Coban and Semuc Champey
Eventually we got to Coban, a pretty town set in the middle of green mountains. It´s much cooler here and drizzles almost constantly. Locals call the rain chipi-chipi, it apparently helps the cardamom and coffee grow. I visited a beautiful white church perched on the top of a hill. It´s really interesting to see how they mix the roman catholic and mayan religions.
We spent a couple of days chilling out here while Chris´stomach stopped doing really wrong things which I won´t go into here. It wasn´t a bad diversion though, after the town of death (see last post) we were beside ourselves to be somewhere nice and found the most fantastic restaurant which we visited 3 times in 2 days. I had to ask Petal how to tell the waiter that the macedamia nut pie had changed my life.
Eventually we made it to Semuc, the bus journey down there was awesome, my face ached from smiling so much by the time we got there, 2 hours of bendy, bumpy roads tacked on to the side of the mountain with a sheer drop on one side. Guatemala has the most fantastic landscape, green mountains and volcanoes everywhere.
Semuc is beautiful, I went down to the waterfalls and pools and swam in the turquoise waters surrounded by green mountains. However, for me it wasn´t worth the mission to get there. This is a place to go caving and jumping into rivers from bridges and rope swings and tubing down the rapids. I can´t put my face under water and am scared of the dark!
The first night there one of the guys staying at the hostel went into the river and still hadn´t come back 3 hours later, by which time it was pitch black, his clothes left on the bank. Being in the middle of nowhere the fire brigade couldn´t get there for about 4 hours so some of the locals started a search party. At the hostel the local marimba band had shown up to do their weekly show, after a couple of songs they were sent home as no-one was in the party mood and they randomly found him coming out of the undergrowth, a way down the road.
Thank god he came back safely, he´d been dragged underneath by the current and down some rapids. He managed to get out downstream and was scrambling through the undergrowth in the dark trying to find a path.
This confirmed my lack of desire for thrill seeking!
Tags: Guatemala
