From Tulum, which we reluctantly left after about a week longer than we meant to spend there, we got a bus to Chetumal, the regional capital of Quintana Roo. Pretty much your average horrible big city, with one Crystal-Maze inspired difference: there are no street signs. Not small ones, not bad ones, not dirty ones, none. After some wandering about with our monstrous packs and a polite but utterly unhelpful chat with a very friendly chap and his donkey about where we were, we got a cab to our hostel. It cost about 25p, and I think the guy gve us foreigners' rates. Later we took a walk into 'downtown' to get some cash out (9pm on Good Friday). There was a motorbike and washing machine shop with a bank in the back, so we did some money swapping and went for dinner. I had the best chicken soup I've ever had, a local speciality I can't even begin to spell. We crashed out in our bunk beds and at four in the morning we began our eleven hour bus ride to Flores in Guatemala. I think John's covered that. I am grumpy at best in the morning, and being forced through a border crossing at 6am into Belize was not my idea of fun. And at the other side they actually charge you to leave the place, because they know full well that if they charged you ten quid to get in no bugger would ever go. We paid up happily.

When we got to Flores it was such a total relief – it's a tiny little town on an island with a bridge across it to the next town, Santa Elena. We jumped off the bus and got a took-took to our hostel, Los Amigos, which has a great (and well-deserved) reputation for being a fun, helpful place to stay. We nabbed the last private room available, which turned out to be a treehouse!! Wooden steps led up onto the platform and inside was a bed and a little table. It even had a light and a fan! I amused myself for a good forty-five minutes getting tangled up in our mosquito net, at which point John tied it up for me.

The next morning we set out for Tikal, accompanied by much scorn from the (mad, mad, dreadlocked and incredibly earnest) kids who ran the place, for whom the only Tikal experience is the 3.45am bus ride to watch the sunrise from the top of Temple IV. Had we not been so horribly knackered we might have done it, but as it was we left at 9am. This was Easter Sunday by the way, and although we were sometimes out of sight of anyone else, mostly we were part of a huge local crowd out for the day with picnics and seventeen children each. It was a really festive atmosphere, and having heard some dodgy things about security at Tikal, we were happy to find the place was really pleasant and easy to get around. It covers sqare kilometres and we walked for hours (me in fetching brace with anti-child stick. also in case we met any really big jaguars). The first of the temples we walked to, IV, was very steep and pretty huge, but the best thing about it was the family of howler monkeys who were swinging in the trees above us. They were having loads of fun and we watched them for a while – we also saw spider monkeys, some beautiful little birds and loads of lizards (as well as the usual creepy-crawlies of all persuasions – you know you are in the jungle spirit when you start trying to entice lizards into your rooms to eat all the bugs).

The rest of Tikal was incredibly impressive: huge complexes of multi-chambered buildings alongside enormous pyramid temples – the Central Plaza with its two huge temples, central courtyard and smaller structures was really wow. We climbed the rickety wooden steps to Temple IV and from there you can look out over the jungle to see the tops of Temple I and part of another complex of buildings. The sheer size of these things has such impact, and the jungly setting makes them seem even more incongruous, as though no one could build a city this size out there, but in its heyday it was a sprawling settlement of thousands of people, and apparently there has been limited settlement in the area fairly consistently since it was abandoned more than a thousand years ago.
Ok, now I'm being a total geek, but even John was impressed and actully read the book on Tikal we bought – it knocks your socks off, so if you're ever in the area...

After the mad Easter fun in Flores (toting effigies of Christ and various other night-gowned saints around town to music) we got a bus to Rio Dulce on the coast. The good weather broke that day and we got soaked on the dock waiting for our boat to the hostel. Central American time works differently to other time, so we can easily wait three hours for a meal, or two hours for a water taxi due 'in five minutes'!! We met a nice Irish guy called Paddy who stayed at the same hostel, a little place in the jungle only reachable by boat, which bizarrely did really good pasta. We stayed up having a few beers, and I had to be put to bed after I got far too excited about a tiny frog which leapt onto my cheek suddenly, in pursuit of bugs (which also follow me – I have been bitten milions of times in the last week).

We stayed in the hostel one night and then decided to get a river boat to Livingston, which was a really nice two hour trip through huge lily ponds, a massive gorge and included a quick stop at a hot springs (smelly, we avoided it). Livingston was a nice town with a real Caribbean feel to it and we thought it might be good to stay for a day. Unfortunately we couldn't get a room in a hostel we really liked the look of, and ended up staying in a grim little 'hotel' we did not like! The night life also died around 9pm so in the end we decided to cut our losses and leave the next day.

