Super Central America (San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico)

Hello, friends. I´m alive. I´ve been slacking on my update duties. I know, I know. It´s just that you get so busy out here on the travel road, then your friends from home come skip about the Americas with you and it´s just so damn hard to keep up. So sorry. Let me see if I can remember enough to re-cap.

I think I left you in Trujillo, Peru, where Nicole and I ate a hilarious dinner at a not particularly tasty chifa, a Chinese restaurant, that looked like it had been designed as an elementary school cafeteria and converted to a peep show shop in the not very distant past. Each conference table was surrounded for privacy by its own red curtain and the waiters wore tuxes and averaged 100 years of age. It may have been the strangest dining experience I will ever have, but what a photo op! After dinner we caught a night bus to Lima and spent a couple of days observing colorful and chaotic processions at the central cathedral and plaza and running errands and buying Peruvian trinkets and saying goodbye.

Then came the oh so roundabout trip to Belize. I was terrified of the Houston airport experience, but it was actually rather painless. I ate a mediocre bagel, just because I could, and drank a Starbucks frapaccino, which I quickly remembered I don´t even like that much, just for the sheer rush of all that Western-ness and pure clean ice. It was the Cancun airport I should have feared. Turns out, the most awful of awful Americans, the gjewelryelery, the bad accents, the loud obnoxiousness I was afraid of facing in Houston, were actually all waiting for me in Cancun. Good Lord. I just barely survived my one night there and got on a very early bus to the Belize border.

If you have ever wondered where your childhood school buses went to die, the answer is Central America. Most got a paint job, but the interiors are without alteration. The Virginia Students Code of Conduct was even posted in one of mine, just in case some Belizians were wondering how to behave the next time they attend grade school in VA. Anyway, it was a lovely nostalgic ride to Belize City, and a quick taxi to the Seaside Guest House where I sprinted up the steps to learn that my favorite Amanda Hart had arrived just a few seconds earlier. Amanda was the one to send me terrified through the metal detector as I boarded my flight to Auckland last October so our reunion was quite exciting. We spent a night in Belize City, which doesn´t really have too much going for it, and made for the cayes!

Belize's Caribbean feel was a big transition from all the Latiny Spanish-speaking countries I've been enjoying lately. Fun different music and atmosphere. First we hit up Caye Caulker, one island over from San Pedro, which Madonna sings Isla Bonita about. The weather was a little touch and go and not fantastic, but the island was quiet and pretty. I dove one day and we swam off the remnants of a broken old bridge and then we headed south. On a tiny penninsula on the mainland in far southern Belize is a precious little beach town called Placencia. It was quiet with spurts of rain smooshed between glorious hot hot sun. The main road is not a road, but quite literally just a sidewalk lined with shops and restaurants paralleling the water. It was perfect breezy relaxing beach with great swimming in moderate waves (I´m apparently getting to be something of a picky beach judge). We stayed at Eloise´s which was not pronounced how it looks, with Eloise and her obviously adorable daughter named Dara. There were hammocks. If you haven´t figured it out by now, I love hammocks. It was great. Placencia was full of chatty chatty local divemasters with no divers as it´s the rainy season and not peak resort time so our tropical cocktails at beachside palapas were regularly graced with enthusiastic visitors who taught us important lessons like ¨The blacker the bird, the sweeter the juice¨. What - didn´t you know?

