Thanksgiving. It was hard to be away from our families on this special holiday for the first time. Fortunately we were with new friends. Also, a hostel run by ¨Cosmo¨ an American Harvard gradúate ex patriot, organized an epic feast for only six bucks a person. It was an amazing turkey dinner with mashed potatoes, stuffing, tropical fruit chutney, green bean casserole, Johnny cakes, mac and cheese, gravy, pumpkin pie – the works.. While it wasn´t on par with our families´cooking (no one can beat Liz Clifford at a Thanksgiving blow-out), it was great to get proper American food. In short, it beat all expectations that we had for finding some semblance of American Thanksgiving in Panama.

The next morning, we decided to head out once more after spending way longer than inteded at a beautiful beach. This time, we set our sites on a mountain town in the highlands of Panama. The hiking is supposed to be great, with volcanoes, waterfalls, hot springs, views, pumas, and quetzals. Also, today is Panama´s Independence day and this is the center of the celebration. Who knew? Initially, this was a bit of an issue, as the first 23 hostels we went to were full, but there was one only a two kilometer hike up the hill (not the direction we started in), so everything turned out well. Actually, Tori fell in a hole and twisted her ankle, but it was kind of funny and everything turned out well when the owner gave us roasted pork and vodka tonics after we checked in.

Today, we went to see a garden called ¨mi jardín es su jardin¨meaning it was free. Also, it was expansive, well maintained, free, epic, and free. We took about 200 pictures of pretty flowers, so when we have a good connections, there will be an inundation of photos. We also watched parades and ate meat on a stick. Panama is awesome.

We have been busy little bees

Since we last wrote, we spent another couple days at Tommy's farm, went to Satya's (a friend of Tommy's) family's farm up in the coldest mountain in Costa Rica, and visited two (or 4) beaches on the Pacific Coast. We have some good stories, but you'll have to bear with us. Also, you'll have to deal with some brevity and infer more from pictures. Feel free to contact us (we love messages!) if you want elaboration. (This is a shameless plea for love)

Tommy took us to see Volcan Poas and La Paz waterfalls. Volcan Poas was really cool, but we couldn't see much due to the fog. La Paz waterfalls were mainly destroyed by the earthquake last year, but are still magnificent and we could barely tell. According to Tommy, we only saw about fifty percent of the falls, but the zoo there was awesome, too.

The above two pictures are of the la paz waterfalls and a sloth there. Tommy also took us out for any amazing lunch at a French restaurant where we had crepes with mushrooms and cheese, bunny in dijon mustard sauce, blackberry refrescos, and chocolate mousse. It was amazing.

The next morning, we left with Satya (her husband works and lives on Tommy's farm) up to her family's farm high in the mountains.

They are ex-pats from the U.S. who left with no money and six kids to avoid the draft during the Vietnam war. It is a great little farm and it is amazing what one family can accomplish together. The majority of what they use is generated on the farm, but they also rent out their farm house as a lodge to travelers. Plus, they're really nice and showed us great hospitality. They taught us a lot about how to live and work on a farm...we started by milking cows, then made cheese, butter, sour cream, and whey milk shakes. Yay for efficiency! Here we are making butter:

After Las Vueltas, we headed down to the beautiful beach of Montezuma where we camped out with a bunch of hippies on the beach. Luckily, only our flip flops were stolen. We also went on an awesome hike up through a series of waterfalls. There was an 80 ft, 40 ft, and 15 ft. waterfall. We jumped off the last two, which was awesome!

This is Tori jumping off the 40 footer.

After a two days at Montezuma, we headed up to Puntarenas to hang out with some exchange students we had met while traveling in Nicaragua. Brian let us sleep on his floor. It was hard, but free. It was fun to party with college students, just like old times. We had a huge bonfire on the beach and tried to watch a meteor shower (it was cloudy).

Now we are back at Tommy's. We plan to head to the Caribbean side of Costa Rica in the next few days, then Panama. The adventure continues!

Havin a blast on Costa Rican farms

When we left off last, we were enjoying the rain in Monteverde after an exhilarating zipline ride through the rainforest. The rain didn’t really let up for the rest of the day, so we spent the afternoon planning and preparing for a feast that night.

The plan was to make steak sandwiches that Stew had dreamed about a few days earlier. And by dream we mean he actually woke up in the morning with the words “steak sandwiches” on his lips. We have been eating rice and beans for almost every meal, and Stew was craving some seriously filling food. Tori also woke up with a craving and was whispering “salami and cheese” before we even got out of bed. After our strenuous day on the lines (we did actually have to hike, which really means waddling because of the harnesses), we decided we deserved it. Also, rice and beans was getting pretty old.

So we hit the grocery store which was strikingly similar to any grocery store in the U.S. and had anything we could possibly want. There was real cheese, Italian meats, tapenades, ranch dressing…all of our greatest desires. We each gathered the necessary ingredients to satisfy our dreams: good hard cheese, fancy peppercorn salami, a pound of steak, a pound of bacon, a bottle of ranch, sautéed pepper and onions, and fresh tomatoes. The meal turned out to be amazing, but we kind of disgusted some French tourists but their pasta carbonara was crappy and they ate their bacon raw. After dinner, we had a little party in the hostel with the owner and a couple kids from the U.S., including a girl that lives in Georgetown.

The next morning, we decided to brave the rain and go for a hike. We had been really excited about hiking in Monteverde, but the constant rain had dampened our spirits. We had bus tickets for 2:30, so we got up at 9 a.m. to get going. The hike turned out to be a lot more difficult than we expected, partly due to the steepness but mainly because of the slipperiness of the mud. The rain had made the path pretty much impassable, and we gave up eventually and walked back to town. Still, we saw some beautiful views from Cerro Amigos and got to walk through majestic forests.

The five hour bus ride turned out to be only three hours, which is the first time a time estimation has erred in that direction. When we arrived in San Jose, Tommy Thomas, a friend of Tori’s parents from the 80s who’s been living in Costa Rica since the late 80s, picked us up and took us back to his cool herb farm in the Central Valley, about 30 minutes outside of San Jose. We’ve been living the high life since!

Tommy’s house is awesome. It’s inside his farm, in the mountains above San Jose. It’s nestled above jungle ravine on his farm, so when you look out from the window it feels like you’re in a forest. After an unfrigginbelivable dinner of homemade Indian food (Tommy worked as Peace Corps volunteer in India during the 60s), we went to sleep in preparation for an early morning trip to Tommy’s buddy Bob’s house. Susan, Tommy’s girlfriend came by in time for breakfast that morning. We left about 9:30, after the best Costa Rican coffee and smokey thick-cut bacon ever. Bob is a motocross racer/surfer who also owns businesses in Costa Rica and spends about 1/3 of his time there. He owns lottts of acres on the banks of a river near the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.

Bob’s house is also totally awesome. Apparently it’s the fashion to have a farm in Costa Rica, because Bob has a business growing ornamental plants for the US, and also leases land to a pineapple grower that supplies pineapple to the largest fruitcake producer in the world. A less bizarre but equally sweet thing about Bob’s place: he uses part of land for a tourist adventure center which runs canopy tours (ziplining through the jungla) and white water rafting trips.

The afternoon we got there, we jumped into duckies, or inflatable kayaks for white water rafting, and headed down the Rio’s class III rapids. Tommy and Bob were each in a kayak, while Stew and Tori took the double. Apparently we still haven’t learned that we are not the best kayak partner pair. To be fair, white water kayaking is a lot more difficult than rafting. You’re on your own, so you’re doing the work.

We started off with Stew in the back and Tori in the front, which was pretty hilarious. We managed to hit almost every single object in the river that we intended to avoid. We managed to get stuck for a solid 45 seconds on a rock, hit the bank of the river, go over the rapids at their most gnarly areas. The ride was a lot of fun, though occasionally painful when we slammed our butts on the rocks, or when wasps attacked stew’s face about ½ through. He powered through, to the amazement of all. When we switched seats about 2/3 of the way down the river at the suggestions of our guide, we manage to do a little better on the directional front – the kayak doesn’t really move where you steer if it’s heavier in the front than the back, according to our guide.

