Tikal

Sunday morning, we got up bright and early so we could hit the road at 5am.

Once we arrived at Tikal, we spent the next 4 hours walking around and climbing pyramids ... with our insane guide! Haha! Pretty sure we didn't learn anything about the ruins ... at all.

Our guide (whose name I can't remember) is a shaman. He had a strange way of guiding. He would say crazy things and then allow us absolutely no time to process them. For instance, he would say "the message of the Mayans and the message of Jesus Christ are the same. Okay let's go over here." Or, "inside this ring of pyramids is where the Mayans contacted extraterrestrials. Okay, let's walk toward this temple." Or, "many cultures have misappropriated the symbols of the Mayans - for example, the Jews stole the Star of David from the Mayans. On our left, we can see a sweat lodge."

I asked him how he became a shaman. Evidently you're trained by other shamans to meditate and achieve astral projection. This involves smoking a lot of pot, doing mushrooms, and licking toads. Not joking! He told me this - there are witnesses!

He informed us that that being Mayan is not an ethnicity, but a state of mind. Evidently, according to our guide, Mayans are responsible for most of mankind's ingenuity. He gave them credit for soooo many things! It was ridiculous! At one point, I could've sworn I heard him mention the large hadron collider! When I asked what he believed caused the downfall of the Mayan culture, he informed me that he believes in the disappearance of the Mayans. He went on to elucidate that the disappearance of the Mayans is akin to the rapture talked about in the Bible ...

I'm pretty sure we didn't learn anything ... anything that's true, anyway. But he was super entertaining!

The ruins themselves were pretty cool. Honestly, I wasn't too excited to see them. I've seen a lot of ruins in Mexico, and after awhile all these pyramids start to look the same. But there were some good views - especially from the top of temple four. Our guide told us that George Lucas did a little bit of filming from up there for one of the Star Wars movies. As soon as he said that, I thought to myself "yeah, this does look a lot like the opening shot of Yavin IV in A New Hope. And then I felt the appropriate amount of shame for being such a huge nerd - haha! But according to Wikipedia, this is true! So I guess we did learn one true thing ...

We also saw a decent amount of wildlife - these things that are kinda like raccoons, some spider monkeys, a fox, a howler monkey, and a tarantula.

After we left Tikal, the van dropped off Erin and I at a crossroads about an hour south of the ruins. We said good-bye and waited in the rain for a bus to Belize!

We flagged down a passing van and rode for an hour or two over intermittently paved roads to the border! When we arrived in Melchor de Mencos (the last Guatemalan town on the road to Belize) we tramped through the pouring rain across the border. The border crossing was quick and easy, and on the other side we caught a cab to San Ignacio. Once there, we took a bus to Belmopan (Belize's capital) and then another bus to Dangriga on the the coast.

We were both really surprised by how different Belize is from Guatemala - the differences were apparent immediately after we crossed the border! The houses were different, the people were different - even the chicken buses were different!

Every Belizean speaks English ... kind of. it's a very Jamaican sounding English and is difficult to understand. Most of the Belizean's we met were very friendly and very talkative. We arrived in Dangriga after dark and were directed by a random guy on a street corner to Rudy's ... which we later found out is actually Ruthie's - the accent was responsible for the misunderstanding. Ruthie is an older lady who has owns a few cabanas on the beach.

Before turning in for the night, we took a stroll through the city to find a restaurant. But evidently on Sundays Belizean restaurants and stores are all closed. The only restaurants that were open were Chinese. There are a surprising number of Chinese people in Belize.

Before bed, we sat on the beach and chatted with another guy who was staying at Ruthie's - Clayton (he goes by "Boya"), a Bahamanian guy who lives in Atlanta.