After six and a half months on the road Françoise has come up with her top three issues. The first is the heat. It is incredibly hard to travel on the bike when its 40°C, but some days we simply have to. Her second issue is speed humps. They work, in as much as they slow us down significantly. Some of them are quite viscious and we do bottom out occasionally. Her third is the chairs in restaurants. After a hard day on the bike the last thing we want is a hard wooden chair in a restaurant. So restaurants are now chosen in function of their chair seat cushions.
Our previous stop in Guatemala was Lago Atitlan and we learned more about it after we left. Prior to leaving, Paul shook the dust out of our shoe bag along with a scorpion - not sure how long he had been hitching a lift with us, but better he stayed at Lago Atitlan than in one of our shoes.
The plan was to ride to Semuc Champey which has some very interesting limestone karst features - which result in some lovely pools to hang around in. However with the heat and distance, in excess of 300km, we were not sure that we would make it in one day. And we didn't. Françoise counted 209 speed humps in the first part of the day and we decided we had to stop in Coban for the night. We knew, and know, nothing about Coban because all we did was eat and sleep there, leaving us a short journey the following day. Luckily. The approach to the hotel next morning was beyond challenging for Paul and he had to be shown an alternative approach with less rock, gravel and steep descent. He got a quad bike ride out of it to ensure we could actually get to the hotel. If we had come across the initial access tired and in the dark the previous day...
Health and safety is always prevalent in our minds, but school transport seems to have slightly different criteria here...
We had an organised tour to Semuc the following day. What we hadn't bargained for was that transport there meant standing up in the back of a pick-up truck. We were then taken on a wet caving expedition followed by a swim out under a waterfall and finally tubing down a river for lunch. Paul survived despite his (lack of) swimming skills. Before you could enjoy the pools we had to hike up a steep 500m hill. Not sure how our Travel Insurance would have viewed the transport arrangements. Having eaten lunch, we then became the lunch of the small fishes who nibbled our feet and legs whilst we were in the pools. And, if you wanted a beer at any time, there was always a local ready to jump out from nowhere to sell you one - even when they were fully clothed and you were tubing down the river. Quite a memorable day really.
One of the issues in these remote areas is non-guaranteed electricity and water. One of the members of staff at the hotel told us that he had not had piped wafer for three months. Water is often delivered in big blue containers on pickup trucks and siphoned out. The hotel employee told us he went and washed himself in the river every day. The bed linen at the hotel was washed by hand by a lady who came in every other day. And we panicked like mad when the electricity, and A/C went off one night... (but it did come back on after 30 mins).
We headed north next to Flores as a base to visit the Mayan ruins of Tikal. It was a very tough day, Francoise struggled; seven hours on the bike for 340km with little/no opportunity to find accommodation en route. The following day was a very welcomed 'nothing' day; nothing except cake and coffee.
Time to visit the Maya site of Tikal which had some truly massive structures. The vast majority of the site is still hidden in the jungle and ground penetrative radar has found another 5,000 structures hidden under soil mounds with trees growing out of them - not all of the hidden ones will be 70m tall though. It is currently estimated that there could well have been 250,000 people here in Mayan times before the site was abandoned in around 900AD. The structures are solid and were covered with stucco plaster relief descriptions which the jungle has had the better of. The structures served as platforms for the rulers to give their state of the nation addresses as well as elevating them nearer to the Sun God. A well known film uses a temple above trees shot.
The current hypothesis as to why the site was abandoned is drought caused by severe deforestation. Not only did the growing population need water, but their agriculture which was needed to feed the growing population also needed water. To make the lime cement necessary for the stucco plaster reliefs, a massive amount of timber had to be burnt and when the forests ran out of timber, the rain stopped. The Mayans then moved to the Lago Atitlan area where the majority of the current population are of Mayan descent and speak various Mayan dialects. After that, the Mayans stopped building mega structures; lesson learnt. Most of their leaders were executed one way or another for not having delivered on their promises. One of our guides called it the birth of politics...