That night at dinner, we discovered that Bob makes a mean pina colada and tenderloin steak. We had fun hanging out with Tommy, Bob, Susan, and their friend Maria.

The next morning it was time to zipline again! The course was totally different from the course at Monteverde: instead of going through cloud forest, we went over a river and through the jungle in a big loop. We also got to pass over a garden that Bob is starting. The garden has many of the same plants as Tommy’s, but they look different here because of the wildly different altitude levels.

Bob was heading back to the U.S., so we had to close up his house before we could leave. Apparently, people will steal just about anything if he doesn’t secure it. Someone broke in and stole some guitars so he put bars over the windows. Then, someone used a crow bar to remove the house siding and broke in that way. Now, Bob goes so far as to remove the ceiling fans. Pretty hilarious, but I guess necessary.

Back at Tommy’s, we had another party before Bob flew out in the morning. We got to stay in Tommy’s tree house, which is pretty much the coolest place in the world. There are three rooms: one with food, fridge, and hot plate, a bathroom, and a three walled bed room with a great view of the central valley and San Jose’s lights. With plumbing, electricity, a comfortable bed, and a nice view, we were as happy as could be.

The next day, Tommy and Susan gave us a tour of the farm. We got to see all of the herbs which he grows and sells. There is an amazing variety and more basil than you can dream of. Even more impressive than the herbs is his personal garden. There are plants from all over the world, some exotics, some natives, fruits, cacti, gingers, bamboos, and a thousand gorgeous varieties of each. It really is impossible to even describe how great the garden and its well maintained paths.

After lunch, we decided to make dinner for Tommy and Susan in appreciation for all of the wonderful meals and hospitality they had given us. Lasagna is our specialty and something we haven’t made since California. Plus, access to an herb garden makes cooking really fun and delicious. In the end, we wound up with red pepper, artichoke heart, hearts of palm, spinach and goat cheese lasagna, along with a caprese salad, and garlic bread.

Today, Tommy took us to Zoo Ave, where we got to walk through a jungly area filled with ever specie of animal in Costa Rica, and a few others. Maybe they don’t have absolutely everything, but darn near. The birds are especially impressive, but caimans and mountain lions and monkeys are pretty cool too. We really can’t list every species that we saw, but they were all pretty cool. Evidently, there was an artist on staff, too. All around were well done paintings in various styles (cartoons, dark/trippy/creepy, realistic) warning against the harms of eating turtle eggs or buying endangered animals or advising children of the importance of conservation. It was a great zoo and it really made us miss our camera (which had been destroyed the day before in unfortunate circumstances.)

Afterwards, we went out for pizza and bought a new camera at the mall. It was kind of a pain and they screwed up the purchase. After some awkward arguing in Spanish and a long wait, we eventually walked out with a wad of cash and a camera, and all we had to do was sign this little receipt. Tommy took us to see his spice warehouse, his factory, his office (Tommy runs a spice import/export/processing company in addition to the herb garden), and the storeroom where Susan keeps all of her imported furniture from Indonesia (a business she runs). It was the first time we’ve seen a proper factory and it was really cool. Plus, it smelled great.

Now we’re going out for Peruvian food. Tommy is great and really generous. We’re having a fabulous time and this is one of the most amazing places we’ve been. We posted a photo album on Stew’s facebook. They should be available for anyone to see, but if you can’t find them let us know and we’ll figure something out.

Pura vida en la lluvia

We spent a couple days hanging out lazily on the beach in San Juan del Sur. We decided to delay our departure from Nicaragua in order to take part in the many Halloween (Noche de las Brujas) festivities. San Juan del sur is a big gringo town so even though the holiday is not generally celebrated among latinos (and is considered a great sacrilege by many), there were countless parties and costumed fools advertising in the streets.

On the day of Halloween, we saw John and Kim from Chicago in the streets and they invited us on a deep sea fishing trip with them. Tori had never been fishing before, so we snapped at the hook. It was advertised as a booze cruise, but today was half price and no booze. Probably a good deal over all given that alcohol is cheaper than water in Nicaragua. We did bring our own bottle of rum, however, which proved useful given the slow fishing day. We only had one bite the entire afternoon, but John managed to reel in a great big black tuna. If that is the name of the tuna, great. Otherwise, it is merely descriptive.

Our madre at the house where we were staying had been cooking us meals every day and we thought she would be willing to show us how to cook a fish Nica style. Also, John and Kim did not have a kitchen, so it was kind of necessary that they share with us. Sweet. Our madre jumped at the fish and slashed it into dark red slabs of delicious in just moments, while ordering us to chop vegetables. The fish turned out amazing and even Stew liked it, which is remarkable because Stew hates all fish. It was such dark meat that it didn´t have any of the stinky fishiness he objects to. Madre sauteed it in garlic and made an onion, tomato, and green pepper sauce to go on top.

Afterwards, all four of us went out for drinks to celebrate Halloween. We meant to dress as zombies because one bar was giving away free drinks for zombies, but we had no makeup. Thus, we went as gringos. We spent most of the evening at a bar having a surf competition of sorts. It started raining so hard that we couldn´t leave and spent a couple hours watching people try to balance a mini surfboard on a log.

The next morning, we decided it was time to hit the road and made our way down to the border at Peñas Blancas. While waiting for the second bus, we made friends with a super nice Costa Rican kid about our age who was studying tourism at university while working at a bar. We think he must have been excited to try out his tour operator skills because he helped us tremendously in navigating across the border and on the other side in Costa Rica. He even went through a map of Costa Rica with us, circling the coolest places to see and discussing the cheapest ways to get there.

Liberia was our first stop in Costa Rica. We had hoped to make it a little further, but by the time we hit this big, dirty city we were exhausted. The last night`s partying was catching up to us, and it was time to crash. Our buddy walked all over the city with us looking for the cheapest hotel. It still proved a little pricier than we had hoped, but apparently that is just how it goes in Costa Rica. The next morning we were back on a bus on the way to the Parque Nacional Rincon de La Vieja (Corner of the Old Lady) via Curubande (spelled Corobunda in our wretched guidebook).

When we got to Curubande, we set out on the 10 km hike to the park. This is where the skies opened up. It rained, and poured, and rained, and poured...and promptly stopped raining as soon as a car slowed down to give us ride. By this point, we had been walking for about 45 minutes in a torrential downpour. Our clothes and packs are still wet. When we finally got up to the park, we found out that it is closed on Mondays. It would have been useful if our guidebook had mentioned this. Weve decided to burn it when we finish with Panama.

The upshot of all this is that we ended up staying at ritzy hotel instead of camping in the park. Our first plan was to camp right outside the entrance, but we (Tori) was frightened by tales of roaming jaguars in the night. This ended up being a fantastic move. The hotel was running a promotion for the month of November: 29 dollars per person per night, including breakfast, sauna, volcanic mud baths, and hot springs. Plus, there was a waterfall on the hotel property. So, we got to stay in an awesome hotel with real Amuurrican style hot showers and a buffet breakfast, plus do everything we had wanted to do in the park (hot springs and waterfall), and sleep in by far the best bed we have slept in thus far. The mud bath was especially sweet. We painted ourselves in volcanic mud bubbling out of a pit below us and then laid in the sun as it dried. We looked like monsters from the deep! Stew looked especially bizarre in a creature from the blue lagoon sort of way.

After Rincon de la Vieja, we headed South for Monteverde, a small town in the midst of Costa Ricas last remaining Cloud Forest. We found a sweet hostel with free, delicious coffee and breakfast, as well as free internet. Score.

This morning we went on a canopy tour, which entails ziplining from platform to platform through the cloud forest. It also included a tarzan swing and superman free fall. Pura Vida, as they say in Costa Rica. We had a great time despite perma-wedgies from the super tight harnesses. Stew strongly resembled a grizzly bear in bondage gear. Now, it's pouring rain yet again. I guess we really have solidly entered the rainy season in the rainforest.

