I can´t think of a title for this one

Hey guys, here’s the next instalment of my Livingston update. Ok, for those of you who didn’t get this from the last post, I spent a weekend in Tikal. I’m sure Zoë is feeling very intelligent right now, thinking “I know what Tikal is, ha-ha” but for the majority of you, who haven’t studied or travelled through Latin America, I will tell you. Basically it’s this huge national park in Northern Guatemala. Most of it is not accessible and is just a protected reserve, but the central attraction is a site of Maya ruins, there are six huge temples around the park and hundreds (according to the guidebook thousands) of other buildings scattered around. Also the site is in the middle of the jungle so you can imagine the amount of wildlife hanging around the area. Every time you climbed to the top of a temple you could see monkeys leaping from tree to tree, I was reminded of Matt and CJ swinging about on the scaffolding at the drop zone, congratulations boys, you look like a pair of spider monkeys… actually Matt probably looks more like a Howler Monkey but I don’t imagine many of you know what the difference is, basically just imagine a monkey with Matt’s head and you pretty much have it, those of you who don’t know what Matt looks like, don’t worry about, if you really want to know can do a Google image search on howler monkey, then imagine it with cloths on, walking around drunk and shouting unbelievably loud, it’s probably best to also imagine it following around an 18 year old female student.

Anyway enough of insulting Matt, I better get back on topic before I lose my non-skydiver audience.

So we started the weekend by heading upriver to Rio Dulce on a boat, as per usual the Lanchero filled the boat beyond the point anyone could have thought possible, if they hadn’t already been at the project long enough. I have started calling it “Lancha Buckaroo” it’s this game the Lancheros seem to play with each other, “how many suicidal people can we force onto the boat before it sinks”. They haven’t managed to sink one yet, but it has to happen eventually. Anyway if I don’t get drowned by these insane lancheros, I’m sure to lose my legs through blood loss, last time I actually spent the trip in a position where I went numb from the waist down, I had one leg tucked round under my seat and the other being crushed by a bag, then the seat is so hard that your arse goes numb and my waist was being crushed against the back of my seat by this huge suitcase that was thrown on my lap. This wouldn’t have been too bad if it was a short 20 minute trip, but no, unfortunately it was an hour and 45 minute boat ride. And what makes it worse is the fact that the lancheros go about 20 minutes out of the way to drop their mates off in the arsehole of no where, what the hell are they doing living out there, maybe they’re forced to live away from society because they’re so bloody inconsiderate. If you live that far away from everything, why haven’t you got a boat for Christ sake, and how do these people get to town, it’s not like boats would ever go past, they’re too far out of the way.

Anyway back to the story, the Lancha took well over an hour and a half to get to Rio, then we went and caught a coach to Flores, which is like a little Island in the middle of a lake, you can drive to it via the bridge though. We found a pretty nice hotel for 40Q a night, that’s about £3. They had a shower there and if you turned it on a low enough pressure, low enough so that the water dripped out rather than ran, the water was actually not cold… Amazing, ok it wasn’t exactly warm but wow, that’s the closest to hot water I have had for over a month.

That night we had pizza, I ordered the double cheese one, don’t worry Skydivers, it was tiny compared to the one in Seville. It was great because in Guatemala you cant actually get good cheese, in fact there are only 3 types of cheese here, well I suppose there are 4 if you think that the kind of cheese in a McDonalds Hamburger counts. The types are Queso Blanco, Queso Duro and Queso Seco. These translate as white cheese, hard cheese and dry cheese. Basically Queso Seco is a dry version of Queso Blanco, and Queso Duro is exactly the same except a little bit less crumbly.

So pizza was great as they seem to import some kind of semi-decent cheese for that. Anyway, due to the extreme lack of cheese in my diet since arriving in Guatemala, my stomach wasn’t happy in the morning, I’ll spare you the details.

We left for Tikal at 2:00pm, well we were supposed to leave at 2:00pm but it was more like 3:00pm, I’m sure I have already laid out the principals of Guatemalan time keeping, it goes something like “get there when I tell you, then I’ll turn up when I have nothing better to do, but if you aren’t there when I arrive to bad, you still pay and I don’t wait round”. On occasion it turns out to be something more along the lines of “I will tell you a time, I may not turn up at that time or at all, but when you find me and ask me where I was I will insist that I sat there and waited an hour for you, I may lie and tell you I waited in the correct place but what this actually means is I am sat in the office watching Mexican wrestling and eating a Burrito or seven”.

