Chaska in South America

Well, our trip is over. It’s so hard to believe that I’m sitting in my old room in my parent’s house and that I dropped Matt off at the airport today and won’t be seeing him every day any more. I will probably write a couple more posts after this one and try to add some photos that aren’t already included, but this is the last one with new news about our travels. Our last week in Latin America went well and we had an interesting combination of extreme Central American experiences to some experiences that didn’t feel so Central American. After leaving Escipulas in Guatemala, we crossed the border into El Salvador where we spent four nights. We were told by people who had visited El Salvador that the best part of the country were the people and how incredibly friendly they were. Right after crossing the border, we were able to notice how true this was. Not very many people at all visit El Salvador, so the people are not as used to tourists as in other countries. We had taken a minibus to the border and walked over and then had to take a chicken bus (this is the term used by travelers to describe the North American school buses converted to city buses that are used in Guatemala and El Salvador) to a town called Santa Ana, where we planned to stay for a night. There were loads of buses and we were unsure which one to take. Several people offered to help us, including one guy sticking his head out of another bus to ask us what bus were looking for and telling us the bus number and location. Santa Ana is the second largest city in El Salvador, and we read that it was a nice place. It had a nice plaza and church, but that was really all that Matt and I found appealing about the town. Granted we were only there for one day and probably didn’t see everything. One thing that kind of shocked us was how the entire town completely seemed to shut down as soon as the sun went down. We decided we wanted some dessert at about 7 in the evening and wanted to just find a mini market to buy something, but upon leaving our hotel found that every single store that had just been open an hour prior was closed and the streets were almost completely empty. By the looks we got from the few people that were out, we got the feeling that it was just not safe there after dark, and we hurried back to the hotel. The next morning we got on a bus to San Salvador, where Matt’s friends live. Matt has two friends living in San Salvador. One of them is Matt’s old girlfriend from highschool, Jessica, who is there on a Fullbright scholorship and is interviewing several members of a Jewish communtiy living in San Salvador. She is the friend who we planned to stay with. The other friend is a childhood friend of Matt’s whom he hadn’t seen since he was about 10. She spent two years in the Peace Corp in El Salvador and then stayed afterward and has been working for another organization since then. The first night in San Salvador, we stayed at a hostel and went out in the evening with Stephanie, Matt’s childhood friend. We went to a pupuseria and had pupusas, a typical Salvadorian food (basically tortillas stuffed with beans, cheese, or other things.) We had a really nice time with Stephanie and her Salvadorian boyfriend, Eduardo. I wish we could have spent more time with them! The next day we met up with Jessica and spent the next two nights with her. The area of town where our hostel was was pretty nice, and I thought it was probably the wealthy part of town. I was wrong. It certainly wasn’t the poor part of town, but where we went the next day made it look like the slums. Jessica picked us up in her car and as we were driving to the area where she lived, she said “Just to warn you, you are now entering my world, and it’s pretty rediculous.” She was right, the world we entered was pretty surreal. We stayed in a neigborhood of houses that were basically fortresses…houses behind giant walls and metal gates and several with armed guards out front. The house that we stayed in belonged to a family that Jessica was friends with, but they weren’t there. The house was absolutey beautiful and had maids dressed in maid uniforms who, although were not supposed to be working, served us to the point of making us feel guilty. We spent two days of the good life, in which we ate at fancy restauaunts, drove around in nice cars, and even had a hired driver take us on a tour of several nearby towns on one of the days. This was definitely very different from most of the previous experiences we had in Latin America! After three days in San Salvador, we somehow never even saw the downtown but definitely had a unique experience and a really nice time!
After leaving El Salvador, we went back to Guatmemala for two last nights. We planned to go to a place called Chichi, where they have a huge market. We needed to by gifts for our families since we hadn’t bought a thing throughout our whole trip. I had a little issue though. I realized that a bunch of money was missing from my money belt. I didn’t think that it could have been stolen since not all of the money in the belt was gone, but regardless it was missing and I was kind of upset. I kind of had the feeling that I might have accidently dropped it somewhere, and it turns out I was right. Jessica later found it under the bed in the room we slept in…leave it to me to just drop money and not notice. Anyway, we ended up staying in Guatemala City the next two nights (definitely not our favorite city!) but went to Antigua one of the days to do our shopping. It was Semana Santa (holy week), and Antigua is famous for its Semana Santa celebration, so it was really cool to be there to see some of the excitement. It was way too expensive for us to sleep there, so that’s why we stayed in Guatemala City. We definitely had a truly awesome last Latin American bus experiece to and from Antigua! The trip is less than an hour, but it felt like much longer due to our condition. As I mentioned before, the buses are old school buses. They paint crazy colors and designs on the outside, but the inside is just a normal school bus. The seats are not very wide, but they pack up to three or four people into every seat, including the aisle also being absolutely filled. The law is that everyone is sitting, so at times the police stopped the bus and checked to make sure…it’s hilarious, everyone in the aisles just sit and don’t fall to the ground because everyone is packed in so tightly. The bus never fails to stop for more people either. Just when you’re absolutely sure not a single other person can fit, the bus stops and about 5 or 6 more people somehow squeeze on. Chicken buses certainly aren’t for anyone who needs to have any kind of personal space!!
Here are a few photos of our last week of our trip!