High on volcanoes

So when we last left you, we were about to get dinner. It was great. A lot of restaurants will have their normal menu as well as another dish(es) of the day for about half price. Thus we got huge plates of steak, chicken, rice, beans, salad, plantains, and (most importantly) hot sauce and ranch. RANCH???? Yes. RANCH. In Nicaragua. The hot sauce here rules, too. Our friends at the Lizano company make ¨chile¨and ¨salsa¨which are both great in their own special ways but are best when combined. You can get them in the U.S. too and you should.

Granada is a beautiful colonial town with lots of sun, churches (everywhere!), a fort, a lake that was once considered for a canal instead of lake gatun in Panama, and all the houses are painted like flavors of ice cream. We counted pistachio, blue raspberry, cotton candy, rum raisin, strawberry, and lemon sorbet. Granada is one of the wealthier and more conservative cities in Nicaragua (read: somoza supporters) but because of this it is very well maintained. One feels safe at all hours, there is no trash in the streets, all of the colonial buildings look as pretty as a colony, and some of the main streets have huge sections blocked off for pedestrians. Interestingly, people are also hugely obese. We have not noticed this since we left America but gosh darn if there weren´t some lard butts in Granada. I´m talking Texas sized rears.

This became especially noticeable the next day when we hiked to the top of Masaya Volcano, which awesomely sports five craters. One normally thinks of ¨summiting a volcano¨as an aerobic activity. Not here. Everyone took a bus to the top and climbed the last couple of steps only if they were particularly determined. THere were over a hundred people at the top who had participated in no exercise other than sitting upright in a van. We (the fat lazy americans) forwent the 2 dollar shuttle and hiked 12 miles in, up a volcano in the heat of a Nicaraguan day. We might just be stupid. One of the craters is very active and spouts smoke constantly. Sometimes, at night, you can see the intense fire burning from the molten lava still chilling (so to speak) in the center. Another older crater is marked by a cross to guard the world from the gateway to hell. It was placed there by a priest in the colonial era and stopped the natives from sacrificing virgins to the hag god within (all true). With huge black volcanic boulders perched craggily all around, one can understand why they thought it looked like hell. We suspect walking across it would certainly feel like hell. The third crater we saw was much older and filled with green trees, bushes, birds, and stuff. Stew peed in it and felt like the king of the world. We never found the other craters. Weird.

After the volcano, we caught a bus to downtown Masaya, a small town about twenty minutes outside of Granada. Masaya is famous for its large market of Nicaragauan handicrafts, and as we have assiduously avoided all earlier market opportunities for fear of spending too much money, we (Tori) figured (demanded) it was time to give this one a shot. The market was full of every variety of ceramic object, beaded jewelery, and woven cloth a girl hs always dreamed of. Too bad we had seen so much artesania on the streets that it all looks kind of the same too us now. Honestly, a person can only look at so many beaded bracelets before they all look the same. Stew tried on a bout a million belts in quest of something to hold up his now too big pants, but there wasn´t anything right or for the right price. He did, however, find a pretty awesome Sandino T-shirt that has now magically morphed into a tanktop. Despite our lack of purchases, we still had fun giggling at all the tourist traps. It was a nice, relazing afternoon after our hike.

We spent the next morning in Granada checking out ¨La Polvora,¨ known in English as the White Fortress, built by the Spanish in 17something9 and later converted into a prison by Somoza. We climbed the tower and got a great view of the icecream city. The fortress also had some colorful gardens full of strangely shaped flowers we´d never seen before. We swear some of them looked like flourescent dragon babies.

After La Polvora, it was time to hit the old dusty road again. We were itching to catch another island. We jumped on a bus to Rivas and then on a smooth-riding, albeit crying baby filled, ferry to la Isla de Ometepe. Ometepe means ¨island of the two breasts¨in Nahuatl, the ancient Aztec langauge (also true). It is so named because of all of the women on the island expose their breasts (false). Actually, it is composed of two different volcanoes and a strip of land that forms the cleavage.

Our first day in Ometepe was spent climbig Volcan Concepcion with our righteous dude of a guide, Jesse. He´s our favorite guide thus far. Jesse went at our speed, cracked lots of jokes, spoke Spanish slowly enough that we both could understand, and cut us a good deal on top of it all. However, he also convinced us that it would be a good idea to hike back from the volcano to Mayogalpa, the city we were staying in, rather than taking the normal bus back from the base of Concepcion. This tacked on a solid 3 extra hours to our journey. There were definitely benefits to this: we walked over volcanic rocks through a dried magma river (totally sweet), Jesse taught us how to crawl like guerrillas under farmers´barbed wire fences, checked Capuchin and howler monkeys, saw magic mushrooms growing on cow poop, and met some cows on the dirt road at the bottom. However, by the time we got to back to town, we were ready to collapse. Which we did, immediately.

After an hour of delicious sleep, we were rudely awakened by our hotel owner´s grand children playing soccer on our door. By the way, our hotel was not really a hotel. It was more of a family complex, one of which owned a restaurant with a giant courtyard behind that included three extra bedrooms. It was, however, the only hotel in town that would let us use their kitchen. The ¨baño general¨was half price compared to the rooms with a private bath, but that was fubar. We enjoyed our private room where we didn´t have to wade through chickens, pigs, wild dogs, parrots, and children in order to use a narsty loo. Anyway, with children kicking a soccer ball at our door, we decided we had to get out for a little bit. Thus we wound up at Jesse´s bar drinking beer and eating steak before we went to bed at 7 p.m.

9 a.m. the next morning came surprisingly quickly for our tired feets. Jesse had planned a full day starting at 5 a.m. in order to see the island, but since it was raining, we decided to scrap the plans of motorcycles and beaches. Eventually, after a bus, a hike, a hitchhike, a hike, and a bus, and a hike, we were 25 kms from our hotel at a place known to have the best petroglyphs on the island. This was the main reason we came to Ometepe. THis is also, evidently, the worst possible reason to come here. If you want to see something more exciting, do anything else. Tori saw one on the walk up and declined to take a picture on the grounds that ¨the ones we have to pay for will be better.¨ Wrong. That was the only interesting petroglyph, standing in a cow field and on a rock about 3 feet high. The carvings at Tikal and Ceibal were much better, as are the Nasca lines. Plus we had to pay a dollar each, got led around by a crazy maid that didn´t know where the glyphs were, and ate a lemon that had crazy numbing chemicals on it. We hitch hiked back to our hotel with the help of the ministry of health (no joke) and got off the island.

Everyone on the island had assured us there was a bus waiting to take us to San Juan del Sur but this was not the case. Side Note: they re-use saints´names so frequently for cities that there are two San Juan´s in NIcaragua and are distinguished as ¨north¨and ¨south¨...we´ve been in 5 Santa Cruz´s since beginning this journey. After a fierce ¨piedra papel tijeras¨(rock paper scissors) battle, we decided to pay our taxi driver an additional 8 dollars to take us all the way to San Juan del Sur and skip the bumbling metropolis of Rivas. We later found out that Rivas is the site of William Walker´s grave. If you don´t know who William Walker is, he is the boldest of American imperialist swashbucklers. ¨My own company? Psh, my company needs its own country,¨ said Walker with a flourish of his gallant hair and a flash in his grey eyes.

Anyway , now we´re in San Juan del Sur which is a great beach town that looks like Myrtle Beach if every surfer from San Diego had moved with it to Nicaragua. Surfers really do have a way of transforming the culture of an area faster than the boldest imperialist. It looks nice though, so we´re going to go check out the beaches.

Gustaf and Anna have a blog ,too. Here it is, with some pictures. If your Swedish is rusty, use google translate (www.google.com/translate) and your imagination.

http://www.resdagboken.se/Default.aspx?documentId=3&userId=269145&section=blog&entryId=2204577&journeyId=373399

The Carribean Coast of Nicaragua

We left Leon about a week ago to make the long journey up to the Corn Islands off of Nicaragua´s Moskito Coast in the Carribean.

