Pausing Here and There

1) I left the comfort and luxury and licuados and tofu of San Marcos via a bumpy bumpy road on many many buses crowded and smelly to get to the wonderland they call Semuc Champey. The day we journeyed to Semuc we had over 12 hours of travel! Delightful.

2) Natural beauty: summer camp usually has it, semuc definitely did. Semuc Champey is a national park and it is the place where a natural rock bridge has formed above a river. At the same time, it is the entry point of a second river and so, on the top of this big rock bridge beautiful pools have formed, emerald, turqouise, and gorgeous. There were so many brilliant vines hanging tangled about and aerial roots and big beautiful leaves.

3) As I’ve done many other times in my life, I acted the klutz on this adventure. I was venturing onto a slippery log to look at some interesting fungi and I fell off. I think it is necessary for me to have one accident on every trip I take, more or less, whether in Semuc or at Camp.

4) However, there was a friendly counselor in the form of a park guide who took great interest in my fall. Our conversation went like this: You fell? Yes, I fell. You fell? Yes, I fell. You fell? Are you having pain in your arm? Yes, I fell and now my arm hurts. It continued like this, and he repeatedly, very kindly, called me back over to him to repeat this conversation, always beginning with: You fell? He offered me medicine, I declined instead choosing to elevate and soak in icey water.

5) Moldy wet dorm room beds.

6) Rain. Lots of rain.

7) Rope swing. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to take a picture of me on it, because by the time I busted out my camera, I had nearly broken my arm.

8) Cafeteria style dinners including rice with corn in it in a molded form of a bowl. All that was missing was jungle juice! (We made do with Moza and Victoria, the beers of choice).

9) My clothes got moldy because they couldn’t dry out and now I smell, a little bit.

10) Learning new card games, meeting new friends who regaled us with stories of Utila (inspiring me to go do a dive course there with brotherboy), and enjoying every moment difficult and lovely of my experience.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 24th, 2006 at 8:20 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.