Jess and Stacey’s Travels

Hola.  After a hiatus of 1 1/2 months braving the jungles of Connecticut and Missouri, we’ve come back to the comforts of Central America.  In the states, we braved a heat wave, bugs that bite when the sun goes down, and Jess got sick.  We would only recommend visiting those places if you’re not of the faint of heart.   Seriously, we had a great time there seeing friends and family.  Thank you everyone who put us up and helped us forget our Spanish.  The time there was really nice.

Our trip back to Guatemala was totally uneventful.  Flights were on time, someone was waiting for us at the airport from the hostel we stayed at, and an easy bus ride to Antigua.  In Antigua, we are staying with a woman we’ve stayed with before.  We’ve cracked open our dusty Spanish lesson notebooks.

After one month in our tropical bubble on Utila, we’re heading to the less obvious, non-tropical destinations of Missouri and Connecticut.  We’ll be doing homestays there as well, improving our English with family and friends :.  We will be back in Central America in August. 

Utila was good to us.  Stacey completed her Rescue Diver Course and Jess caught up on movies and books.  The people at the dive shop were really great.  We are planning on returning at some point once we come back from the states.

We’ll continue the blog in August unless there is great reader demand to hear more about Missouri and Connecticut.

We’re still here in Utila, although our passports say that we went to Belize.  We think we had a great time there.  We overstayed our 3 month welcome and had to pay a bit more to the immigration officer here on the island to get a new stamp giving us another 3 months.  The other option was to actually have to go to Belize, Mexico or Costa Rica, all of which would have cost us much more, as the immigration officer was keenly aware when he set his price.

Stacey is continuing to take dive classes, now doing the rescue diver class.  Jess has gone through much of the alphabet of Sue Grafton’s murder mysteries.  He’s on S is for Silence now.  The Funkytown video rental/library/book exchange is next door.  We’re both still enjoying our room at Rubi’s.  There have been some amazing lightening storms out over the water that we watch from our room.  Always a party with us.

For those of you (i.e. Betsy) who requested more information about the food, we swing between two diets.  Diet A, we’ll call the “college dorm diet” involves us eating Cup of Noodles, Mac and Cheese, Ramen, hot dogs, microwave popcorn, cans of peas and candy bars in our room.  Diet B, “vacation diet”, the less frequent scenario, is us eating out – pasta, sometimes fish filets, salad, pizza, nachos, burgers, etc.  Eating out isn’t that expensive, but shockingly we still tend to be frugal people, even in a 3rd world nation.  Utila isn’t quite reknown for it’s food.  It’s cheap and filling, perfect for the dive crowd.  We frequent the same places when we do eat out.  Jitters for coffee and muffins run by a retired American lawyer from Alaska.  Went to UW law.  Big Mammas for breakfast sometimes.  Bundu Cafe, run by a Canadian couple, for BBQ chicken, taco salad or their special of the day.  Bundu shows a movie during dinner.  The bakery for whatever they happened to make that day.  The dive shop bar for lunch specials and milkshakes.  The cinema snack shop (next door to us) for milkshakes.  We used to eat a place called Munchies but learned that they serve conch which is a bad thing to take out of the ocean here so some of the dive shops are boycotting the restaurant. 

If you’ve been reading our blog, you know that we met a family living on a boat at Finca Tatin on Rio Dulce in Guatemala.  As chance would have it, they are now moored out in the bay, within swimming distance of us.  Since Utila is essentially a one seahorse town, we ran into them the other night.  After nine years of being in Guatemala they decided to explore a bit of Honduras.  The family that runs Finca Tatin is also coming this week for vacation.  Guess this means another Uno rematch with 6 year old smack talking.

Utila Pix-click on photo for more pictures

Our Spanish is officially leaving the building.  On the positive side, we are certified for advanced open water scuba diving, Stacey has overcome her ichthyophobia (fear of fish) and we are also much tanner.  Utila has been ideal for squandering all previous investment in Spanish lessons while luring us into greater investment in scuba lessons.