This was no easy task. We left Leon Saturday afternoon, and 4 buses, 1 boats, and 2 days later we were on the Carribean coast, in the port city of Bluefields. Then we got on a boat that we thought was taking us to the Corn Islands. This was not the case. We arrived at Bluff, a nothing port town with one resteraunt and one hotel. At least the hotel was pretty cheap. We walked around the entire town and the beach in about the hour. The most exciting thing that happened was meeting a drug addict turned evangelist on the beach who tried desperately to convert Tori. Stew was a lost cause, apparently. He did tell us that the town was supposed to become a major port for the Soviets, but this was undermined by a hurricane and a counterrevolution. Thus, the town has nothing. Oh well, it wasn´t too bad for a night.

The next morning we returned to Bluefields to try to get to the Corn Islands once more. This time, we got more accurate information about how to get there, though we had to wait around a day for a boat. Damn Bluff. Bluefields was interesting in that it´s a city totally different from any other central american city we´ve seen thus far. Most people speak english with an island twang - weird grammar, strange vocabulary, and words from other langauges are liberally mixed in. Spanish was much easier to communicate in than English, which was wacko. Finally, we weren´t gringos, just ¨whitey.¨ Also, no one serves tortillas with meals on the Carribean coast. This came as a quite a shock to us, but thankfully tortillas were replaced by tostones: deep fried salty plantains. They rule. In fact, they own tortillas.

After two boring days waiting on the coast trying to get to the Corn Islands, we caught a boat to Big Corn Island. We woke at 6 to get in line for tickets at 7 so we could sail on the 9 a.m. boat. Sometime after 8 they started selling tickets and it was about then that it started to rain. I guess that´s Island time for you. Only the rain shows up consistently. The boat ride was uneventful, unless you count thunder storms in a tiny shaky craft in the middle of the sea eventful. We felt like sissies for feeling so miserable, until we realized the coast guard officers on the ship were puking. Then we felt like badasses. To be fair, half our nausea may have been caused by Gustavo Leyton. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7vwBoiZea0&feature=related We watched this for an hour of the six hour hellcruise. Around hour two, we decided to fly back to Managua. One good thing about the trip was that we met some great people and bonded. Gustaf and Anna, our new best friends from Sweden, made the trip very enjoyable and along with John and Kim from Chicago joined forces to reap the Corn Islands.

We decided to stay on Big Corn after the ride, which turned out to be something of a mistake. It was still pouring rain, so we grabbed a pizza and a beer with the Swedes. By the time we got to a hotel, Stew´s bag was soaked and smelled like a wet dog that had been skunked. and then left in an unplugged refrigerator. Tori smelled a little bit better. Everything on Big Corn was super expensive, so we made macaroni and cheese on our stove before retiring at 8.

The next day we woke to rain again. Tori said ¨This is a miserable island.¨ Then the sun came out and we all had fun playing in the beach. Tori took back her maldigas. We made stew with Anna and Gustaf before heading out to Little Corn on a much shorter and very fun panga or sweet little motor boat that jumps four feet out of the water and smacks your rear like a frat boy at initiation. Little Corn doesn´t get rain as much, because it is better than Big COrn. It is also cheaper and prettier and allegedly has better scuba diving. Which is also cheaper.

We shared a room with Gustaf and Anna at Hotel Sunshine, owned and operated by Dustin the Redneck Texan, a title he proudly bears. The hotel was cheap and great, though the mysterious smell in the bathroom confounded all. We suspect this was what caused the swedes to get a cabana on the other side of the island, five minutes away. Maybe it was the snoring.

There is basically nothing to do on Little Corn, which is great. We spent the mornings swimming and reading in the sun, hiked in the afternoon rain, cooked meals in our hotels rockin kitchen, played pool and drank cheap beers at our hotel, talked with travelers about other great destinations, considered diving but rejected it because we are cheap and wanted to save money for our plane tickets to buypass brownfields. We did go snorkeling one day with the swedes and had a great time. It was pouring rain, which is pretty cool to see from below the water. If you´re wet, you´re wet. It´s an old Pollock family proverb that ¨water is wet.¨

One night, we went out to a Cuban restaurant for a great dinner. There is no ATM, so we pulled the ¨friendTM¨move where you pay for everyone elses meal and make them pay you in cash. This works well until the rain takes out the credit card machine and they won´t let you leave the island till you leave them a check and everyone is thoroughly confused about the payment. Actually, it worked well enough even then because we got a great meal and had enough money to leave. And may have gotten a free meal. By the way, Bank of America, we definitely did not write a check on this island.

Today we flew to Managua (way too much money but way better than getting back on that boat or the 9 hour overnight bus tour through theft town) and three hours after leaving Little Corn, we were in Granada. It is like a prettier rainbow version of Antigua on a lake. We´ll investigate this further tomorrow. For now, dinner.

Three Countries in one day

After our intense experience in El Mozote, we decided that we needed to get back on the road and keep heading south. Chile is still a long way away.

We woke up at 4 a.m. to begin our long day of traveling. Then we turned the alarm off and woke up at 6 a.m., feeling much more optimistic about the day. We hopped a bus toward San Miguel and jumped off at ¨km 18 on the military road.¨ THankfully, someone on the bus knew what that meant. From there, we grabbed another bus toward the border. We stopped to get breakfast (40 cent pupusas and 10 cent coffee). When we went to use the only bathroom in the town (maybe this is an exaggeration...) in a cool looking bar, the owner turned out to have lived in America and bought us beer at 9:30. What a nice guy...for a yankees and cowboys fan.

The next bus dropped us at the border of Honduras, which we walked across after paying the 3 dollar entrance fee. No stamp in the passport, just a piece of paper. Bummer, but I guess we´ll get some stamps eventually. We got on a micro bus (minivan) to the border with Nicaragua, several hours away. We got totally swindled on the fare, which really annoyed us. It just feels like everyone is taking advantage of you because you´re an American. We spoke better Spanish and were dressed worse than some of the other passengers, but were still targeted. I guess after what the U.S. did to El Salvador (or Guatemala, or Nicaragua, or Honduras, etc) it makes sense. Still, it made us unhappy.

We walked across the Nicaraguan border, too. Customs and IMmigration are, as always, really annoying, but it was exciting to finally get here. Also, it felt cool to have succesfully crossed two borders in one day even though people said we couldn´t do it in time. We hoppped another Micro to CHinandega where we got on a bluebird (school bus) to Leon. SO MANY BUSES!!!

Leon is a beautiful colonial city that holds the oldest and possibly largest cathedral in central america. Impressive, grandiose, opulent and Catholic. It is a great little city and very fun and comfortable, despite having some of the highest poverty rates in Latin America. Also, it was a focal point of the revolution in Nicaragua, largely due to the university here which produces very radical students.

The revolution in Nicaragua seems pretty similar to El Salvador´s, only they won through military force rather than having to wait almost 20 years to win through political process. El Salvador´s current president, Mauricio Funes, was elected 100 days ago and is from the FMLN. Since his election, he has nationalized health care succesfully (according to a Salvadoreno), made school free, and provided social security income to anyone over 80. Not bad for a ¨first 100 days.¨ Maybe Mr. Nobel Peace prize should take some notes.

We explored Leon´s museums and art galleries. One of the museums is in the old prison where the Somoza dictators tortured and executed Guerrillas, poets, crazies, and dissenters. Stew got a haircut in the courtyard at one of the museums, including a ¨Shape up¨(razor trimmed edge around neck, ears, forehead, etc). Later we went out dancing at a bar with some of the artisan kids living in our hostel. We bought jewelry from them, too. TOri has a wire chain necklace with a tiger´s eye stone and Stew has a leather cord with a javelina tooth. We look awesome.

We´re heading off to the Corn Islands in the Carribean today, or as far as we can get in one day.

