In personal terms I'd say that the Guatemala honeymoon is very much over. I'm increasingly fed up with working a six day week with no scope for travel, not being able to learn Spanish as I'm teaching the whole time and being too tired at the end of the week to do anything interesting. My other problem is that there is relatively little to actually do here. The city is a fascinating place to live for about 6 months, after which it becomes very, very boring. The problem is that everyone is terrified of each other and so there is little social scene in the city. Any that there is lacks any kind of cultural drive and usually tends towards drinking over-priced under-flavoured beer in completely soulless bars. I am though striving to find something, anything more interesting to do with the little free time I have.
In terms of plans, I would like to continue to teach English abroad and work on my Spanish. However, with few savings it looks like this is going to be a difficult ask. Thus, I'm hoping to score a job in Korea or China, with paid flights and accomodation and frankly a much better wage than the one I currently earn. At the moment I'm hoping to leave in November but we'll see. I do need to start looking now, and I've earmarked most of today to do some applications.
To hark back to happier times, I've posted some photos of a trip i made back in April. This was the last call on my Semana Santa tour and came as something of a surprise. I had intended to just get the bus back from Coban, but a last minute change of plans meant that Bryant was driving back to the city. We decided that in the interests of pushing some eco-tourism style stuff, we should check out one of the local attractions: a little known waterfall at a small village in the mountains called San Rafael Chilasco.
Getting there is not easy. You turn off the Coban highway at km125 and follow a twisting dirt track about 15km as it winds up into the mountains. It's worth it for the drive alone as you rise further up above the valley around some potentially fatal corners. When you finally reach the top you are greeted by the local tourism committee, to whom you pay an entrance fee and hire a guide. We actually ended up with two guides for the price of one, as the girls we were assigned's brother jumped in too. We drove another kilometer to the top of the trail and set off into the jungle.
It's not an easy hike to the waterfall, as it involves a steep descent on muddy paths down hte side of the valley. The jungle is incredible though, with giant ferns making it seem like you've regressed to prehistoric times. It's not the safest place in the world though; on walking past a section where a landslide had previously wiped out the path and a great swathe of jungle below it, we asked our guide how long ago had it happened? "About 15 days," came the reply. It was about this time we started to be able to hear the distinctive roar of a lot of water falling a long way. Rounding a corner of the path we were greeted by the sight of a white torrent plunging about a hundred metres into the jungle. It looked a bit like this:
We walked on for another twenty minutes and finally reached the bottom of the waterfall. despite our guides advising us not to we went over to the bottom of it. Only then do you realise quite how powerful and quite how loud it is. You really can't hear much but you can get some awesome photos like this:
It was a bit cold and we were underprepared so we didn't try swimming, but the pool under the waterfall is quite calm so it would certainly be possible. Instead we took some more photos with our guides and then headed off to the other waterfall.
The other waterfall is less spectacular in that it has less water, but is much more serene. This is another good place for a swim or simply clambering about on tree roots about a drop of about 50m so you can take photos like this. How neither Bryant nor I died taking this I'll never know.
Having squeezed the last battery life out of my camera we decided that we'd better get back and get on our way. We didn't quite manage it though, as we decided to stop for lunch in the village as well, and ended up hanging around and chatting to the locals for quite a long time. It was three in the afternoon when we finally got back on the road, about three hours later than intended. Both of us agreed it was a thouroughly worthwhile day though, and now I have a tracing of Winnie the Pooh given to me by a little girl in the village. I just have time to post up one more picture of Bryant posing with our guides...
...and then I'm off. I have lots of photos and some time today, so expect more very soon.