This is the day we had the hired driver in El Salvador take us to several small towns.  We stopped at an awesome restaurant and had some really good typical Salvadorian food.  Jessica is the one on the right side in the front.  Her Salvadorian friend Alesandra is next to her.  Next to Matt on the left is Jessica’s friend Karen who is from Boston and is also a Fullbright scholar.  Chomie, another Salvodorian friend of Jessica, is next to Karen.

These are two small towns that we visited.  I can’t remember the names at the moment!  They were not far from San Salvador.  You can see a vocano in the first photos…it is an active volcano and just errupted in October.  We saw some pretty intense photos of the erruption when we visited Alesandra’s uncle in the town.

We visited some aritisan shops and were able to watch some men weaving some large blankets and tapestries.

Here we are at Laguna Verde, a crater lake, that we also visited while on our day trip to the small towns.

These two photos are of the main plaza in Antigua, Guatemala the day we went on our shopping trip.  The plaza was absolutely full of people–both tourists and local people.  The indigenous people were dressed for Semana Santa in beautiful typical clothing.

We weren’t able to see any processions in Antigua since we had to get back to Guatemala City, but we were able to see a couple Good Friday processions in Guatemala City the morning of our last day.  This is one that we watched in the main plaza.

This was hilarious.  Immediately following the somber procession, and I mean immediately, there were TONS of vendors following behind selling everything you can imagine…including the guy shown here selling Dominoes pizza. 

This is a chicken bus.  We rode these several times while in Central America.  It brought back such memories of riding the bus everyday in Jr. High!  Almost all of them are painted bright colors like this and have names.

One last photo.  This was taken in Guatemala City, but it really shows what a typical street scene in any city in Central or South America looks like.  We’ve got the fresh fruit vendor, food vendors, bootleg CD’s and DVD’s on a blanket, and crappy immitation designer products.  I miss it already!

Well, that was our last week of an incredible journey.  Matt and I got back to California Friday night really late and both felt so strange…I still have to gather some thoughts, stories, and photos that I would like to include before I finish with this blog, so stay tuned over the next couple weeks.  Thanks so much for reading this and being a part of my adventure. 

