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Sunset In Flores

Guatemala City at night

On Saturday we made it to Semuc Champey and stayed at a hostel called Las Marias till Monday. Semuc Champey is a natural spring at the base of a valley. The force of the spring has carved out a land bridge and a series of pools. If you google it you'll see it, it's beautiful. During our stay we also took a candle lit tour of some nearby caves. Our tour was lead by Rojo, a fearless 4' 5" local teenager. His extreme case of the giggles would brandish his gold teeth and comfort our restless souls.

We are back in Guatemala City (Smog Kingdom) but we'll leave for Antigua today. We'll probably spend a couple days there and hopefully get around to hiking the volcano Pacaya. After Antigua we'll head to Lake Atitlan and begin Spanish school, we are all looking forward to it. A strict regiment of Spanish and avacados near the lake will be benificial. By then it will have been almost two weeks since we left our comfortable lives in Oregon. Familiarity is distant, we are now in control of our direction instead of letting our jobs and distractions tug us along.

A spelling error from our last blog: Tical is actually Tikal. We apologize, we were in a hurry.

Flores

After 13.5 hours of mass transit and a death defying cab ride we spent our first night in Guatemala City at Ari's sister's apartment. The city is enormous as well as dangerous so we spent only one night. Tuesday we took off for a little place called Flores. We endured a 10 hour bus ride under a lunar eclipse, which spit us out in Flores at 5 AM. We've been staying at a hostel called Los Amigos since then. This morning we took a bus at 3 AM to Tical to see the Mayan ruins. Our tour started by catching the sunrise on "temple 4." It was pretty amazing to hear the jungle wake up below us. I think ferocious howler monkeys would be a pretty effective alarm in the morning. Tomorrow morning we are planning to go to "Semuc Champey" which is a pretty cool little park about 5 hours from Flores. That night, with any luck we'll stay at a place called Las Marias.



All together the trip has been pretty exciting. Althought I think we are all trying to grasp that we'll be living out of comfort for a while. We'll get used to it and we'll soak up as much as possible.



Much love to everyone, we'll try and write again soon.





ps to those of you who may have sent Mitch an email he has not been able to check his inbox for some reason, sorry.

Mental BackPacks

There is a defining point in our timeline.  This point will sever the comfort we experience in everyday life and in return dawns a waiting period wedged between our lives and the moment of our departure. It's a traveler's purgatory. It's the feeling you get when in the waiting room, only prolonged. Although it's no burden, no one is complaining. Let us pack mentally. We've been lending our time away for too long, from now on we'll live for ourselves and those we meet along the way. 

- Mitch