El Salvador´s Revolution

We´ve been pretty busy since our last post. Our last stop in El Salvador was the tiny mountain village of Perquin, headquarters of the FMLN during the revolution-cum-civil war in El Salvador. We got quite the history lesson at the Musuem of the Revolution in Perquin, as well as at the guerrilla base camp (open for tours) and at nearby El Mozote.

The musuem was tiny but powerful. It was hard to remember that we were really getting only getting the FMLN´s side of the story because sympathizing with the government in this war means you´re probably evil. The revolution in El Salvador began in a familiar way. The social system was highly stratified, with the legendary ¨14 Families¨owning practically all land and all businesses in the country while the vast majority of persons could barely practice subsistence farming. As always, student groups reading Marx, Engels, Trotsky, and the rest of those radical old white guys, got uppity, protested, and thus were shot. The FMLN, a political party turned communist guerrilla group, got organized in the mountains to avenge the students, fight the army, liberate the people...you know the drill.

The thing that distinguishes El Salvador´s war from most others are its duration and brutality. The war raged until peace accords were signed in 1992, and even then it wasn´t all over. The guides that led us through the museum were former guerillas, the pictures of martyrs on the walls were their friends. The Salvadorean Army - US trained and supplied, but of course - blatantly disregarded human rights, and any other sense of basic moral decency. This was really brought home to us at El Mozote. Today a monument, El Mozote was a small mountain town populated by religous, evangelical peasants who found themselves caught up in the middle of a war they wanted no part in. The army wrongly suspected these peasants of organizing a guerilla force and supplying existing FMLN forces. Instead of doing their research, soldiers came into the town, separated the entire population by age and gender, and then killed them all in incredibly gruesome ways. This includes babies of only a few months, pregant women, teenagers, grown men -- everyone. One pregnant woman was crushed to death by a massive stone placed on her stomach, which made the unborn baby´s bones penetrate her organs. Every girl over the age was taken to a nearby mountain and raped before they were murdered. They justified killng the children because ¨one day they will become guerrillas.¨Only one woman managed to flee to the mountains, where she survived for 8 days in the woods. She is the only reason any one knows this massacre happened, and no one knows how many more like it might have occurred but lacked surivors.

Learning about this kind of history made the two of us feel incredibly guilty for what our government has done, for what our tax dollars have paid for. Without the funding and training from the US, none of the violence of El Salvador´s revolution could possible have been so severe. Though the war had already begun, it took a dramatic turn with Reagan´s election. Indeed, it is only inthe 1980s that massacres like El Mozote began to occur.

Strangely enough, in a place that some might consider one of the most dangerous areas of El Salvador in the fairly recent past, we felt safer than anywhere else -- safer than you might feel in Washington, DC. The people welcomed us, they were eager to share their stories and asked that we spread the word such that something like this would never occur again.

Red, White, and Brown (skin tones)

After more than enough time in the big city of San Salvador, we figured it was time to hit El Salvador´s world famous beaches. If you look at a map, you´ll notice that El Salvador is a really narrow (50 miles at its widest) strip of beach a hop skip and a splash north of the equator. THis means that the entire country is basically a beach.

We caught a bus to La Libertad which is a little more blown up because of all the surfers that have mvoed there from aroudn the world. We decided to go to the more secluded beach of El Palmarcito. We jumped off the bus at a bridge and took a cobble stone road to the beach. Question, when are cobblestones just regular stones? WHen they´re big enough rocks that it is no longer convenient to walk on them. ALso known as hobble stones.

We were the only tourists aside from two boys from San Salvador who claimed to be teenagers. Being cheap, we opted to camp underneath the gazebo rather than pay for a room. This made it easy for Stew to roll out of the tent and into the pool for his morning shower.

THe beach is pretty much empty except for a couple of local surfers at sunset and fishermen sporadicalyl throughout the day. THere are two huge cliffs that mark the ends of the beach, though there are trails that lead up and over them. El Palmarcito is probably 200 meters of sparkly black sand and big fun waves. Over one of the cliffs is a path to another beach which is maybe 30 meters long. This one was less fun because there were rocks on the bottom where the waves crashed. Along the path, however, there was a pool that filled up with salt water from the ocean spray but was partly protected from sharks. Which made Tori feel a lot better.

We spent two and a half days chilling at the beach and exploring some of the trails and overlooks. It was great fun and very relaxing. Also, it was really cheap and we managed to stay under budget every day. Eventually, we got tired of being so happy and caught a bus to another beach.

The bus was supposed to be easy and short but 4 hours and 4 buses later, we finally got to Playa los Blancos. NOte that it is not Playa DE los blancos (beach of the whites), nor Isle of Wite, but White Beach. Which is not exactly appropriate because the sand was really quite gray. Still, it was a very long and wide beach with hot sand and fun waves. and hammerhead sharks. We saw a woman preparing one for dinner. Stew asked later and was informed that there were a lot in the water, but "only little ones." He didn´t tell Tori.

We ended up spending three days here, rather than the intended one. We tried to go to La Puntilla to check out another beach. When we got there, people swarmed us and tried to rip us off for ridiculously overpriced shitholes of hotel rooms. When we asked the manager for the price, she told us she had to ask the boy that had recommended us what he said he was going to charge so she didnt undercharge us. What a system of thievery. We left after checking out the beach and swearing a blood vendetta. We hopped back on the bus and returned to the awesome room we had been in where for $16 a night we had a great pool with an underwater table to drink at, water bar stools, two slides, and beach front access. Also, Cheech Marin appaers to own the hotel. We ate 40 cent pupusas for almost every meal and cooked the rest. What a great time.

Eventualyl, our bodies were too pink to remain in paradise and we reluctantly hopped a bus to somewhere. It turned out to be San Vicente, so we got on another one to San Miguel. This was the focal point of the revolution and people here apparently remember the war very vividly because of all the people killed by american trained soldiers. It is a sleepy town with a bunch of people that speak english and good fast food. We´re heading to Perquin now to check out a museum and go hiking. What nerds.

Still in San Salvador

We´ve spent the last few days in San Salvador trying to see all of the sights nearby. We have only had a moderate level of success. Despite spending a longer time here than anywhere else so far on our journey (except Los Gatos), we have only seen about half of the attractions. The city is huge and confusing and all the buses go everywhere. Salvadorenos are very willing to help, even if they do not know the answer. Thus, we have spent the majority of our time lost.

Still, what we have seen has been pretty cool. Since Joya de Ceren, we have seen the historic center of San Salvador. This included a beautiful national palace, which is still in the process of being restored. It is pretty cool to see tourist attractions when they aren´t all done up in their make up. There was an exhibit on colonial El Salvador, which was basically an exhibit on churches. There were also cannons. Stew posed as a judge in the supreme court room. Tori posed with a cannon and looked like a badass.

We also saw the cathedral which was really pretty but not too different from the others that we have seen. Santa Ana´s was newer but more impressive...at the turn of the 20th century there was a ton of money due to the rise in the coffee industry and El Salvador´s lush volcanic soil which gave the beans a special flavor and led to people getting really rich. They built a grandiose cathedral in a gothic style to demonstrate something...presumably that they were as rich and cultured as Europe. Thus, the more recent, less important cathedral of Santa Ana is better to take pictures of than San Salvador´s.

San Salvador has another important church called La Iglesia Rosario which is probably the most interesting architecture for a church that we have ever seen. The building is basically two massive arches connected by terraced concrete, filled with colored glass mosaics to let in light. It looks like a rainbow inside the otherwise concrete and metal structure. The bulding is filled with metal sculptures depicting Jesus´s life, death, and resurrection. Everything is made out of construction scraps and has a rather industrial feel, countered by the warmth of the stained glass windows. It is supposed to be in contrast to the opulence of the Catholic churches in which everything is dipped in gold and plated in diamonds. This church seemed to resonant more strongly with the local, impoverished community.