Like my first week in Guatemala, my second was great too.  It started out really busy and ended a little bit more relaxed.  When I last posted, Matt and I were in Guatemala City waiting for a bus to go to Tikal.  Tikal is an ancient Mayan civilization set in the midst of the jungle in northern Guatemala.  We took an overnight busride of about 8 hours to town called Flores and arrived at about 6am.  We then got a small shuttle to take us to Tikal.  We were told by some other people that had already visited Tikal that the best time to see it was just before sunset and just after the sunrise because the park is practically empty and you’re able to see many more animals than during the day.  The town of Flores is about and hour from Tikal and many people stay there and take a day trip to Tikal.  In order to see Tikal in the evening and morning though, you have to stay within the national park, so Matt and I decided we would take our chances and hoped to find a place to stay there.  We were able to rent a tent at a  hotel that had tents set up in there courtyard, so things worked out really well.  We spent several hours in the ruins during the day, but it was really crowded and really hot, so we decided to save our energy for later in the evening.  Matt started to feel a little rundown though, so I went back into the ruins on my own in the late afternoon while Matt rested.  It was absolutely amazing how much better Tikal was after about 4 o’clock and most of the daytrip tourists were gone.  The park is huge and really amazing…the pyramids are enormous and are spread out a pretty far distance from each other with beautiful jungle throughout the whole place.  The trees are absolutely full of playful monkeys after most of the tourists leave and I spent a good half hour just watching them swing and play in the trees.  Most of the monkeys are small and the only noise they make is a squeeking noise every once in a while, but there are also howler monkeys that make the loudest, craziest noise you can imagine.  I now know where they got the noise that Chewbaca makes in Star Wars!  When Matt and I first heard the noise earlier in the day, we thought it was some kind of lion or something…it’s shocking when you see the monkeys and realize that they’re actually really small.  I was told by some people I talked to in Costa Rica that you can see parrots and toucans at sunset and sunrise, and that the best place to see the sunset was from the top of a pyramid.  There is one pyramid in particular that is supposed to be the best one to watch the sunset, so I found this pyramid and climbed the enourmouse ancient stairs to the top.  It’s pretty high up and a little bit scary, especially if you have any kind of fear of heights, so several people that had intended to watch the sunset from the top never made it.  This was an advantage for those of us who did make the climb because it ended up that there were less than 20 of us up there that had the whole thing to ourselves.  I’ve seen some beautiful sunsets (being from California and living right next to Sunset Cliffs in San Diego for several years), but I think this was the best one I’ve ever experienced.  Everyone who was on top of the pyramid with me was really cool and I talked to several of them for a while.  Just before the sun went down, all of the sudden, tons of beautiful parrots started flying all around, and then tons of toucans appeared and started flying all around us as well.  It was absolutely magical.  On top of this, there were so many wonderful jungle sounds, including the howler monkeys howling away in the nearby trees.  There was no way my camera could capture how amazing all of this was, so I didn’t even really try.  As soon as the sun went down, we all hurried down the pyramid and hurried outside of the park, but it’s about a 30 minute walk to get out, so it was pretty much pitch dark by the time we made it out…I’m glad I wasn’t alone!  There were fireflies flying all around though and the nighttime jungle noises and the stars were incredible. 

The park where the ruins are doesn’t open in the morning until 6am, which is after the sun rises, but several people that were at the sunset with me said that you could hire a guide to take you into the park before that so that you could watch the sunrise.  Since Matt didn’t get to see the incredibel sunset with me that night, we both decided along with a French guy Emanuel, who we had met earlier in the day, to wake up at 4:30 and pay a guide to take us into the park so that we could watch the sunrise from the top of a pyramid.  It wasn’t too dificult waking up that early since we were in a tent with no sleeping bags or blankets on the hardest ground imaginable and not really getting much sleep anyway.  Quite a few people had decided to do the same thing, bus somehow, even though our guide waited way too long to see if others would join us, we ended up being the first ones on top of the pyramid that morning and the only ones to actually be there when it was dark and experience the change from night to day.  We were on a different pyramid from the one I was on the night before–this one being the tallest one in Tikal.  About 30 or 40 people showed up before the sun was all the way up and spoiled our peace and quiet, but it was still absolutely beautiful.  After watching the sun come up, we decided to get away from the crowd and headed over to the pyramid that I had watched the sunset from the night before.  Emanuel, Matt, Jenna ( a girl I had met the night before during the sunset), and I were the only ones at the top of this pyramid and once again the parrots and toucans began flying all around and the monkeys howled like crazy in the trees.  I’m so glad that I didn’t just visit Tikal on a quick daytrip…I would have missed out on two incredible experiences.  Here are a few photos from Tikal.

