Hello everyone,
I am finally sending a long overdue update on my adventures on the road, AKA World Wedding Tour extraordinaire. Firstly here is a link for photos from the first part of my trip in California and Arizona:
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2560586&l=24e5c&id=9365549
So far things have been amazing, though more eventful than I planned.
While I arrived in Guatemala City, Delta Airlines felt it was appropriate to send my bag in Jamaica and finally give it to me five days later. I sent them an email saying that I deserved the same treatment they gave my bag, therefore a free round trip ticket to Jamaica would be in line as compensation. They seem less convinced, and we are still negotiating exactly what compensation I will get. I ended up buying toiletries and such in the market as soon as I realized that it would not take a day for them to get my bag, as they had initially claimed.
My first big activity was to climb volcano Pacaya, which remains an active volcano. I have never climbed over hot lava, nor have I ever hiked before in an environment where I was concerned my jeans would catch on fire. Law suite liabilities are hardly prevalent here, so you are welcome to engage in activities that are completely banned in the US. For example, when I went caving in Semuc Champey, Katrina (my friend who I traveled with for the first three weeks) and I went through the caves with one guide and nothing for light but a candle a piece. With no lights and no dry land, you swim through among the rocks with bats overhead, and climb through holes to get to the next caverns. The point in time where I thought imminent death was the most probable was when the guide told us to crawl through a hole down a waterfall... I couldn't see where it went because there was so much gushing water, and the non-English speaking guide was giving me very precise directions about how to climb through in Spanish.... Spanish 1, my only Spanish training, did not include cave climbing vocabulary so I was very relieved when I managed to follow his directions correctly and landed in a pool of water safely at the bottom.
My biggest faux pas in the cave was that I punched my tour guide in the face. He was a very nice, but mischievous spirited person, who thought it was a good idea to sneak up on my in the dark. He only did this once. When you are swimming through a dark cave with water where 95% is free of animals according to the guide (which makes you wonder about the other 5%), with a single friend and a small candle each and someone jumps out at you from the dark you are prone to react with some form of self defense.... It was simple a reflex, and I didn't realize I had hit him until Katrina told me I had done so I turned to see him rubbing his face. I wanted to ask if he was ok, and searching a way to say this in Spanish I settled on asking "tiene dolor de cabeza?" to ask if his head hurt. I then mixed up the word for beer
(cerbeza) and head (cabeza), thus in short I punched the man and then asked him how his beer was. He looked confused and said that he didn't have a beer, but now he wanted one...
The most unsettling thing about punching the guide was that he was actually a nice person. Were I to be given a premise where I had to punch a tour guide, I would allocate it to someone else. I am quite certain that my tour guide in Tikal would have made a much better candidate, not only because he lacked communication and time management skills, which are inherently important to the job, but because he was the most unhelpful person imaginable in cases of medical emergency. I will try and post whatever pictures of the trip I can get, however given that I fell down one of the Mayan pyramids camera in hand, there will be no more photos from my camera.
Apparently royalty used to walk up and down the stairs in front of their Mayan kingdoms as part of societal tradition... I will assume they did it more gracefully than I, who did so by skidding down on my back, smashing both my hand and camera. My tour guide responded by claiming there was no medical center on sight. He then admitted there was one but said it was too far, then admitted it was nearby but claimed they had no medicine. By that point Katrina and I disregarded him and went to the medical center on our own. That is the flip side of the absence of law suite liabilities, that tour guides are free to try to inhibit you seeking medical help upon injury if it means they will get home to their family 15 minutes later than planned. My hand was swollen and losing motion... a problem that would later give me reason to get to know the Central American medical system. This exploration started with a visit to a Mayan doctor out the back of a corner boutique who charged 80 cents for a visit and ended at a Catholic charity medical clinic. It turns out it was never fractured, and after some proper medicine it has healed almost completely.
I am now in Utila, Honduras. I became a certified scuba diver yesterday, wohoo! I was able to accomplish this despite unprecidented difficulty with compas navigation, and a strange tendency to buoy to the surface accidentally, which fortunately I didn't do on the final course dive. I was able to avoid my instructor getting overly frustrated with me by catching onto other skills a bit quicker than normal. I have been learning one on one, because the only other girl who signed up for the same time slot didn't made it out of the bars on time to make it to any of the classes. This made the coursework somewhat boring but meant I could go through the water skills really quickly and was able to do the dives with just myself and the instructor. I have been able to see a number of rarer animals over the last couple days, which my instructor has been bragging about to the other dive masters (so I know I have been unusually fortunate...).
These animals include an octopus, a sea turtle, squid, and white tipped oceanic shark and a whale shark. The latter two were seen from the boat, but they came right up to us! I have been promised sea horses this afternoon....
That's all for now folks, more to come!
Chansonette
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