The hike from there to La Ceiba (Honduras) involved a 6.30am river ferry to Puerto Barrios, a taxi to the bus station, a minivan to the border, an on-foot border crossing, a bus to Cortez, a bus to San Pedro, then a four hour bus ride to La Ceiba, followed by a final ferry to Utila at 4pm. We reached Utila at 5.30pm and fell into its arms gratefully despite the torrential rain (apparently that was a vomit-strewn ferry crossing – I was asleep so missed it!). A dive shop by the Utila jetty offers help to newcomers, where you can dump your packs and find somewhere to live. Drowned rats as we were, we gratefully accepted and they found us a little hotel on the front with both 24 hour electricity and hot water (luxuries, but after our achievement of Livingston-Utila in one day we felt we deserved them!).

Utila is lovely, a little town with an abundance of places to eat, and all the diving you could ever want. There's a little jetty by our hotel and we hang off that feeding Ritz crackers to the fish, of which there are a incredible array of species and colours – and these are only your bog-standard town fish, the reef ones are even better!!! John and I didn't originally intend to dive, but after trying a 45 minute fun dive yesterday and loving it we decided it was worth the time and cost to get certified so we can dive in the future, in Thailand etc. Am not sure it's worth the 6am wake up calls, but ask me again after noon.

P.S. Mum and dad, remember all those times you went through our hair with nit combs at primary school? I could really do with one now because I've got fleas.

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Hello from two newly-certified open-water divers!! We are now qualified to dive on our own (with a buddy, no totally on our own, that would be mad) up to 18m in open water! We've had the best five days EVER learning to scuba dive, something neither of us thought we would do – John because he tried it once in Sicily and didn't enjoy it, me because well, it is a mental thing to do, isn't it, strap yourself to weights and a tank and swim around 60ft below the surface of the ocean. For our fun dive we had a lovely, very German woman called Anke teaching us, who was very reassuring and made it a really fun dive (but her motto was 'You don't do what I say, then I hit you like zis!' cue a whack across the top of the head. All the instructors had their own methods but corporal punishment was a pretty unique approach).

For our open water course we had a nice young guy called Steve, who was an excellent teacher, really really great and with whom we felt totally safe - which was actually a v important thing for me particularly, because the idea that i was going to responsible for my setting up my own gear (though obviously Steve checked it all) was pretty scary in itself! (I would probably have been more worried if Steve had mentioned before our course that he was in fact 9 years old. Alright, 20, but ONLY JUST!! He sheepishly told us when we had finished our course and I had a retrospective fit – I thought he was a youthful looking 25 or something! He was a brilliant teacher but I could not believe he was even younger than me!)

We practiced all our 'skills' on the surface first, like filling our masks with water, pretending we were out of air, 'losing' our regulators and having to find them, then went down to 6m to practice all the skills before our first 12m open water dive. It takes a bit of getting used to to take your breathing apparatus out of your mouth and chuck it over your shoulder underwater but you get used to it, and after every dive it gets easier. So then we went out for our (7am again) dives the next day to look at some reefs and practice more skills. Scuba diving is absolutely knackering, but (going to gush from the brochure now) seeing the ocean from inside rather than on top of it like when you swim is just awesome, it looks like a totally different world and you really do see so much you could never see on the surface – like a huge barracuda circling you when you accidentally surface 100m from the boat. I thought it was a sword fish though so I wasn't scared until someone told me what it was. I also nearly sat on a scorpion fish (clue is in the name) and failed utterly to understand whn there was anything dangerous in the vicinity owing to not having listened in class when Steve taught us the hand signal for 'dangerous animal'. I reached the bottom one day and everybody started making bunny ears at me and pointing frantically at something under a rock. So I went to have a look at the amazing underwater bunny. Turned out to be a lobster the size of a dog.

Communication under water is hilarious and totally hit and miss – Steve was v clear about all the signals, and if you could remember the signal you always knew what he was saying, but the rest of us were all over the shop. You could never be sure if someone was trying to tell you they were having a great time, they had run out of air or they wanted to have a wee in their wetsuit.
The last day of our course I had trouble equalising the pressure in my ears, so we all had to stay at 12m instead of 18m (did I feel bad), and the next day for our fun dives when we were qualified I couldn't get my ears to go at all so I had to stay on the boat while everyone else dived. Sniff. Think it was a slight cold or hayfever, but if you can't get your air spaces to equalise with the pressure around them, something will probably explode, so it's not really worth the risk. I did some snorkelling however and saw a ray, so that was cool because John and the others didn't see anything except another dog-sized lobster. And then had to surface ten minutes early because John apparently needs more oxygen than other people – he always, always runs out of air first.
We were both so glad we did the course and I can't wait to dive some more, definitely in Costa Rica!