On the 14th June we left Belize and returned to Guatemala. We caught the bus down to Punta Gorda (Fat Point) in Southern Belize and got a tiny 'international' boat to Livingston in Guatemala. The boat was the worst we had so far - we were unlucky to be at the front of the boat which came crashing down every time we went over a wave. I (Simon) took off my life jacket and used it as a cushion to ease the pain. A minute after getting off the jetty we bumped into Ma...

So after days of not being well enough we finally made it to Tikal. To avoid as much of the heat as possible we caught the bus at 4:30am so were at Tikal shortly after 6am. We decided to have a guide as it only cost slightly over 2 GBP each and he turned out to be very good. As we walked through the jungle to the first set of ruins we saw Spider monkeys in the trees. Most of the ruins are still unexcavated so there are many temple shaped hills with trees growing ...

We had only planned to spend three nights in Flores then move onto Belize however food poisoning changed our plans and we are about to spend our sixth night here, but hopefully moving on tomorrow. Flores is a small island, linked to the mainland by a large bridge, situated in Lago Peten Itza. It's pretty quiet and there don't seem to be that many tourists here. Most stay just to access Tikal (see next blog entry) so are away in the day. It's quite pretty and doe...

We left San Marcos at 5:30am on a tourist shuttle bus, which took 12 hours to reach a small town called Lanquin. We couldn't face doing this journey on the chicken bus and I doubt it would have been possible to complete in a day if we had. The landscape became more tropical and much hotter. In Lanquin our hostel met us and we rode in the back of a pickup truck the last 10km to Semuc Champey. Semuc Champey is a series of turquoise limestone pools situat...

We spent two and a half days on Lake Atitlán, which was both beautiful and comical in parts. We got the chicken bus from Xela which dropped us by the turn-off to Panajachel on the Interamericana highway - where we caught two more short buses down to Panajachel on the lake. Finally we caught a boat across the lake to the small village of San Marcos which is much more beautiful than the built up tourist town of Panajachel. We chose to stay at a wonderful pla...