Yesterday, we tried to hike Volcan San Salvador. After waiting 30 minutes for a bus, taking 4 different buses for two hours, and being no closer to the volcano when it started thunderstorming, we decided to give up and get lunch at a mall. At least we managed to take care of some errands, like buying Stew a notebook and toothpaste. We also got to see Salvadoreno mall culture. It looks a lot like in the U.S...angsty teens and beauty queens. When we got back to our hotel, we saw a missed call from Eduardo, Tori´s brother Alex´s friend from highschool.

Ed came and picked us up from our hotel in his super cool black truck, and we got to go hang out at his beautiful house up in the hills in San Salvador. You can see the soccer stadium, including part of the field, from the park about a block away from his house. If El Salvador wins their next game against Mexico, they´ll play Honduras at home. We learned from Ed that this will be the biggest deal in a very long time in San Salvador....if this happens, we will be sure to stay out of the city, which will become a total madhouse. In contrast, Eduardo will be sure to make it to the game. Still, we´re rooting for El Salvador to make it to the world cup.

Eduardo´s house is lovely - it goes up a hill and has beautiful gardens, and the architecture is clean and modern. However, the coolest part about it was the zoo! We got to see macaws, tucans, five green and yellow parrots, an adorable cappuchin monkey that swang zanily from branch to rope to branch, three kinkyjews (yes, that´s the real name....we think that´s how you spell it), a big loveable, and relatively tame racooon, a ferrett, a hedgehog, five (mini) sharks, five dogs with really awesome names (sambucca and garbanzo are standouts), eleven cats, and more. Stew even held the hand of the raccoon! It was really fun to meet all of the animals, and it definitely made us miss having doggies around. Eduardo was so welcoming and fun to hang out with -- it was really nice to be with someone from back home.

After chilling out at Eduardo´s house for a while, it was time to see his restaurant, Citron, situated in the San Salvador´s Zona Rosa, stomping ground of the fabulous in El Salvador. The restaurant is in a former house (there´s still a living area upstairs), so it has a small (read: romantic) outdoor seating area and a little citrus tree garden. The decor is elegant with smooth, modern lines. It has an open kitchen, and we got to sit right up on the counter overlooking it. This made for an especially fun evening because we got to watch Eduardo cook and chat with him all night.

On to the food: oh my gooodness, we haven´t eaten this well since.....we don´t even know when. It was heaven. Stew said it was the best meal of his life, though he also once said that after eating In-n-Out burger. Our first course was a signature dish at Citron: yucca gnocchi in a pesto cream sauce made with four different kinds of basil and a Salvadoran flower bud. Even though the menu changes every few weeks, it´s been on the menu since the restaurant opened four or five years ago. The gnocchi were fried to perfect crunchiness on the outside, while their centers were soft and yucca-yummy. The pesto was a delicate yet flavorful compliment. We devoured it.

Oh, and the bread came with tomato garlic oil that we couldn´t stop ourselves from polishing off in about ten minutes flat. Eduardo claims that it only has tomato, garlic, and oil in it, but there must have been some kind of crazy secret ingredient. Or maybe he´s just so good that he can do things with tomato and garlic that we mere mortals can only dream of.

For our main course, Eduardo whipped up a special plate of farm-raised venison with a rich orange citrus sauce, mashed sweet potatos, a tomato-mushroom ragout (special crazy looking tropical mushrooms, that is), and venison chorizo made with lavender and rosemary (I´m pretty sure it was lavender and rosemary...). It was out of this world. We´ve both had lots of venison thanks to Stew´s family´s hunting prowess, but this was unlike any deer we had ever tasted. The meat was so tender it fell off your fork, the citrus sauce was so flavorful and awesome we drenched everything possible in it. The potatoes were sweet, delicious, and whipped to perfection. We relished every woodsy-tasting crazy looking orange mushroom on our plates.

And then we had dessert. It began with three different kinds of ice cream: bacon (Stew thought he had died and gone to heaven), corn with cinnamon, and a tropical fruit whose name has escaped us but tasted like a sort of guava-citrus combination. When Eduardo asked us which one was our favorite, we took turns declaring each one the winner. In retrospect, Tori votes for the fruit and Stew votes for the bacon....but now we´re struggling and second-guessing ourselves, so maybe the best one really was all 3. The second dessert course was cinnamon sugar churros with a chocolate hazlenut sauce and mascerated strawberries. We have decided there is nothing better in this world than a deep fried dessert with chocolate. Even though we didn´t think there could possibly be anymore room in our bellies, we somehow managed to eat every last bite.

All in all, it was a fabulous night with an incredibly gracious and welcoming host. I think it may have been the best night of our trip so far! Next time Eduardo comes to the US, we are going to show him a truly outrageous time. Thank you, Eduardo!!!

Today, we are off to beach at La Libertad to try our hand at surfing. Yippee!

S

Checking out El Salvador (she`s hot!)

So, we´ve spent the past 4 days in El Salvador.

We started out in Santa Ana, the ´Queen of the West´, according to our guide book. It´s a relatively boring city close to the guatemalan border...but El Salvador is small enough that nothing is too far away from any border. We spent an afternoon sightseeing and had seen everything the town had to offer: a museum with 3 exhibits, one on the eruption of Volcan San Salvador in 1917 (tourists kayaking on the lake in the crater went flying!), one on salvadorean currency through the ages (now they use the US dollar), and one on mammoths (they´re large); cathedral (closed for remodeling, so we saw the outside view); casino (a private members only club we also saw from the outside); an art school. We left the next day.


We arrived at Lake Coatepeque just in time to see the beautiful day turn into a thunderstorm. Even though it prevented swimming, seeing storms over water is always cool. Tori also didn´t care because at this point she was sick as a dog and just slept for 18 hours. Stew had to bide his time wandering around the town....that is, the dirt road. He got a $2 steak though, which made him happy. We left Lake Coatepeque around mid-afternoon the following day, even though we had planned to stay there for two days. After all of the beautiful lakes/water we saw in Guatemala, this wasn´t really up to snuff. I guess we´re getting a little spoiled in that regard.

Other substantial motivating factors leading to our early departure included Stew´s near death experience by electrocution in the shower (Central American hot water means electric coils installed above showerheads.....not very safe, especially when poorly installed or when you´re 6ft4), and the owner of our hotel was an evil trannie. The wo(man) just about killed us with her evil glare when we went out for breakfast, and then tried to charge us for breakfast on the way out....but the night before, she said the resteraunt was closed (at 5pm) when a fellow traveller tried to get dinner. Wack.

We got to San Salvador in two evenings ago. Unfortunately, Stew got realllly sick yesterday. We took it easy, which was actually a welcome change in some ways, except for the whole Stew puking part. We´d been running around from place to place to place for a while, so it was nice to have a day to catch our breath.

Today we went to Joya de Ceren, a Mayan village that got volcano´d in about 600 AD. Unfortunately, the museum was closed for renovation (this is starting to feel like a recurring theme), but we got to walk around the archeological site and check it out. This is one of the only sites where you can see how Mayans actually lived from day to day; i.e., itçs a village, not a temple or political center or astronomical viewing area, ect. Turns out Mayans had saunas! Weird, because all of central america kind of feels like a sauna just walking around. We ran into some older Americans driving out of the park as we were walking to the bus stop, and they picked us up and took us back into San Salvador and dropped us off at the musuem we wanted to check out. Pretty sweet. It turns out that the wife of the pair worked at the Embassy, and she gave us a pretty hard sell on joining the Foreign Service...we´ll see...right now, working for the government - the very gears of industrial capitalist machine- doesn´t sound too enticing.


