entering guatemala

It's been a busy few days. We left Tela after a gorgeous day on the beach and took a zillion buses to get to Omoa, a tiny town on Honduras' northernmost coast that turned out to be quite adorable. We stayed in what is accurately billed as 'the best hostel in Honduras', with dorm beds for $2.50, free drinking water and a huge outdoor garden. We met bunches of travellers who gave us advice on places to go in Guatemala, which was really helpful and quite inspiring too - some of these people have been travelling for months with no end in sight!! And we played a killer game of Yahtzee - I rolled THREE Yahtzees and ended up with over 500 points :)

We reluctantly left Omoa and took a pretty scenic route, and a chicken bus, pickup truck, minibus, minibus, chicken bus combo to get across the border and into Puerto Barrio in Guatemala. From there we took a boat with some Irish guys to get here, Livingston (after all this time seeing Spanish and Mayan names, it still cracks me up to be somewhere colonized by, and named by, the British). We stayed in a cute little colonial hotel and walked a few hours along the beach and through Garifuna villages to a gorgeous swimming hole - apparently after it rains there are huge awesome waterfalls there, but we came a day too early so it was just swimming. Last night we ate the most spectacular dinner by this woman Maria who was born in Mexico but was married in India and now has a restaurant in Guatemala. Her vegetarian curry was one of the best I've ever tasted, and the mojitos weren't bad either - all that, a salad and a few beers for $6! Livingston is a bit expensive b-c everything has to be shipped into town, but I managed to spend a mere $21 yesterday :)

We're leaving in half an hour on a boat cruise down the Rio Dulce, which is supposed to have good wildlife, and then we're staying at some 500 acre hacienda for the night. Should be nice and relaxing, which is good b-c we're gearing up to go to Tikal, the famous awesome Mayan ruins, on Thursday. 'We' is still Kelly and I, tho she'll be leaving for a language school next week and I'll continue on here on my own. Travelling alone can be hard (and more expensive), but from what I've seen so far there are zillions of other travellers to meet up with and share rooms with and hang out with, so I think it'll be fun. Nice to have the freedom too to do what I want and see what I want for the next six weeks or so!