Greetings from Guatemala!

All right loyal readers: to show my loyalty to you, I am posting some pictures and updating my blog after a LONG day that started about 20 hours ago and just ended in a rather treacherous 3 hour drive from the airport to the hotel in a large passenger van taking sharp and winding turns over horrible roads! We woke up 3:30 am and only ate one meal and hiked in the damp humidity for several hours. And yet I´m here to tell you about it! And getting a little ahead of myself.

Chris and I left Buenos Aires on the red-eye Saturday night and actually flew to Houston together before separating to get different connections. It was rather a traumatic parting and I´m very sad not to be seeing and travelling with Chris until mid-September. Fortunately for me, I had friends waiting for me in Guatemala to ease the pain for me. I´ve known Beatrice practically since birth as our families lived around the corner from each other and we´ve trudged our way through med school (one year off) together, got married the same year, etc etc. Peggy was Beatrice´s college roommate who also became a very good friend and Benji is her boyfriend, who is hilarious...he and I have shared a few adventures too, mostly involving blizzard conditions and the Detroit airport. I´m so lucky that they all wanted to have a little adventure as well so we met up in Guatemala! Here´s a shot from the plane:

We didn´t have much time in Guatemala City as we were actually flying up to Flores, Guatemala later in the day as our base point for the trek to Tikal, heart of the Mayan civilization. But we had enough time to walk to an Artisan Market where they had gorgeous craftwork and eat some street food as well. Yummy! Then off to Flores where the shuttle picked us up and took us to our posada. We had a quick dinner then went right to sleep as we had a 3:45 am pick-up for the sunrise tour to Tikal.

If anyone ever visits Tikal, you MUST do the sunrise tour. It´s amazing...as you can see. We got there just as the sun was rising and saw it burn off the mist in the surrounding rainforest with temple tops peeking out. Howler and spider monkeys woke up the forest with their loud calls, birds were chirping, and the cicadas were doing their thing. All together, it was rather magical.

Our tour guide then took us around a bit of the rest of the Tikal archeological site, which was amazing. Í´ve been to and climbed Chicen Itza but this was probably more impressive. Especially from a heights standpoint! I´m a little afraid of heights and was worried about climbing up and down these steep temple steps but my friends were very encouraging and it wasn´t quite as bad as it could have been. But I don´t think the pictures can convey how really steep they are. The heat and humidity didn´t help. But it´s a fascinating place and well worth the visit.

However, we were super tired on our return and didn´t even have breakfast or lunch! So we were very hungry and went foraging for food. This lady across the street had a juice stand that we inquired at to ask for watermelon water (Benji´s favorite...very refreshing!) but ended up with a homemade meal! Thank god Benji is fluent in Spanish....muy muy utilidad! The lady told us what she had and would be able to make, which consisted of a vegetable soup and steak fajitas (with a plate of veggies for Beatrice, our resident vegetarian). OH MY GOD was the food delicious! I´m sure some of it had to do with our being so hungry but it was really really good food. The soup had grated carrots, potatoes, and squash and was so good! The steak fajitas were also really yummy with freshly made corn tortillas! And all of it for $25 Quetzal dollars which is less than $4 US. That´s right, 1, 2, 3, 4 US dollars. What a steal! We were too tired to do much after that besides sit in our air conditioned room until we left. We did venture out once to buy up some local wood crafts from an artist next to our posada....gorgeous boxes made from a local tree whose leaves were used to help varnish it as the consistency is like sandpaper! They were so pretty that we nearly cleaned out his supply!

Back to the airport to fly back to Guatemala City..unfortunately, we got back late enough that little was open to eat so we decided to wait. But, after 3 hours of the long and winding road, we were all too tired to get food and just wanted to get into bed. Which is what I´m going to do now. Will try post more adventures and pictures tomorrow!