The anthropology musuem was quite well done. The exihibits included:
-a photo exhibit of U.S. leaders with El Salvadorean leaders. Madeleine Albright was thrown in too. And some of the leaders weren´t from El Salvador, per se, because the picture of Joe Biden was with Costa Rica´s president, Obama was with Trinidad and Tobago´s leader, and Hillary Clinton was looking terrifying with El Salvador´s first lady. It was interesting to see Hillary´s picture from 15 ish years earlier when she had visited the first lady and had been the much more attractive of the two. No longer the case.
-an exhibit on agriculture during the mayan era. This was boring.
-a display of pottery and weapons through the ages. Stew´s dad makes much more impressive guns and knives than the Spanish. There was a breast plate with a dent from a musket ball, demonstrating that the gun was real weak sauce.
-general anthropological hibbity gibbity.
-art and stuff. also some stuff on religiyawn.
- a statue of a naked chick washing clothes hiding behind a tree in the courtyard. Also, a metal sculpture called delirium tremens that is supposed to demonstrate the way that God filled the artist with such hallucinatory exultation that it was similar but better than any intoxication from drugs. Cool?
All in all, a very well done museum.

Now we´re at out hotel, not a hostel, which our guide refers to as "the latin american version of a bed and breakfast." It is nice. When Stew was sick, the owner made him vanilla tea.

el salvador

So it has been a while since we´ve updated the blog. When we last left you, we were in Flores preparing for the big trip to Tikal. We took a late bus there so that we would arrive alter 3 p.m. and our tickets would be good for two days. Upon arrival, we set up our tent in the courtyard of a fancy hotel and set out to explore the ruins.

Our guide book told us that sun rise and sun set are ¨particularly magical¨but the guides were going to charge us 50 to 60 dollars extra in order to see either. Being cheap, we snack into the ruins as they were closing and evaded the guards as they kicked everyone out. We are so cool. We could hear their motorcycles touring the ruins, but knew they wouldn´t be able to follow us up some of the steeper trails through the rainforest as the sun was going down. We climbed to the top of one of the larger ziggurats and watched the sun go down over the jungle while monkeys played in the Canopy. The stairs to the temple had been closed to preserve them, but there were stairs/ladders that you could climb to get to the top of the edifice. They were really steep, so we went down before the sun had completely set. The sunset was awesome and we could see the tops of several other temples poking out above the tops of the trees. Even so, we had to find our way out of the jungle in complete darkness. Fortunately we had brought flashlights, but it still made for a great adventure.

The next day, we woke at 6 a.m. in order to get an early tour of the ruins before the sun got too hot and there were too many tourists. We decided to go with a Spanish guide because there were fewer people than in the English group (3 versus 40). Our guide was great and it helped to improve our Spanish, too. Tikal is amazing no matter what the conditions are, but it is especially awesome when you don´t have a huge group of ridiculous tourists with you. When we walked in, the park was covered in mist and it was quite eerie as the temples appeared. Afterwards, at about 2 p.m., we ate lunch and hopped a bus to a small town called El Remate.

El Remate isn´t really a town. There is only one street and it goes along the side of the lake. There are several restaurants, tiendas, and hostels, but they´re all spread out so it takes a while to see all 8 buildings. It is absolutely beautiful and peaceful. There was one other guest at our hostel, our new German friend Michel. Like all Germans, he smokes like California forests, speaks English, and is very nice. We only stayed one night but went swimming four or five different times. The lake is warm like a bathtub and flat. Like something flat. It was a chill way to relax after hiking and camping in a rainforest.

Yesterday, we left El Remate and took a bus back to Santa Elena. It was quite shocking to once again see all the hustle and hubbub of a gross city afte so much beauty. There were so many people yelling at us to get on their bus or go to their hotel or eat at their restaurant….it will never stop being annoying. We decided we were done with Guatemala after three amazing weeks and hopped on a bus to Chiquimula, near the El Salvador border.

Chiquimula is not a tourist town, which means it has cheap food and people are confused when they see you. We stayed in a hotel that was part of the bus station in order to get to El Salvador as quickly as possible. Stew woke up and bought a bunch of food at the market. He went overboard because everything was so cheap. For about a dollar, he got a thing of orange juice (thing = plastic bag with straw) , 10 empanadas, three tacos, and two bananas. YUMM! Tori, who was sick, really appreciated the bed side breakfast.

We caught a bus over the border to El Salvador and are currently in a town called Santa Ana. Tomorrow is a mystery. It is more relaxing here and no one yells about buses. We´re happy and safe.
Love,
Us

trekking through mayan rainforests

Honduras is still a mess and is getting worse. Zelaya is in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa and now the embassy is under siege by Michelletti’s forces using toxic gases. The supermarkets are out of food and the situation looks grim. We’re trying to figure out if El Salvador will be a safe way to go around Honduras and get to Nicaragua. If anyone has any advice, we’d love to hear it.
We left Coban and headed to Sayaxche along the Rio de la Pasion. Sayaxche is slightly larger than Bridgewater, but has bars. It reminds Stew of Iquitos, Peru but given the scale, is more like Iquititos. There was nothing to do in the town and we arrived a little to late to get to any of the ruins nearby, which are the only reason to be there. We walked around, got our stove ready with kerosene, purchased food, and got bored. We couldn’t stand the reggaeton blasting from the building next to our hostel so we went out to walk around the town again. This time, we stopped to get a beer in hopes of delaying until the reggaeton stopped and it was late enough to go to bed. This proved fortuitous, as you will later find out.
We returned to the hotel and watched A cut Above with the owner. When it was finally 9 p.m. we went to bed. Tori’s bed had bugs in it, so she ditched and we slept in a twin. Oh college.
At 6 a.m., we got out of bed and on the road. Everyone in the town kept on giving us bad directions on how to get to Ceibal, famous Mayan ruins, and we got pretty frustrated. It is not much of a tourist town, so there are no established means to get to the various ruins. Thus, you have to find someone willing to take you and they will then try to take all of your money. Fortunately, a man we had met the day before was kind enough to convince a bus driver to give us the standard rate to a small town a couple miles down the road and somewhere between Sayaxche and Ceibal.
Side note: the nice guy who helped us is also kind of a jerk. He believes the U.S. requires a military leader to be the arbiter of the world, and thus he loved Bush and hates Obama. It is difficult to stomach this guy being the nice one. Tori was more of a diplomat than Stew, who pretended he didn’t understand Spanish. Thank God Tori is so nice.
We jumped out of the bus and started our 5 mile hike to Ceibal along a dirt path with a bunch of rocks and giant puddles. Also, monsters. We saw many toads and lizards, a trillion mosquitos, two tarantulas, and a snake.
Sidenote: Stew does not like spiders.
Here are three things that ought not be endangered *colon*
Manatees, jaguars, Honduran democracy
Here are three things that ought to be endangered *colon*
Mosquitos, spiders, and howler monkeys.
Now back to our proper punctuation. After a pretty sweaty hike through the hot and humid rainforest, we arrived at a very basic compound by the ruins. About 10 guards live there and maintain the ruins while they wait to be fully excavated. Guatemala does not have the money to excavate them, so some Japonese are going to do it. About 1 % is excavated now, or two buildings. We got to see all of the covered buildings, many carved stones, much of the jungle, and the spectacular views from the top of the Mayan market.
One finds an interesting conflict with regard to the excavation of Ceibal. First, the local communities do not want it protected. They want to use the land for agriculture because they are impoverished. More land means more food and better living conditions. So, they attack the stellae *carved rocks* with their machetes in an attempt to destroy the historic beauty and prevent any further excavation. Paradoxically, now that several years have gone by since the excavations, local communities are recreating Mayan sacrifices with chickens whenever agriculture suffers. If you sacrifice a chicken for rain and rain comes five days later, it appears to have worked. Every body wins. Unless you count chickens. They always lose in Latin America. Second, the preservation of ancient cultures is important to many for its academic value. The longer we wait to excavate, the more deteriorated the ruins become. Once these are gone, they cannot be replaced. Thirdly, the environmentalist perspective. In order to excavate the ruins requires destroying the jungle around and on top of the ruins. Central America and the world in general do not need any more jungles destroyed, as they too are difficult to replace and important for the sustainment of our environment. Oxygen and biodiversity rule. Jaguars prefer this option. Finally, Guatemala does not have the finances for it and requires international academic communities to provide the money for the excavation and preservation. However, the Japonese insist on taking all of the artifacts, thus depriving the Guatemalans of their cultural heritage and some of the benefits of excavation.
After our exciting tour by Manuel, we returned to the main site where we set up our tent. We were exhausted and mosquito bitten, so we took a nap. We later woke, made dinner, and went back to sleep. At 645. 12 hours later, we awoke again and hiked out.
Today we took a bus to Flores, a beautiful island near Tikal. We will visit the ruins of Tikal tomorrow. Word. We love history and Mayan ruins. Tonight we have a romantic date planned on the lakeside to watch the sunset over the water and eat fancy food at one of the many nice restaurants in the area.
We uploaded pictures on facebook because the computer has a scandisk drive. You’ll have to check Stew’s profile to see them because our blog loads pictures really slowly. Sorry.
₌

Honduras

Is not going so well. So we won´t be going there to volunteer, which is sad. Much sadder is the plight of the Honduran people who, no matter which side of the political spectrum you or they are on, will lose.

