Pretirement

last post was from flores, guatemala. this one’s from flores too. i just made an enormous circle.

palenque was great. the jungle is full of mosquitoes and hippies. the ruins are full of french tourists. took conni back to cancun and now she’s back in ohio for six more weeks before heading back to austria. austria is hardcore. she’ll have to kill a bull by headbutting it to be allowed back in. that’s just what i hear.

spent four or five days in cancun this time. went to the hotel zone. it’s weird there. i can’t afford to pay $40 just to get into a club so i didn’t go out there where all the spring breakers go. but i’ll settle this for anyone who’s still wondering. SPRING BREAK IS A HOAX. it’s an illusion created by mtv and club promoters who only need to sell you the plane ticket or hotel package or entrance fee and have no incentive to follow through. the image of the ultimate party is maintained by pride. you might not have had enough fun to justify the $4000 you spent for the week, but when someone asks you how your vacation was, what do you say? it was amazing!

conni’s spring break was the best two weeks of traveling i’ve ever seen anyone do.

yesterday i went snorkeling in a place called yal-ku. there were lots of fish but no really cool things like sharks. thank you diving for spoiling the water for me forever.

then i took a bus to chetumal and slept in the bus station, and today i rode through belize and back to flores. more stamps in my passport. belize makes you pay $17.50 USD for the privilege of being in their country for two hours. it’s always the most corrupt governments that make you pay the most stupid fines. thank you belize.

flores is on an island in the middle of a lake. it’s really beautiful. everyone who travels here goes to the ruins at 3am to see the sunrise. so it’s really boring too because everyone is in bed.

that’s why tonight i posted pictures. the last of cuernavaca, some carnaval parades from puerto escondido, and the most awesome thing – a shipwreck! enjoy. it’s on my flickr page.

tomorrow night i leave for guatemala city! my cousins mike and jenny are adopting a guatemalan boy named wil. they get here sunday afternoon and leave with him (finally!) on wednesday. i’m super excited because it’s a really special trip for them, and i haven’t seen them in a while…and i haven’t seen any family for four monhts.

then…i’ll be around guatemala for a few weeks. if you want to come visit, fly into guatemala city and come find me. i’ll be in one of the towns on lake atitlan. see you there?

holy crap we did so much diving! i found out that yellowfins are really beautiful, curious, brave, and confident fish. too bad for them they taste amazing. i saw a ray, a lobster, lots of pretty stuff, some dolphins, and SHARKS. they were nurse sharks. they were as big as me. they swam up to check us out but they didn’t want to be petted so i didn’t press the issue.

now i’m open water certified and i have a tshirt to prove it. belize is super expensive and has only american products. they don’t really sell produce. even fish was expensive on the island. how is fish expensive on a reef island. there’s a lot about belize that doesn’t make sense. but the beaches are out of this world beautiful and stewed chicken beans and rice is four bucks so there’s good and bad.

after my first shark decided not to eat me, i bought a necklace made of shark bones. that’s tempting fate a little bit, i know.

i went to a barber for the first time in like four years. getting your hair cut kicks ass. he gave me a great fade and edged my whole head with a razor blade.

conni and i left yesterday for guatemala. we’re in flores, a city on an island in the middle of a huge lake. it’s an hour from tikal, one of the big three mayan sites. the cool thing to do there is go with a tour service at 3:30am. they pick you up in a van, drive you to your site and take you up to sit on some pyramid’s steps to watch the sunrise. we have a ton of spooky pictures of old temples rising up out of jungle and mist. show ya later.

tired now. conni isn’t. that’s annoying. we got here at 10:30 last night, and the most helpful taxi driver ever took us to the only working ATM in the city, woke up a travel agent so we could book our morning trip to tikal, and found us what must be the best $6 hotel on the planet. today the hotel clerk, who moonlights as a travel agent, sold us our tickets to palenque. there are more ruins there and it’s supposed to be a great place to stay. so we’ll stay there a few days, then back to cancun for Spring Break Round Two! yeah! bye!

somehow it feels like there was a time when i was blogging every time i got to a new city. that might have only been four or five cities, but i'm pretty sure it happened. this time i've been to ... [Continue reading this entry]