Semuc Champey and the Peten Region

A long weekend of travel was awaiting us – 8 hours from Antigua to Lanquin on Friday, then another 8 hours from Lanquin to Flores on Sunday. Both trips were on a small van sized ‘turismo’ shuttle with 14-16 passengers. They were cramped to say the least!

Leaving Antigua meant leaving the Western Highlands of Guatemala and heading to the hot, less populated Peten region (however, a cold front moved in and I was still freezing). Peten is known for being a drug running route where tourist transportation is often a target for robberies!

We started with our shuttle driver being totally lost in Antigua. By the time we left at 9am (departure was supposed to be 8am) there was no way we were going to make it to Lanquin before dark. We did have a very interesting passenger from the US on the bus with us. She was traveling the world on the taxpayer’s dime. She stood out instantly, wearing a Chinese hat, carrying a flute, and speaking in the squeakiest voice we had ever heard! Wayne and I thought she was comical, joining in everyone’s conversations with some very weird input. Other passengers asked her where she was going, where she had been, and how she managed it financially when she had never worked a day in her life. She basically told people it was her business and she “made a living work for her”. A journalist from Argentina on the bus wasn’t accepting this answer and grilled her for the next hour – the entire bus was all ears! She finally admitted that she was scamming the Social Security system by claiming she was disabled and collecting monthly checks to travel around the world. She was on a four year plan and was planning to help sail a yacht from San Diego to Hawaii where she was going to purchase a house. We didn’t realize Social Security benefits were so lucrative! We also had the privilege of meeting her again in Flores, whilst having a beer in the local Hostel – she couldn’t leave the hostel due to not yet receiving her monthly payment. She was unable to pay the tab until the Social Security check came in 4 more days!

We finally arrived in Lanquin, a very small town and for us it was just a connection for another shuttle to our accommodation, Utopia Eco Lodge. This shuttle was on the back of a pick-up truck on a dirt, pot-hole filled road for 11km! That doesn’t seem long, but it took what seemed like an eternity. Luckily, we arrived in Our Coffe cabanatime for their delicious communal dinner of vegetarian cabbage and rice. After spending a week with a shared bathroom, I was very excited about having my private bathroom. The lodge staff showed us the cabin and it wasn’t much bigger than our tent and NO bathroom! I didn’t realize I had told Wayne when he was booking that that was acceptable since I wasn’t working for the weekend. However, not only did I not have a private bathroom, I had to walk 50 yards to use it with my headlamp in the middle of the night!! Besides the bathroom issue, the lodge was beautiful and very cheap on a backpacker’s budget. An American family from Ohio opened the Eco Lodge a few months ago. They were in the construction business and had built other hotels in Nicaragua – they definitely knew what they were doing. An awesome A-frame structure overlooked the river and countryside only a kilometer from Semuc Champey. We were able to walk on the trails along the river for our one day excursion.

Semuc Champey is a collection of limestone pools sitting on top of the Cahabon River. It’s pretty amazing to see this river flowing underneath the pools from the lookout, a 1km hike up a slippery, steep walkway. It was our first look at the pools other than the pictures we saw online. WOW – it was beautiful. There were multiple shades of blue in the pools set against tree-lined walls that extended a few hundred meters out of the water. The lookout was hanging off one of these walls and it made my stomach go silly when looking down. After hiking back down from the lookout, we headed to the pools for a swim (see above that I was freezing). I actually got in the water and stayed about 10 minutes, just to say I had done it! Wayne has a higher threshold for the cold and he swam around in the different pools for about an hour. The lodge gave us a packed lunch, another vegetarian delight, and we devoured it while sitting on the edge of the pools. A lot of people don’t head to Semuc because it’s out of the way, but we were very glad we were able to see this natural beauty.

