So it was time to move on, my chest and finger were good as new and with the islands only ATM broken we had no money so no choice. At the ferry office we managed to book a shuttle bus to Flores in Guatemala for a few hours later, so we decided to send our Christmas cards home and buy some traveling food. During this time we ran into a possibly high or drunk Rastafarian who explained what the four raster colours mean on my head band. The red was for the blood spilt in Africa, yellow for gold, green for the environment and black for the colour of the people. Although this guy was harmless every time he saw us from then on he would yell, 'Hey English girls' and everyone looked.

We jumped on our bus all ready to go, to find there was a hole in the roof above our chair and we were experiencing a tropical rain shower.... So we stayed strong and refused to sit there, so the other people had to squash up together and we ended up with the best seats in the bus! Our journey was bumpy but we were traveling in the day so there was lots of new exciting sites to see. We arrived at the Blizian boarder to find we would be stung for $30 exist fee, which we didn't know about and then some more to enter Guatemala. Luckily we were sharing a bus with a group of christian who we on missions so they subbed us some money and we were off.

Our first stop was to Flores, which was the main base stop of Tikal. We went exploring and bumped into Amanda and Nick (our Canadian friends) and like before in Belize they were leaving the next day :(! We arranged our trip to Tikal for the following day and had an early night as we were getting picked up at 4.30am the following morning.

I couldn't tell you much about the journey to Tikal as we both slept, all I remember was it was extremely bumpy again. We arrived at the ruins first out of all the other tourist trucks so as 6am hit and the National park opened we zoomed down the straight 20 km road to the entrance. We were greeted with coffee and toast and then entered the park. Both of us were secretly pleased with our prior research as we were one of the only few that knew you had to pay to get in, so for once we were the organised ones lending money, not the other way round. We walked through a jungle like path for about 30 minuets, with our knowledgeable and opinionated guide pointing out the many wonder wild life. We saw lots of racoons, Howler monkeys, birds and a tarantula which we both held.

We saw our 4th ruins, again left by the maya's. The ruins are set in the jungle and I imagined our tour to be a walk through the jungle and come to a clearing but no they built temples within. Although this time during our tour around the different temples we were allowed to climb to the top and see the views! Our first climb allowed us to see over the whole jungle area, where you could see the tops of the other temples. It was amazing, however Becki began to realise how high up we were and started to panic, especially as the ledges around the top our very narrow and not wide enough for people to pass easily so we took our photos and hurried down the steps. Our tour leader sat us down and explained lots of interesting facts and made us think 'did the Maya people predict the future? Why does their calendar finish in 2012? What will happen?'. We set off and saw more ruins, I can officially say we have done ruins to death now, they all look pretty similar and have similar stories. Climbing our second temple was extreme, we had to climb a set of 100 stairs that were virtually vertical like a ladder. Climbing up was fine, and the view again was super. I believe the temples we could see were the setting for the film 'return of the jedi' but not being a star wars fan it was lost on us. From the top you could see directly down to the bottom and boy it is even higher, so the climb down the stairs was spent giving Becki confidence to handle the backwards climb down. We wondered around some more taking pictures and waited for our bus to take us back for a well deserved siesta,

That night we decided to have a few drinks and look around the town for some dinner. After walking for about 15 minuets passing lots of restaurants we ended up in good old Burger King. I decided I would take it upon myself to order and slightly worse for ware I shouted 'Becki how do you say seven in Spanish?', I started counting in Spanish to turn to the guy and say seven in English..! I think you had to be there, but the guy serving us laughed.

Greeted by another early start, we headed with Amanda and Nick to Laquin. This journey was long and tiring and could have turned out a lot worse than it did. We knew we were stopping in the centre to pick some more people up, so we all got off the bus leaving everything on it and brought some food. Like the good girls we are we were first back to our drop of point to find no bus, driver or bags. Slowly we all started congregation and panicking, then about half an hour later the driver showed up smiling saying he decided to pop home! We all learnt a very valuable lesson that day.