So anyway after a frustrating hour of waiting for our bus to show up, it eventually arrived, as if it was on time, when we asked why the bus driver was so late he claimed he’d had to drive round Flores to pick up the other passengers, there are 2 problems with this: 1. it takes 20 minutes to walk the circumference of Flores, so a bus should do it in 5 at the most. 2. The bus was empty…

We decided to cut our losses and put up with the fact that the driver was covered in crumbs and sauce, probably from the 8^th burrito he had decided to eat on the way. The drive was about 1 hour and 15 minutes so I used the time to listen to one of my pod casts bashing the ignorant cretin known as Sarah Palin. On the subject of her, it’s the 5^th of November today and I’m pleased to find that she wont be blowing up the world in the next 4 years, obviously she would have had to wait a few weeks for McCain to have a stroke or get involved in another plane crash, or for his left gland to swell so much he actually floated away. But after the inevitable happened she would have had plenty of time to monumentally screw the world over the same as the current President, George “war on reality” Bush. Also hopefully Mr “I’m a fuckin’ redneck” won’t be forced to marry her daughter anymore, or has that already happened, I don’t know we don’t get good news coverage here. Imagine that, forcing that guy to be a father, what kind of idea is that. Although I did feel sorry for the guy as well, even though he has got to be one of the most pitiful examples of a human I have ever seen, imagine having that as a mother in Law for the rest of your life.

So anyway we arrived at Tikal and went to ask how much it was to stay in a Hammock at the hotel, it turned out the hotel no longer provided that service, we could however pay $15 (I hate the way touristy places charge in dollars, it’s cos the majority of the older American tourists don’t bother changing them, actually a lot of them think that the currency here is dollars) each and stay in a 6 person room. Now that may not sound a lot to you but in Livingston $15, or 108Q as it should be here, can get me a private room at a hotel and pay for all my food for the day, and then 2 or 3 beers in the evening. So I wasn’t happy about this. Basically before taking the room which we had to do eventually we went to check every where else, $30 each was the next best offer from a hotel. But we could rent hammocks for 35Q and hang them up in the campsite, I was defiantly up for that but one of the girls hadn’t brought a sleeping bag and didn’t want to get cold. This pissed me off as the plan from the start had been to stay in a hammock, the only difference would have been that the other hammocks would be hung outside a hotel, these were gonna be hung 100m away in the campsite. Basically exactly the same. After asking her why she had neglected to bring anything she said she didn’t have room because she only brought a small bag and she thought it would be warmer here. Let’s see, she was freezing in Livingston, in moving from Livingston to Tikal we have moved 7 hours further away from the Equator, 7 hours further up into the mountains and 7 hours further away from the Caribbean coast… hmmmmmmm. In England we call this kind of person a moron, apparently in Austria they call them doctors.

So in the end we had to take the room because she whinged so much and Christoph was anxious to get into the park to see the sunset from temple 4, the biggest one. So we went and got the room, unpacked, then rushed to the entrance of the park. Apparently it takes 30 minutes to reach the grand plaza, where temples 1 and 2 are, 20 minutes if you gun it. We got there in 12 which makes me think that whoever worked that out must have had short legs, which would make sense as I am at least a foot taller than most of the Guatemalans I have met.

It’s then another 15 minutes to temple 4 and as we reached the top the sun had just started to set. Ok blah blah blah, very nice, I’m getting bored of telling you about Tikal now, the next day we went in a 6:00am and were planning to get the bus back to Flores at 6:00pm, some of the girls were told however that the 6:00pm bus doesn’t always turn up. Christoph refused to believe this and got very grumpy, he wanted to catch another sunset at 5:30pm. Buses not turning up as you can probably work out is quite a plausible occurrence. The other buses left a 4:00pm and 5:00pm, the time was 3:30pm and we were not all together so we decided to search for the others and meet back at 4:15pm to try and catch the 5:00pm bus. Christoph insisted on going to talk to the bus driver of the 4:00pm bus to ask if there would be one at 6:00pm. I tried to tell him that if he said there would be it wouldn’t mean anything, they don’t like giving people bad news here so there was a good chance he would just lie. When we got there however the bus driver not only said there was a good chance of not having a 6:00pm bus, but also it was doubtful as to weather there would be a 5:00pm bus also. The bus driver agreed to wait for us until 5:10pm as no one else needed the bus.