Yaxha & Tikal
Tikal, in the Peten region of Guatemala, was always on our “must do” list for Guatemala. It’s one of the largest archaeological sites of the Mayan civilization. In 1979 it was added as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We stayed in Flores for the week so I could work. It was about an hour from Tikal and close to many other Mayan ruins. Flores is a small island on Lago Petén Itzá and is connected to the mainland by a causeway near the twin towns of Santa Elena and San Benito. It’s very clean and full of hotels, traditional souvenir stores and travel shops offering trips to all of the regions ruins and shuttles to the many onward destinations. Our first accommodation choice was terrible and we promptly moved on after just one night for fear of bedbugs! We relocated to a new hotel with a rooftop room and spectacular views of the lake, albeit for double the price. Oh well, I wasn’t saying in that first crappy room to work for 3 days!

Wayne: I disappeared for a day of ruin discovery to a place called Yaxha, on the road to the Belizean border. Doing this trip during the week was ideal as I had the place pretty much to myself in the morning. Yaxha is the main plaza at Yaxha Mesoamerican archaeological site in the northeast of the Petén Basin region, and a former ceremonial centre and city of the pre-Columbian Maya civilization. Yaxha was the third largest city in the region and experienced its maximum power during the Early Classic period (c. AD 250–600). It was so amazing to see what the human race could construct so long ago, with total thought for which direction the pyramids and other structures should face for when the sun rose and set, amongst many other variables. We initially thought that the layout of their cities was fairly random, but everything had its place. My favorite part of the site was the central plaza with its pyramid and three temples, one of which I was able to ascend the steps up the front to the top. I was well above the treetops providing a clear view of the surrounding rainforest.

El Remate
On a completely different note to Mayan ruins, it has been common knowledge that I have not worked since September 29th 2012. This all changed when I decided to go and check out a small town on the road to Tikal called El Remate, famous for it’s handmade woodcarvings. Andrea and I had read about it but never paid it too much attention and opted for the bigger town of Flores instead. After arriving around lunch, I headed straight for La Casa de Don David, a place referenced in our guide book under the ‘treat yourself’ title. Although not quite perfect for a budget traveler, I wanted to see whether the reviews were justified. I loved the food, the toucans feeding in the garden and the views of the lake so much that I asked the receptionist if they had a room for the following night – turns out they were fully booked and that their Internet was also playing up so that didn’t work for us either. Fortunately for them I was a network guru and offered them my services, which they promptly accepted. The American owner would give us a suite that they only rent out long term and include our meals for free the following night if I could fix the wifi! I spent the next 3 hours to no avail but vowed to be back by 7am the following day to finish what I’d started. Andrea and I both had a big breakfast watching the toucans feeding and two hours later the hotel had full use of its wireless infrastructure – I had just earned us over $100 of accommodation and food, my contribution to 3 months of travel.

Tikal
We were now moving around every day or so because we had to fit in everything and still allow Andrea to work! We only had one night in Tikal national park so we bit the bullet and booked into the Tikal Inn, far pricier than what we were used to paying but easy access to the ruins comes at a premium. We arrived at the park entrance around 12:30 only to find out we couldn’t enter the park until 3:30 unless we paid for an extra day park pass. At $20pp we waited to enter at 3:30 with a few other frustrated tourists (we should have listened to the locals as we were told this before leaving El Remate). We all thought we could just show up at our hotel and not have to pay for park entry! Once we arrived, we headed out in the pouring rain with 2 hours of daylight. We hit the highlights of the park and climbed to the top of Temple IV, the highest pyramid at almost 65 meters. We were soaked when we returned with no way of drying our clothes – they were going to smell so badly by the time we landed in Fort Lauderdale the following week! We paid for the all-inclusive plan so we stuck with ordering from the fixed menu which was just okay. The highlight of our stay was the next morning when we woke at 3:45am for the complimentary sunrise tour. We knew there would be no beautiful sunrise as it had poured with rain since we arrived the previous day, in fact pretty much for the previous week. Our guide was wonderful and showed us so many things we had missed the day before. The temples and pyramids in Tikal are huge, rock structures with plaster on the outside giving them shape. There are too many things to write about Tikal – I think the pictures speak for themselves. We would have loved to stay in the park a few more days to see the sunrise or sunset, but we had to head to Belize for the ATM tour the following day. Make sure you visit Tikal if you are ever in Guatemala – it’s worth the journey, just pray you don’t get stopped by the drug gangs!