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Things are going ahead for my trip to Belize and Guatemala. I’ll be heading out on Christmas and getting back on the 10th of January. Hopefully I’ll get some photos up during the trip so check in during that time. I’m not sure how often I’ll have Internet access, but I expect to have it every three or four days.

I don’t have much of an itinerary so far (you’re not surprised are you?). I expect to head toward Tikal in Guatemala the day after I arrive in Belize and then work my way back. I may try to trek to some of the more remote Mayan ruins if I can get hooked up with a good guide, but I don’t think I’ll make it all the way to El Mirador. I might be able to hit a beach toward the end of the trip. The diving and snorkeling on Belize’s islands is supposed to be great.

I’m working on getting an email link and getting comments working properly. I really enjoyed reading your comments during the trip last year. Unfortunately the spammers have made it more difficult, but I’ll have something in place soon.

Merry Christmas everybody. I’m headed out tomorrow to San Andrés, Guatemala. It’s near Flores on Lake Petén Itzá. It’s also close to Tikal which is one of the largest Mayan sites. I’ll be studying Spanish for a few hours each day at a school called Eco-Escuela where I’ll be staying with a local family. I won’t have Internet access in San Andrés, but I’ll try to check e-mail and update this blog every few days in nearby Flores. I plan to cram as much Spanish into my brain as I can in one week, but if it goes well and I can take interesting side trips, I might spend more time there.

I made it to Flores alright. The plane was a Cessna Caravan from Belize to here. I’m headed to the Spanish school early tomorrow so there won’t be any new posts for a few days. I will take some pictures.

The school is great. I know a lot more Spanish than I thought I did, but I still don’t understand anybody but my teacher. I’ve been reading the children’s book “The Little Prince” in Spanish. I made it through about five paragraphs in about three hours last night (with a dictionary), but I remember most of the vocab that way.

Mi familia de San Andrés es buena. The mother’s name is Francisca. She has had more estudiantes than she can remember in 13 years. She clearly loves to have us. My teacher’s name is Julia and she is great too. Yesterday was difficult because she didn’t have a clear idea of what I know and what I don’t know. There are a lot of basic things that I don’t know, and some complicated things that I do know, so it’s difficult for her to guess. Today was much better.

From talking to one of the other students, it sounds like every week you get a new teacher, and Mondays are always difficult. There are large differences in the teaching styles, and so far so good.

This weekend I will go to Tikal. I think I’ll get a guide so that I can also go to El Zotz which is still covered in Jungle. I’ve never gotten a guide before, but then again I’ve never really understood what I was looking at either. Next week I may stay at Eco-Escuela and just go to the beach on my last weekend.

I don’t really have any pictures yet, and probably won’t until next week. I may not be able to post again until next week. I hope you’re all having a great holiday, and I’ll talk to you soon.

I’m still in Guatemala at the language school. It’s been a terrific experience and I expect that I will come back here to study in the future. My host family is great, and I will definitely miss them when I leave. I stayed here for the New Year’s holiday, and I’m now planning to go to Tikal this Friday. The Internet connections here are all dial-up and shared for the most part by a dozen computers, so you’ll have to wait a week more for some photos.

The language classes are going well. I’m beginning to understand some people and I can formulate ideas better. The children are more difficult to understand because they have no idea what words I might know and which ones I don’t. They also aren’t as able to re-state things in a different way if I didn’t understand it the first time. In addition to that, they laugh and mumble a lot, and usually have things in their mouths.

It’s a terrific place to study. The people in town know that any gringos they see are very likely to be students and they take extra time to speak with us. It seems very safe, and the families are well-versed in travelers’ needs for purified water and that sort of thing. At the same time, the water in town is only on from about 7am until about 5:30 pm and there have been two days so far when there was no water at all. My family’s house is close to the lake so we go down with buckets for water for washing and flushing the toilet. On New Year’s Eve the electricity was out for a few hours as well.

I’ve only been a little sick for part of one day so far. One of the girls in the house made me a sandwich. The sandwich made me suspicious, and I’m suspicious that the sandwich is what made be sick. But it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

The town is perfect for students because there is almost nothing to do. I think that this is probably why there are no tourists. I’ve only seen one restaurant, and have only found two places to get a cerveza—not that I was actively looking or anything.

The weather has been sunny and warm, and there have only been a few mosquitoes that I’ve seen, so it doesn’t bother me as much that the pharmacy lost my prescription for anti-malaria medication before the trip. The food has been very good and the living conditions are fine. They’ve been feeding me gigantic gringo-sized portions, and I’ve been joking that I might need to pay for an extra seat on the airplane home.

For New Year’s Eve, Francisca and Debora cooked up over three hundred bollos and a hundred tamales. It was an opportunity to make some money for the childrens’ school expenses. They cooked them over three separate fires because there were so many. I need to get the recipe for bollos. Does anybody have any banana leaves laying around?

There’s a lot more I will like to tell you about when I get home, and I may be able to post more this week.

Here’s a post-trip post. Mostly it’s an excuse to put up some photos of Tikal. This place was the original reason that I decided to come to Guatemala. I’m glad I did, as it’s been a very positive experience for me, and I think also that I’ve had a positive impact on the people of San Andrés. That’s something that as a traveler I’m not always sure of.

Tikal is an amazing place, especially at sunrise and sunset. Jeremy and I spent a couple of days walking around climbing stairs and exploring ruins. The second day, we took a predawn “sunrise” tour and promptly ditched the loud tour group. We needed them to get into the park, but it was dark and we were quiet. We each took a monument to ourselves and enjoyed the sunrise and the jungle sounds. The horde headed for Temple IV which we had seen the day before. While I was on Temple II enjoying the sunrise over Temple I, Jeremy was heading to the Pyramid and almost literally ran into some girls who had hidden in the park the night before and camped out in one of the ruins. They were cold and scared and didn’t sleep much, and that was before he surprised the bejesus out of them.

In the “Safety is Job None” category, here are a couple of funny photos. Look at what somebody left at the bottom of Tikal’s Great Pyramid. Yes, it’s about 100 feet tall. Click the thumbnail image for the big picture.

Here’s a photo of the inside of a microbus in San Andrés. Every window and door had large fractures in the steel around them. Most had been welded at least once. The road was a little BUMPY!!!, and there were often around 20 people in the microbuses. I was told that this particular bus was 3 or 4 years old.