From Placencia we went north again and took a boat out to Tobacco Caye. Someone had described it to us as Gilligan´s Island and I can´t really argue. It´s a 4 acre dollop of sand in the middle of the Caribbean. It´s paradise. Reef protects the whole thing so the water is bathtub calm and at times, almost too warm, if that´s possible. Perfection. All the places to stay are little rustic all-inclusive places with basically the same name. Ours was a charmingly horribly run little set of white huts on short stilts stuck out over the water. Celia ran the place and Angela, who may have suffered some sort of traumatic fall as a child, cooked. The vegetarian concept was a bit of a challenge for them so Manda and I really got our fill of the local staple of rice and beans. My vitamins came primarily in the form of bright red bug juice. Nightlife meant hanging out with Celia´s hilariously cute 9 year-old grandson Earl or watching the stars and phosphorescents from our hammock. Impossible to beat. Amanda tasted fish for the first time in 20 years and tragically followed it with an entire day spent in bed while I dove with a spastic and unprofessional crew of local divers to an amazing place called Shark Cave. Though entirely devoid of sharks, it was an incredible deep dark hole that opened into a pitch black cave and I loved it. The surface was still within the reef so between dives the water was perfectly calm for diving off the bow and marveling at water so clear you thought maybe you were really just in the deep end of your neighborhood pool. At first we thought maybe we´d get bored on an island you can walk the perimeter of in about 8 minutes, but by the end of 3 days, we were settling right in and leaving was a challenge.

We managed. On the mainland we bought hot sauce at the copier-filled office of Belizian hot sauce magnate, Marie Sharp, whose bottles grace every single dining surface in the country. Then we school bused on over to San Ignacio, which is inland next to the Guatemalan border. The ancient Mr. and Mrs. Guerra´s Plaza Hotel was full so they cleaned out their guest room and handed it over. Mrs. Guerra was very careful to explain every detail of the place to us with knocks on the door every 5 minutes to point out another light switch, or share instructions on how to make the fan oscillate. She was thorough. From San Ignacio we did a tubing trip through local caves used by ancient Mayans for rituals and religious worship. We hopped out of the tubes in the middle of the darkness to explore pot shards. It was impressive. Amanda and I were the only people on our tour and our guide Joanne was lovely and fun until shortly before the end of the route, in open river outside the cave, when I got caught in a forceful swirl of water, lost my tube, got caught on a branch, pulled under, and possibly almost drowned. It was brief and I recovered quickly with the helpful aid of an extra tube pitched my way by the guide of a gawking group of American high school kids. In the end, I suffered only a banged shin and much humiliation, but Joanne was a little disappointed in me and quiet as she drove us to the border.

Crossing into Guatemala popped me right back to my developing-world Spanish language realm - dodging bribes, dodging machine guns, negotiating prices, and so forth. We tried to get staight to Tikal, but our attempts at hitching proved fruitless. Instead we spent a torturously hot smelly night in a stuffy mildewy room in Flores and then left for Tikal the next afternoon. We visited the impressive huge ancient Mayan temples in an evening rainstorm as soon as we arrived and managed to get the most central famous plaza all to ourselves. It was nothing short of magical. That night we slept in rented hammocks on a concrete platform under a palapa in a grassy field at the edge of the jungle. Just as we turned out headlamps my hammock shook. I asked Amanda if hers had as well, but it hadn't. The headlamps went back on and there, on the roof of my mosquito net inches above my face was a gigantic frog. Curiosity satisfied, we said goodnight to Kermit and slept. We got up at 6 am to get back into the ruins when they opened. We spent the whole day exploring temples and inspecting very hairy caterpillars, bright orange catepillars, giant stick insects, birds, monkeys, foxes, and all manner of jungle life. In the afternoon we went back to Flores and left there the next morning at 5 am for Mexico.

It was a long day of serious bus riding for an evening arrival in lovely San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. We quickly found a place to stay and headed out into the rain for a delicious slightly fancy vegetarian Mexican dinner. Being a travelers' town with plenty of Spanish classes for foreigners and a solid population of earthy Mexicans, such a dinner is possible. So is organic espresso and whole wheat bread. Then again, so are delicious market tortillas and mangos and spicy salsas and Sol beers with limes. I love Mexico. There are also nice ladies to wash your very very dirty clothes, there are trips to nearby indigenous Chamula villages, there are museums of traditional medicine, there are Amber expos, and there is live jazz. We've had a great few days. Tonight we head to the beach in Oaxaca for one last dose of sun and sand.

By the way, for all of you who never thought I'd come home, you should know that as of last week, I do in fact, have a real live Continental Airlines plane ticket to North America. I know, I can't believe it either. Miss you all. Love, d.