Playing Catch Up

Well, it really has been a long time since we`ve written here, so apologies for having such a boring blog!

So much has happened in the last month, it`s hard to know where to begin... but here goes:

Tara and I absolutely LOVED living in San Pedro! Tara and her Spanish teacher became new best friends and hung out all the time. ¨Class¨usually consisted of them going for walks, going swimming at the beach, catching crabs, visiting a chocolate shop, or anything else to get them out of the school. In addition to teaching her Spanish, he also taught her to Salsa dance like a real Latina! Everyone that we met in San Pedro was incredibly friendly and we really felt at home there.

I started feeling a bit antsy though and decided to head to Antigua to meet up with our Korean friend, Jiwon. While Tara stayed in San Pedro for one more week of classes and hanging out with Luis :) Antigua is a colonial looking city in a valley surrounded by volcanoes. We spent most of our days wandering around the city, exploring the Mayan market, and tasting the ice cream at every shop in town. Jiwon even taught me how to cook! A real testament to her patience.

After a week in Antigua, Tara and our friend Dan joined us from San Pedro, just in time for Halloween! We did some shopping at the Paca, which is a second hand clothing ¨store¨ behind the market. It`s basically just a bunch of tables underneath a roof made of tarps that sell all kinds of stuff. We were all able to find costumes and boy, were we quite the group!

Guatemalans don`t actually celebrate Halloween, only the tourists and extranjeros dress up. The real holiday in Guatemala is November 1st, Day of the Dead. For this holiday, we went to Santiago Sacatepequez for their huge kite festival. For the weeks leading up to the festival, different groups of men spend hours creating these gigantic kites in ´secret´(no one is supposed to know at which houses the construction is going on). Then, the day of the festival, everyone brings their kites to the cemetery and try to fly them. The large kites in front are for decoration, but all along the roof tops and on top of the tombs children have smaller versions that they try to get into the sky. The kids all thought it was hilarious that I didn`t know the right way to fly a kite and spent a long time trying to teach me. After my lesson, I was definitely worn out (and still feeling tired from Halloween) and so took a little nap on top of the tomb. I`m not sure if that`s disrespectful, or just creepy...

The following Friday, we decided to climb up Volcan Pacaya. The volcano is active, but had a really large eruption last May and so is pretty calm right now- no visible lava flows. It`s a beautiful hike up, absolutely gorgeous views of the surrounding volcanoes and Guatemala City. We brought marshmallows with us and were able to roast them in cracks in the surface where the heat from the lava reaches the surface. Unfortunately, the wind got going just as Jiwon went to roast her marshmallows and she ended up with a bunch of burnt hair! There was also another area of the volcano where the lava had cooled into a sort of cave, and we were able to go inside it but only for a bit because it felt like we were inside an oven.

At the beginning of this week, Tara and I headed up to Lanquin to see the pools of Semuc Champey. We started our day with a candle-lit tour through a cave. We swam up a river, climbed up waterfalls, rapelled down waterfalls, jumped off the cave walls, slid down natural rock slides, all while holding our burning candles! We then went tubing down the river, swinging on a rope swing and bridge jumping. After all these activities, we finally made it to the main attraction- the Semuc Champey pools. These are a series of pools on top of a natural stone bridge. The majority of the water from the river rushes underneath the pools, but some of it travels on top in a series of waterfalls. We climbed up to Mirador (the lookout) to get a birds eye view of the pools and then headed down to swim in them. The water is incredibly calm, and the pools are really deep. Starting at the top pool you can swim through each one and then jump off the waterfall into the next.

We spent the next day in Lanquin hanging out at our hostel and ¨swimming¨in the river. The current was so strong that I don`t know that you can call what we were doing swimming, it was more along the lines of ¨active drowning¨.

After all that activity, we were really looking forward to the all you can eat buffet the hostel offers!

It really was the perfect way to spend our last few days together. Sadly, this morning Tara left to go back to the United States. I tried to convince her that student loans don`t really need to be paid, but she`s worried about something called `credit`? So, she will be moving to New Mexico to live with her cousin for a bit. My plan is to meet up with our Canadian friend, Dan, and travel with him for a bit because he has approximately the same plan as me (ie head south).