Take the time to read some news and educate yourself on this issue as this is probably only the beginning of a much bigger and very sad situation.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8271309.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8267982.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8269073.stm

From what we´ve read, there is a lot of posturing on both sides and neither will negotiate. They are both committed to gaining power and are unwilling to compromise. Regardless of who is the rightful, democratic, or best leader for Honduras, this does not bode well for the Honduran people who are torn between two political extremes. We hope for the best and a peaceful resolution, but given Zelaya´s demands for either ¨patria, restitucion, or sangre¨and Michelletti´s use of armed weapons against protestors, an ideal resolution seems unlikely.

We´re not sure how the English news is portraying it, but the paper in Guatemala paints a grim picture. We won´t be going there anymore, which is unfortunate for us and the children we had hoped to aid.

Caves, waterfalls, and pozas!

When we last left off, we were hitting the hay early in preparation for a 6 a.m. wake up in order to get to Las Grutas del Rey Marcos before the crowd. It turns out there is no crowd and we were the only ones going to these off the beaten path caves, but it was still nice to get an early start. The day lasts a lot longer that way.

First, we took a micro bus with a bunch of locals to a small town called Chalmeco, where we picked up another micro. Micros, by the way, are normal sized American vans (8 passengers) with an extra row of seating and three to four times the appropriate number of people (ok, only 23 at last count, but that is still crazy). The second one dropped us off at a fork in mud road. We proceeded to walk 3 km up a hill past indigenas farms until we arrived at the caves.

The setting was beautiful: waterfalls, natural swimming pools, orchids, a fountain, several small cabana structures, and a giant heart shaped rock in the river inscribed with the Ten commandments of Mother Nature. The caves had a tiny entrance: about the size of a dorm room refrigerator. Stew was confused and hit his head a lot, but was wearing a helmet so he didn´t get hurt, just more confused. The caves eventually (after a perilous climb that required stalactite grabbing for safety and lots of emphatic grunting for emphasis) opened up and revealed a rushing underground river. We had to cross it carefully, as it is a sacred religious Mayan site and also a rushing underground river. Fortunately there was a rope. There was a giant final room where we turned off our lights to contemplate the total darkness and become scared. Afterwards, we went swimming and took pictures standing in a waterfall. We´re planning on starting a TLC coverband when we get back and needed album artwork.
These aren´t our photos because our cable was stolen but they´re photos. We´re trying.
http://www.grutasdelreymarcos.com/galerias.htm

We hiked back down the road and eventually caught a taxi back to Coban (about an hour ride) for less than a dollar each. Tori is a great negotiator. She also made friends with the driver and taught him how to sing reggaeton songs in English, which they were both excited about. Stew demonstrated his comprehension by agreeing ¨Si¨ or ¨esta bien¨ every five minutes.

We caught a micro to Lanquin which was only mildly less crazy than our ride the day before. Sorry parents, we´re trying to stop, but it is the only way to get from the highlands to the jungle. There are no trains in Guatemala. When we got to Lanquin, we realized we had time for another cave, and hiked back down the road carrying our full packs because we wanted to make it before the cave closed.

We got there in plenty of time and saw some of the most amazing formations in the world. This cave was much larger and had seriously difficult rock climbing involved. There was also a beautiful river outside called Rio Lanquin (real creative guys). We waited to see the bats leave en masse, which was pretty spectacular as there are more bats here than anywhere else in the world. In fact, it was featured on Planet Earth for this reason. We saw a weak display, apparently, but we were still impressed. http://www.semucchampey.com/es/lanquin-cuevas.html This is not the most impressive photo or link but it gives an idea. It is much better in real life.

We caught a ride to a hostel called Jam bamboo near Semuc Champey after the bat show. It was pretty lucky because the hike back to town would´ve been too much for one day. The hostel was the most beautiful yet. Like a Hawaiian themed frat party minus the tackiness. It was owned by Argentines who make an excellent caiparinha and pasta carbonara. Both are weird for Guatemala or Argentina, but both are welcome anytime and anywhere. The only bad thing were the howler monkeys that do not understand Stew yelling angrily in English to stop waking him up.

This morning we went to Semuc Champey, a nature reserve. We took a hike up a muddy steep trail through the rainforest until we came to an overlook and could see all of the river below us. There were several clear pools flowing into each other through a series of waterfalls. The view is amazing. Then we hiked down and went swimming and diving in them. We are not as good at doing flips off waterfalls as Guatemalans, but we did our best. There was also a furious river rushing underneath the falls, meaning that we were actually on a land bridge over a subterranean river and cave network. Pretty cool. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semuc_Champey

Also, a honeymooning couple that we traveled with yesterday and today offered to send us their pictures. If they follow through, we will be happy to forward the email to anyone that wants it. Just post your email address in a comment or send us an email and we´ll forward it when we get it.

Ridin´ Dirrty

After a relaxing in the lovely Fuentes Georginas hotsprings, we decided that 24 hours was certainly enough time to spend in Xela. To be fair, the hotsprings were beautiful, steaming hot, and relaxing. They didn´t even smell too sulphuric, which was a pleasant surprise.

When we showed up to the bus station in Xela, we were dismayed to find that there were no direct buses back to San Pedrom (a good jumping off point to other desirable destinations), nor were there any buses direct to Coban, the next town we wanted to head to. Desperate to leave the dirty city, we went spontaneous and jumped ona bus to Santa Cruz del Quiche, as from our map that seemed to be about half way between Xela and Coban.

Santa Cruz del Quiche is definitely NOT a chief tourist destination. In fact, the only other gringos on the bus were peace corps volunteers (who basically convinced us never to do the peace corps - too much beauracracy). It was pretty refreshing to stay some place where we were not assaulted every few minutes by various handicrafts vendors. However, the povertty we saw there was striking and not a little depressing: a little boy barely so small his backpack dragged on the ground was attempting to shine the shoes of those passing by.

We left el Quiche early this morning to make our way towards Coban on some of the craziest roads I´ve ever been on. The peace corps volunteers we had met on the bus complained that they weren´t allowed to go certain places in Guatemala, inclduing the road to Coban. After coming here, I totally understand why it´s restricted.

The road winded and twisted at terrifying degrees and in many places was covered with gravel and boulders from recent landslides. At one point we saw a rock actually roll down the hill past our bus. Aside from the terror, though, the ride was quite thrilling. The scenery was jaw-droppingly beautiful, replete with lush forests and craggy mountains, gurgling rivers and tropical flowers. Nevertheless, because of the poor conditions of the roads, what looked like it would take about 3 hours on a map ended up taking 8. Pobrecito Stew´s arm got really sunburned when he fell asleep with it out the window! Also, in case you all are curious, his eye feels much much better and he may even begin wearing contacts again tomorrow.

Once we arrived in Coban, everything was closed. Nevertheless, we walked to every attraction we wanted to see in the hopes that our book was incorrect. At least we know where everything is for later!

Tomorrow morning we plan to go caving in an old Mayan religous spot, where a sacred underground river flows. If were lucky, we may stumble upon a religous ceremony in progress. Cross your fingers for us!