big bad guatemala city

i´m updating this from an internet cafe in a MALL in guatemala city. there is a marching band playing somewhere close by. it´s 10ish in the morning and i´ll be hopping on a bus to xela in an hour or so. i couldn´t skip over this place though. the way people describe guatemala city you´d think they were talking about baghdad, but after successfully finding a mildly satisfying dinner last night, i am still alive, with my wallet and all my limbs, able to update the blog.

i got in yesterday after a 6 hour busride and 1 hour ferry ride from belize. rana flew home out of belize city a couple days ago (yesterday maybe? i have no concept of time right now) and i got a bus to punta gorda, which is where you catch the ferry the next morning to get to guatemala. i wandered around punta gorda for a bit with my enormous backpack in the most humid place i´ve perhaps ever been. the entire town is like a wet t-shirt contest in the sense that you just sweat through your clothes throughout the day. it was definitely a really chill place to spend the day but i´m happy to be wearing jeans again. i found this awesome little reggae bar that also doubled as a vegetarian restaurant and drank beers with these hilarious rasta dudes for a bit, one of whom was the customs guy.

looks like i haven´t updated this in awhile.. rana and i went so many places in guatemala and belize i feel like i can´t even remember them all. during our awesome trip to the highlands through nebaj, we rode buses through the mountains on barely existing dirt roads that hugged extremely close to the side of the cliffs. we went through coban and caught a minibus to semuc-champey, which was the most amazing thing i´ve seen here. there are pictures of it in the earlier post, but it is this series of natural, turquoise pools made of limestone that we swam in for a few hours. we hiked up to the mirador, the lookout, and took some photos before hopping in. we played cards a few nights in a row with these awesome chilean guys and had some crucial hammock time by the river. after semuc-champey, we went up to tikal and climbed around on the ruins and watched the sun set and got up to watch the sunrise and hear the monkeys and birds waking up too. tikal was stunning since the temples are so high and it´s in the middle of the jungle. after tikal we took a super hot minibus ride to the belizean border with our new italian friends and got to san ignacio, belize. san ignacio would have been amazing if we had money to do 60 dollar cave-tubing trips, but it was just really hot and i am broke, so we decided to leave the next day for the beach. we were offered a ride by these seemingly nice people from ohio who were staying at our hostel and what a trip that was.. the drive was a total nightmare. these two middle aged couples criticized and cut each other down at every opportunity and then decided to stop and do a sight-seeing tour of belize instead of going right to the beach as they´d told us. rana and i have cast them perfectly in a screenplay which is like the daytrippers meets who´s afraid of virginia woolf -- the first couple will be played by jeff bridges and a really unsexy goldie hawn or the late gilda radner, and the second couple is kevin kline or steven colbert with sally field, if she´s still doing movies. these people were seriously toxic. once we finally got to the beach in placencia it was late afternoon and we should have been there hours ago. the beach was amazing and toally worth it though. we lounged around for days, finished many books and went on a killer snorkeling trip and saw sharks, enormous sea stars, barracudas, schools of bright blue fish and this adorable dolphin on the way back to placencia. belize was awesome but everything was so expensive that i am psyched to be back in guatemala.