 This is Templo I.  You can’t climb this one anymore, because I guess two people fell off and died.  I really don’t think it’s any more dangerous than the other though, and they let you climb almost all the rest! 

This is Templo II.  I think this is the easiest one to climb and the one that most people do climb.  There are wooden stairs that they built on the side, so you don’t have to climb up the stairs in the front.

 Here’s Templo IV peeking out from the jungle. 

 Here’s a monkey that was playing in the trees.  This one isn’t a howler monkey…they were too high up to get a decent picture of them. 

Matt and Emanuel at the top of Templo IV, waiting for the sun to rise.

The sun rising above the fog. 

A toucan in the midst of the morning fog.  I’m SO happy that I was able to see toucans.  They were incredible, and I didn’t only see one, I saw tons.

Matt, Jenna, Emanuel, and I at the top of El Templo del Mundo Perdido. 

After our second day in Tikal, Emanuel decided to join Matt and I for the next couple days.  We headed to Rio Dulce.  Rio Dulce is a long river that connects the lake Lago Izabel to the Caribbean Sea.  We were told by several people that it was amazing and shouldn’t be missed.  We left Tikal in the afternoon and didn’t make it to the town of Rio Dulce until early evening.  We decided not to stay directly in the town, which isn’t very nice, and stayed at a hotel that was a little ways down the river.  The hotel was really cool.  You have to take a boat to get there and it’s in its own little swamp with the the rooms sitting above the swamp.  We only stayed there one night and then went on to a town called Livingston the next morning.  Livingston is at the very end of the Rio Dulce, right where it dumps into the Caribbean.  The town can only be reached by boat and is more like Belize (which is just a short ways away) than Guatemala.  The Garifuna people (black Caribs) live here and the whole town has a more Caribbean feel than Guatemalan feel.  I really liked Livingston a lot.  Emanuel stayed with us for one night, and then he went on to Belize.  Matt and I stayed in Livingston one more night and just spent the entire day relaxing–mostly just reading in the hammocks at the hotel.  We were going to hurry to another really cool place that we were told about in another part of Guatemala, but then we just realized that another full day of travel was the last thing we wanted to do.  We decided to skip that place and just chill out for a couple days.  We then took another beautiful boatride back up the Rio Dulce back to the town of Rio Dulce and stayed there for one night, also just relaxing.  Today we woke up early and took a long bus ride to a town called Esquipulas, which is really close to both the borders of Hondures and El Salvador.  Tomorrow, we’re going to go to El Salvador.  Matt has two good friends that are living in El Salvador, so we’ll go visit them for a few days and then come back to Guatemala for a couple days before our flight back the States.  I cannot believe that we have exactly one week left of this trip!!!!  We fly back to Los Angeles on the evening of the 14th.  Well, here are a few photos from Rio Dulce.

 Matt, Emanuel, and I at the cool hotel we stayed at on the Rio Dulce.

These three photos were taken on one of the two boat rides we took on the Rio Dulce.  The river was absolutely beautiful and the boat rides were great.

 Here’s a picture of part of the main street in Livingston.

This is the church here in Esquipulas, which is rather famous for it’s Cristo Negro (black Christ.)  Lots of pilgrims come especially to see this and since next week is Easter, there are tons of people here now.  The plaza is packed with really poor and crippled people begging.  Matt and I walked into the church earlier and it was full of people all over the ground with candles burning absolutely everywhere.  I guess a lot of people enter on their knees, and most of the people in their were either on their knees or lying on the ground with candles burning on the floor all around.  It was actually kind of creepy!  Also, upon leaving the church, many people walk backwards so as not to turn their back to the church.  They do this while singing and chanting, which was also kind of strange. 

I had intended to make this post short, but as you can see, I wasn’t very successful…sorry!  The next time I post, I think I’ll probably be home in California.  This has been such an incredible journey, and I’m hoping for a great last week! 

When I last posted, I was on my way to the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. I didn't have an exact plan when I left Monte Verde--I just knew I wanted to go to the Pacific coast and had a ... [Continue reading this entry]