They say that there are three lies of Utila – 1) This is my last beer 2) I love you and 3) I’m leaving tomorrow.
That pretty much sums up the atmosphere of Utila.  A lot of under 30 scuba rats mixed with a Caribbean local culture.
We fit in well. 

We’ve been here about ten days – three of which were spent hunting down the doctor for medical clearance.  The other seven were spent in dive classes at Utila Dive Center with our dive instructor Tracy, an Aussie.  We seem to attract Aussies.  Our first class was the ‘open water class’, which just gets you able to dive without drowning yourself or others.  We went on to do the ‘advanced open water’ class, which makes diving more enjoyable.  For this class we had to do five dives.  The ‘deep dive'(30m/100ft) and ‘navigation dive’ are both obligatory dives.  We also did a ‘wreck dive’ to a ship that was at 30m, then a ‘night dive’ and a ‘search and recovery dive’.  We also did a dive to improve our underwater control but you’d never know it if you saw us underwater now.  Our underwater control is about as good as our Spanish.  Monsieur Jacques Yves Cousteau would roll over in his grave seeing us near the reefs.  We are getting better with each dive but still do not get as close to things as most of the experienced divers do (do not want to hit the coral, etc) [read on]

Updated:  link to photos actually works now. 

Thanks for the concern regarding the 6.8 earthquake that hit parts of Guatemala and El Salvador.  We had left Guatemala for Honduras and were unaffected.  We read in the news that there were no casualities. 

After returning to Antigua from Tikal, we loafed around for about a week finding excuses why we needed to stay just one more day. We explored the city, watched a lot of movies that we hadn’t seen this last year, and tried more restaurants.
The number of tourists is noticably picking up as the college crowd flocks down here under the guise of learning Spanish. Katherine (the Australian woman we’ve mentioned before) delayed her departure back down-under for another month.  We met up with her again in Antigua.  She joined us as we continued on the gringo trail to the Copan Ruins in Honduras. 

Copan is just over the border from Guatemala, about 6 hours from Antigua.  The ruins are just outside of the town called Copan Ruinas which is a great little town.  They say that Tikal is the New York of the Mayan world and Copan is the Paris. 

[read on]

Semuc, Tikal and Finca Pix-click on photo for more pictures

Sometimes it feels like we’re swimming our way through Central America. We have swam in ponds, lagoons, lakes, hot springs, caves, and rivers. We have yet to do ocean, swamp, and swimming pool; although two of the three will probably be done very soon.

Semuc Champey-click on photo for more pictures

While waiting for some friends to come to Antigua, we took a three day “jaunt” up north to the area around Coban and a place called Semuc Champey. Semuc Champey is a series of naturally formed pools that are on top of a limestone “bridge” that goes over a river. The river goes underground below the pools and then emerges with the last pool. (Photo above shows the pools).  On the bus, we met a young guy, Scott – nationality withheld 😉 who had just bicycled across Cuba. He joined us for a few days. We had a great time together. We even had what we thought was the perfect day.  [read on]

Yeah-Lava!-click on photo for more pictures

Housekeeping Note:  If you click on the pictures and they first appear blurry, wait a bit, and they should adjust to be clear.  Or else, just select slideshow option and captions will appear with the pictures.

After three weeks based in Xela, we have packed up and moved on to Antigua.  The three weeks were fun and event-filled.   We went to jail, warmed our toes by some lava, and enjoyed a swing from the tree tops….but more on that below.  More importantly, we improved our Spanish at ICA, our school which was a great school.  We met many really nice people – students, teachers, and homestay families.   The school arranged many activities for the students everyday after classes and also on weekends.   Some of the more notable activities were:

• We visited a woman’s jail the day after Mother’s Day to bring them Mother’s Day gifts, dance and have cake with   them.   The women in this jail are from towns outside of Xela and do not have people coming to visit them.  They are all being held while their cases are being investigated which sometimes takes up to two years. [read on]