We arrived at Laquin and and headed to our hostel called Zepha. It was two beautiful thatched buildings on top of a green mountain, surrounded my fields, bulls, cows and a river running through. As a result of staying in a tiiny village in the middle of nowhere with no phones or banks we had to buy everything at the hostel, which meant everyone including the staff had dinner together every night which was lovely. We had just sat down to dinner and two guys rocked up called Danny and Andy, who we had met in Belize. We were very excited as we had a right little group forming.

As a group we decided to chill the next day, visiting the local market and going on the hostels tubing tour down the river. The market was really funny, you could openly buy steroids on the street right next to a children's toys stall. What was even more funny and the locals agreed was how tall we all were compered to the locals. I think the average height for an adult was about 5 foot, so we looked like giants. The tubing was really chilled out, we just floated down the river, twisting our way around the rapids and even jumping off and visiting a cave with bats.

The next day we woke up all excited as the was time to visit the main reason for our stop in Laquin, Semuc Champey. This was a national park which had a set of caves, tubing, waterfalls and water holes. Our first adventure was into the caves, brilliant our tour guide doesn't speak a lot of English and no one in our group spoke a lot of Spanish so understanding the safety rules was interesting. However it was perfectly safe, we had our borrowed shoes that fitted perfectly (NOT) wearing bikinis and shorts for warmth and we had a candle to hold by bare hand that had to last the whole trip through water that was possible deeper than us!! This was going to be a lasting memory shared with the group! We set off and before we had even ventured 20meters we were staring at the bats above us with only our candles for light to see small little black things huddled together making funny little twitching movements. We carried on further wading through water up to our knees maybe this wot be so bad..... how wrong was I? A waterfall inside the cave awaited us, remember our lighting was by candle light and this doesn't take kindly to getting wet! However, there was a rope and natural foot holes but forget safety harnesses (for me thou this is half the fun of traveling, the contrast!& still you feel safe because it is in your hands!) we all scaled the 12ft waterfall which was a buzz until I realised what goes up will eventually come down and Becki hate's heights! Following our guide religiously to avoid rocks and deep holes, although at times we had to swim as it was too deep everywhere we came to a pool. The guide climbed up the wall and showed us how to jump from the wall into the pool making sure to miss the over hanging wall and still land in the deep part! Being lifeguards you can imagine how we felt but never one to miss out we did everything and it was a great rush. Eventually the guide stopped us and said we could go no further, we played in the pool but having no meat on us we were staring to feel the cold! We continued back along the same path sliding down mini waterfalls until we came to the end and we had to tactfully slide into a position to slip through a letterbox into the unknown all you knew was the guide would shout 'uno, dos, tres' then push you through and then you were gone. It was great though and I loved every minute more so once I had my towel wrapped round me warming me up.

After the cave we grabbed some rubber tubes to do some more river tubbing but not before we did a massive rope swing into the river. Our guide took us to a massive waterfall, making us all jump into the river after him and swim up to the waterfall where we climbed up and under the cave. It was beautiful looking through the cascading water to the river and jungle. Sliding tastefully down on our bottoms we jumped the last section of the waterfall picked up our rubber tubes and floated off down the river lifting our bottoms over the rocks in the rapids.

We grabbed a quick snack to eat then headed of to see the top attraction Semuc Champey. This was a National park and we had two options, either a hour hard hike up a massive hill to see the water pools or spend the time scrabbling over them, swimming through them and jumping off them...? Luckily our group was all of the same mind and we ventured off to swim in some water pools. The pools came in lots of different size, shapes and depths and there were about ten individual pools. Each pool offered a different challenge or adventure with the final pool offering the greatest adventure yet. It was a 12 meter jump of a cliff edge into the bottom of the waterfall, sound easy? Nope you had to angle your jump to avoid the rocks, trees and shallow waters. Normally Hana is the first to volunteer on things like this and Becki does them to compete, however on this occasion it was Becki to take the leap of faith.... and Hana didn't follow to prove she doesn't need to compete with Becki.

Our time at Semuc Champey came to an end and in true traveling style we partied hard that night to celebrate our time at Laquin (however the party antics resulted in the creation of an adult version of DONKEY the children's card game!!!) and to look forward to our next stop, Antigua.