I said to Christoph there is no way on earth I am paying for that room again. So we ran back in to tell the others to get back out for 5:00pm, Christoph was still grumpy having to miss sunset. We managed to hitch a lift with some rangers and arrived at temple 4 on time, but no one had found Alex and Nico, another two Austrians.

We went and searched the Grand Plaza and still didn’t find them so resigned ourselves to missing the bus, we headed back down to the entrance to see if they were waiting out there. We got to the car park at 5:07pm but they weren’t there. Then the bus driver popped up and said, don’t worry, there’s defiantly a bus a 6:00pm now. Great, there wasn’t time for us to head back into the park to see anything unless we felt like more running and I was sick of it by this point. Christoph had a grump on for the day and a half till we got back to the project and Nico and Alex came out just on 6:00pm to catch the bus.

We ate pizza (this time I had a bigger one but decided not to go for double cheese, I also saved some for breakfast, I learnt my lesson in Seville) in Flores again then travelled home on Monday, which was a day of as it’s a national holiday.

So that’s the massively cut down account of the weekend in Flores. Since I have the better part of a page left before I hit the four page mark, I’ll bulk this out with a few more Livingston Characters.

First let’s start with crazy voodoo lady, this is what we have started calling here, however we have no idea of her real name, no one seems to. Crazy voodoo lady has probably thrown you off a bit however, your probably picturing her as some woman with crazy hair and a bone through her nose, running round with some heads on a string and sacrificing chickens. This is not what she is like at all, in fact we have no idea if she has anything to do with voodoo. She is a pretty large old woman who walks round in some kind of orange dress and a summer hat. The reason we call her crazy voodoo lady is because she has a habit of hanging around outside our hotel and crotch grabbing as people walk out. The only way we can account for this is that she is a) crazy or b) practices voodoo and it’s some kind of weird ritual or something, since a prerequisite of the latter is that she would have to be crazy, we have labelled her crazy voodoo lady. Luckily she has never been around when I’ve been on my own so she has never gone for me before but I have seen her go for other people and it’s bloody funny, although quite disturbing. According to Berti she is also a serial flasher who is prone to sitting outside her house on the porch and shouting “amigo” then lifting her dress while wearing no underwear, luckily only Berti has seen this before, it’s not something I would imagine to be a pleasant site. Berti’s explanation is “eizer she’z crazy or she really juzt needs a prick or zumzing”.

Rusty next I think, he’s the owner of a local hostel and bar named Casa Iguana, he’s also very very gay. Not that that’s a bad thing, I just want to make it clear that we aren’t talking about your common, garden variety, Ian Mckellen type homosexual. No, we are talking about your full on Liza Minnelli, Madonna gay, the type that call everyone “darling”. He looks very similar to someone who used to be on the English big brother, but I can’t remember his name or what series it was in. Basically it was a bald gay guy who was obsessed with the transsexual woman. If you know who I mean, just imagine him but twice the height and you’ve got Rusty.

Anyway, I haven’t known him very long as he hasn’t been in Livingston recently, he left a few of the other guys from Casa Iguana in charge. But he got back recently and me and some of the other guys are regulars at Casa Iguana. So we were sat talking to him over a few beers, then he went upstairs suddenly, we were talking to some of the other customers at the time so didn’t notice. Then suddenly he came back wearing nothing but a fish net leotard and a pair of cat ears. He then began dancing on a table to Christina Aguilera and that just about sums Rusty up.

I was planning on telling you about Insane Mexican Restaurant owner woman (I think her names Maria), or Sid the drunken Barman, but I’m almost up to the four page mark, so I’ll save it until the next post and give you something to look forward to and me something to actually write about, since there is’nt much else meant to happen any time soon.

Later

Ps. Liz was complaining because she wasn´t in the last blog so... Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz, Liz. Is that good enough