Mexico, Guatemala and into Honduras

A big catchup again, we've been through the ruins, up the jungle, and across the islands. Not many internet options along the way...

jb/Mexico/March 19/Coba ruins
Hired a couple of notionally roadworthy scooters to make the 120km round trip to the ruins at Coba. For anyone who can read a map it's an 80km round trip down a single straight road, but that's another story. Anyway. Coba is one of the few large scale ruins in the Yucatan that isn't fenced off from us peasants wot might want to climb over it. Unfortunately the steps are incredibly steep, polished smooth where they're not crumbling, and on that particular day the crosswind was vicious above tree level. Em decided to sit out the temple ascent (leg brace + flipflops = dodgy climbing) and she definitely had the right idea with hindsight. The views across the jungle were impressive from the top, but the getting down was a bit hairy - more so in high heels I'd imagine, but that didn't stop people.

jb/Tulum/March 19/Food
Mexican cuisine and Mexican plumbing have mutually excluisve agendas.

jb/Yucatan peninsula/March 19/The 39 steps
Some of the Mayan archeological 'truths' seem a little far fetched. The Yucatan is the land of the little people - I could run down a crowded street with my arms wide and still not clothesline anyone - yet the 'steps' up your average Mayan temple or palace are incredibly steep, like half a Mayan high, versus a tiddly size 6 shoe wide. If they're actually steps, as they're supposed to be, it's a fucking triumph of form over function, and no mistake. You really want to know why the Mayan race died out? Thigh strain.

jb/Mexico to Guatemala via Belize/Buses #1
Buses? Rumbling, bone crunching, un-airconditioned chicken shitting torture wagons. You buy a ticket at one end for a 'luxury, first class, air conditioned, non stop coach for 7hrs'. You get a 40yr old wreck designed for midgets, with no AC, that stops to pick up every other vagrant, donkey or both. 10 and a half hours of pain from Chetumal in Mexico to Flores in Guatelmala. All to the crackling FM sounds of Enrique Buggering Inglesias and, at one point, the Belle Stars.

Ok, it cost £12 to cross two borders and travel over 500km, so the clue's in the price. The thing I really admire is the sincerity of the chap who sells you the ticket and swears on six saints and three close relatives that it has all mod-cons. Damn, but he's good. We fall for it every time.

jb/Belize/March 20/What a dump
Drove through it, saw no reason to stop. Rusting car wrecks and shanty towns. Tempted to head to the much vaunted Cays, but we think we can get the better in the Honduran Bay islands for less.

jb/Guatemala/March 21/Tikal
Wow. Tikal blows Chichen Itza away. The scale and setting are truly monumental, it's in a national park teeming with wildlife, and much less sanitised than most of the ruins we saw in Mexico. We actually went on Easter Sunday which was rather fun because the locals had come out for the day to picnic with the family. Spent five hours there and it wasn't nearly enough. I'll say it again, wow!, and leave it at that. Emily can do a much better job describing it than me.

jb/Guatemala/March 21/Buses #2
The return bus from Tikal almost tops the Chetumal run. This beat-up, overloaded minivan averaged less than 30mph over 60km of good, flat, traffic free road. On anything approaching an uphill slope it would have been faster to walk. Moral so far – all Central American buses, add at least half again to the advertised travel time (this does not include start time delays). If San Juan Travel are involved, double it and disbelieve everything they tell you. If you want a cheap laugh, though, ask the little driver fella to put your luggage on the roof.

jb/Guatemala/Easter weekend/Flores
Easter weekend in Guatemala is awesome fun if you're into watching hardcore God-botherers at play. In Flores, the whole town gets in on the act (including the otherwise 24hr game of kickabout soccer that takes place in the town square). They've carted effigies of saints, Holy Joe and a working generator around the town at funereal tempo, they've banged drums, tooted horns and partied into the small hours. As far as we can tell the celebrations only stop when the explosives run out. Glorious.

jb/Guatemala/March 23/Eek...
It's a bit dangerous right? Well... Leaving aside the obligatory military presence, the weekly beer delivery truck has a guard with a shotgun riding, er, shotgun. So do most of the local bars and pharmacias. We've seen small children with machetes bigger than their torsos, and a semi-automatic in a fetching leopard-print holster. Topping it all though, outside El Remate, was the Paedophile's Worst Nightmare: a naked toddler with a gun.

Actually I'm being unfair on the country. You can fly in, use private minibuses and go to Flores, Tikal and other tourist hotspots with relative ease, in decent hotels and without any real risks if you want to. Bugger the guidebooks, it's a very poor country but we've felt pretty safe in Guatemala. Mostly.

jb/Guatemala/March 23/Can I borrow an aerosol...?
Big official road signs every ten km or so demanding that we 'NO MOLESTARE LES SENALES' which I originally insisted meant 'Don't Beat Up Old People', a nice enough sentiment from a government not known for nanny state tendencies. However Emily has since correctly translated it as 'Do Not Vandalise Road Signs', which has presumably been created by the Department of Asking For Trouble.

jb/Honduras bay - Utila/March 29/Em's got fleas
She does what it says on the tin. Elsewhere we're chilling out on a lovely little island, doing a bit of snorkeling and generally taking things easy. Hot, slow,and peaceful.

jb/Honduras bay – Jewel Cay/March 30/Scuba diving
We were probably the only visitors to the main island who weren't there for the scuba diving (or the drugs), but now we've gone and signed up for the PADI open water diving qualification. Utila was small enough, but this means four days on a tiny, tiny island-cum-sandbar called Jewel Cay (say 500 yards by 100, height above sea level approximately one metre on a good day, number of churches, seven). It's been bucket flush toilets and bucket showers, with lights out by 9.30pm when the donkey that powers the island's generator goes to sleep. It's also the first community we've seen that wasn't primarily geared in some way or other towards tourists. Not a souvenir stand in sight, no-one trying to sell genuine Mayan tat hand carved by their nephew five minutes earlier, or indeed trying to sell you their nephew. Just a charmingly mad bunch of Jesus freak fishermen intent on keeping an unhurried perspective on life. Utila time, they call it.

We've loved it. The dive instructors have been excellent - very thorough and very good at confidence building. We both needed that. I can't speak for Em, but the sea scares the living shit out of me – I'm the right generation to have been indelibly scarred by Jaws as a child, and I swim like anyone who has years of 40 cigs a day behind them. After I had to do a 200m sea swimming test on the first day I nearly quit (having used six different strokes, doggy paddle included, and still made little or no headway against the current). Yet here I am 60ft under, dodging barracudas and harassing turtles without a care in the world.

jb/Honduras bay – Utila North side, 20m down/March 31/Cutting it fine
Today I made it to the surface with zero air due to a technical problem. Not 500psi, not 200psi, nothing. I had to inflate the BCD jacket manually (technical term for 'blow in it'). Everyone else still had half a tank left and was swimming about down below. No fair.