Xela-click for more photos

We are in Quezaltenango, Guatemala now, commonly referred to as Xela.  It is a big town in the mountains on the ‘Gringo trail’.  It is much, much cooler here.  I bought another sweater to wear here and broke out the blue fleece again.  We were told that Xela is at about 8,500ft altitude. It took us 4 hours by bus to get here from Guatemala city.  It was a winding road through the moutains of Guat.  I wouldn’t want to do it with stomach issues.  We met two other women from Washington also going to Xela.  They are also going to the same Spanish school, ICA, as we are.  We also moved in with our new family, the Lopez’s- Mario and Monica (parents), Javiar (15), Daniel (10), Alejandra (7).  They seem to be a really nice family in a nice house about a 20 minute walk from the school.  There is also another American woman, Helen, living here.  She has lived with the family for 7 years and works as a special ed teacher.  We don’t see much of her.  The family just built this house about 4 years ago.

The woman, Gilda Arroyo, that we stayed with in Guatemala city had told Jess and I that women are expected to do most everything in this society.  Gilda was frustrated at times because although she is a single mom with 2 teenage daughters and her own bed and breakfast business, her mom still expects her to wait on her brothers when they come to her [read on]

The 16 hour bus trip on King Quality bus line from Managua brought us through the north of Nicaragua, into Honduras, with a quick layover in San Salvador (El Salvador) and then onto Guatemala City.  We left Granada at 2:00am to get to the bus station in Managua by 2:30am and then left on the King Quality bus at 3:30am.  The bus service was really nice, with air-conditioning, reclining seats, meal service, and movies.  We splurged for “king class” without realizing it and so had the amenities.  (for travelers:  King Quality’s website is all done in Flash so it doesn’t appear when you Google it. (http://www.kingqualityca.com/)  If you’re making the trek from Nicaragua or countries south of there up to Guatemala, you don’t need to stay overnight in El Salvador like you do with Ticabus.) 

It was nice to travel during the day to see the countryside as we passed through each country.  San Salvador looked alot less initimidating than what we expected.  Our 45 minute layover there didn’t permit us to venture out.  But we left in a double decker bus to continue on to Guatemala allowing us to look at the city while we passed through.  We met a woman on the bus who spoke great English which came in handy for us because there was some confusion at the layover about who was suposed to get on which bus.  She was also traveling on to Guatemala and offered for her husband to drive us from the bus terminal to our hotel.  While we appreciated being taken under her wing, we had already arranged to be picked up by the woman, Gilda, who runs the bed-and-breakfast at which we are staying.  She will also take us to the bus station for us to continue on to Xela. That is 4 hours west of Guatemala City and the city in which we will take more Spanish classes.  Everyone tells us that the Spanish in Guatemala is easier to understand than that in Nicaragua.  In Nicaragua, they often cut off the ends of words and slur things a bit. 

Right now, we are enjoying the cool temperatures of Guatemala city and hanging out at the b&b studying Spanish.  Tomorrow we’ll head out to Xela.

After four weeks of four hours of Spanish class a day, we decided to take a break from the classroom. Both of our heads hurt a bit after two weeks but then got better with a couple of mojitos.  My (Stacey) knowledge of French really does come in handy learning Spanish, but also gets in the way when I try to speak.  I tend to speak Franspagnol.  I now know enough to know when I am suposed to use things like the subjunctive, but am not good enough to actually use it on the fly when talking.  I blame some of that also on my poor command of the English language.  I can hardly recognize verb tenses in English so although  I try to translate in my head, I often don’t know the tense that I am thinking in English.  Unfortunately for us, it also seems that most of what we need to say involves an irregular verb.  We have decided that now we need to practice more in day to day life.  We are planning on going back to the classroom again at some point while we are here.

To celebrate the end of classes and our one month anniversary here, we went to the same Laguna de Apoyo that we talked about in a previous blog entry.  This time, we stayed at the water’s edge at the hostel, Monkey Hut.  There are a [read on]