Belize, Guatemala and El Salvador

Last year in November and December I spent 3 weeks in Central America, visiting Belize, Guatemala and El Salvador. I didn't have the energy to write a full blog about this trip back then, but based on the fragments of my travel diaries and my photos I still put together a post about this trip. I hope you will enjoy reading it.

Part 1: Belize

I have always wanted to visit the Caribbean. However, I made a promise to myself that I would go there for the first time on my honeymoon. On this trip I had the opportunity to visit a Caribbean island without cheating on my promise. I started my trip on a Belizean island called San Pedro, which is also known as La Isla Bonita. And yes, the song by Madonna is about this island. It took me more than 30 hours to get here, but it was worth it.

The island itself is quite crowded. It used to have big beaches but now the nice beaches are gone and replaced by beach resorts. It's still nice to make a seaside walk though.

I was staying in a great hostel with a rooftop terrace with hammocks. It was quite nice to lay in one and have a view like this:

Notice the shape of the palm trees: in the months before I arrived it has been hurricane season and you can see how the wind affects the growth of the trees. Also notice the Christmas tree in the background.

I also went on a boat excursion to go scuba diving. After some initial problems, I finally pushed myself over the mental threshold to just put my face underwater  and a whole new world opened up for me. The coral was absolutely amazing, one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. I can really recommend to go scuba diving in this area, the water is very clear and the coral is amazing.

After two days in San Pedro I headed back to the mainland again. I went to San Ignacio, a small town inland from where you can visit the holy caves of Actun Tunichil Muknal (or as everybody calls it: ATM). The place is really in the middle of nowhere, but it is also a must-see. The hike to the cave is pretty cool (you have to pass through the jungle where you need to cross a river twice). The caves themselves are a must-see: they are partly underwater, so again you need to walk through the water or sometimes the water is so deep that you need to swim. How often do you get to swim inside a cave? Very deep inside the cave there are also some Mayan artifacts and a skeleton of a human sacrifice that was made 1000 years ago. Sadly you are not allowed to take any photos in the cave, because some tourist dropped his camera on the skull of the 1000 years old skeleton and broke it. So I can't share any pictures with you, but as mentioned before: if you ever get to visit Belize, this is a must-see destination!

Part 2: Guatemala

From Western Belize it's only a short way towards Guatemala. I went on the road together with 2 Germans who I met in the hostel in San Ignacio and we decided to not take the easy way to the big city but head directly to the Tikal National Park. It was a bit of a struggle to get there because we had to change minibuses in the middle of nowhere. We needed to wait a long time for the bus, but luckily we found a small restaurant (that was pretty much a big room next to the house of the lady who owned it) where we could eat some homemade food. There was no menu, only a lady mentioning all the dishes she could make out of the top of her head in fast-spoken Spanish, but in the end we ate a good meal there. We were in Tikal in the early afternoon and had just enough time to visit the ruins and watch the sunset from the highest point of the national park. It was a beautiful sight, with nothing but jungle and a few ruins as far as the eye can see. Below an impression of the Mayan ruins in Tikal.

After a short stop in Flores I headed down to Antigua. Antigua is lovely colonial town that used to be the capital city of Guatemala, but after a series of earthquakes the capital city was moved to a different location. As a consequence, Antigua is now a small town with lots of history and a backpacker paradise. It is also home to the one of the best hostels I have ever been to: Hostel Matiox. The place really felt like a home away from home and the set-up with a patio makes it an ideal place to meet other backpackers. I also went to a place called San Pedro La Laguna for a few days and met some nice people there. This place has a nice lake and some volcanoes around it. I also went hiking on a volcano. Below are the photos of the main square in Antigua, the view on a volcano we got during the hike and me making marshmallows on dried lava, using the heat from mother earth.

Part 3: El Salvador

The final stop in my trip is the relatively unknown and not at all touristic El Salvador. According to some statistics, El Salvador is one of the most dangerous countries in the world. I knew it was the murder capital of the world before I got there. It's quite funny that after I got home I read a news article that in January there had been at day without murders in El Salvador for the first time since forever. My friends and family made fun of me for going to such a dangerous country, but I knew better. Most of the violence in El Salvador is gang-related. As long as you stay away from "bad" neighborhoods it's totally safe for tourists to travel around here. Although due to the lack of touristic infrastructure it can be somewhat difficult to navigate sometimes, as I will show with an example in a minute.

I started off my stay in this country with a day at the beach. It had been a personal goal this trip to travel from the eastern side of the Central American continent (the Caribbean Sea) to the western side (the Pacific Ocean) and to "set foot" in both waters. I visited a little surfers' paradise called El Tunco. The facilities for tourists there are quite poor and I was the only person staying at my hostel (which was also a bit outside El Tunco and owned by an old man who spoke no English at all - very convenient), but the beach was nice and I did meet some people from other hostels there. Probably the waves too, but I wouldn't know since I am not a "surfer dude". :D Below an impression of what a Salvadorean beach resort looks like:

Next up was the capital: San Salvador. Thanks to a couple of Americans it was quite easy for me to find the right bus to my hostel after I arrived there, but in general it's quite difficult for a person who doesn't speak Spanish to get around here. As usual, I went everywhere using local public transportation. But when you are on the way back to your hostel outside the city center, stuck in traffic in a minibus and the bus driver starts to take a detour to avoid the traffic jam, you lose all sense of where you are and how far away the neighborhood of your hostel still is. Then when you ask in your best Spanish to the person next to you if you need to get off soon. This person seems to indicate you need to stay seated but you don't understand a word he is saying, so you stay seated. He keeps making the same movement to stay seated with his hand upon your next requests and seems to understand your destination, so you stay seated. However, when he gets off and a new person takes his seat, it turns out that you are already waaay past your destination and even in another village by then. Something like this happened to me only once before in Moldova (another country that is not very tourist-oriented), but just like that time with the help from some helpful locals I found a bus that was heading back to the city. And there was even someone who did speak English on this bus, so this time I got very clear instruction about where I needed to get off and how I should walk from there back to my hostel.

The next day I felt forced to challenge myself again and went to Suchitoto by bus. Again it's not easy to find the right bus. I had to go to a big bus station at the other end of town. But when I got there, I got the impression that the location where you need to wait for this long-distance bus changes every week, as even people who spoke some English gave me different locations about where I should wait. Two people told me I should not wait at the bus station, but at the side of the road and indeed: after 10 minutes a minibus was passing by with the right number on it and I got onto the bus to Suchitoto. Suchitoto is... not the most lively city I have ever been to, but it was a nice change of pace after the hectic capital city. And it was a good place to sit and relax in the sun one last time, as I knew the next day I would be leaving to the European winter again.

The way home...

For my flight back I was a bit in trouble due to a relatively short layover at Atlanta and a delayed flight from San Salvador. I didn't want to miss my connection because that would mean at least a 12 hour delay, so I arranged with a friendly flight attendant that I could sit on an empty seat just behind business class before landing and rushed through all the security stations in just 30 minutes which must be a new record. When I arrived at the gate for the flight to Amsterdam there was almost nobody left, but I made it just before the final boarding call. My boarding pass was denied though, so I had to go to the lady behind a computer. She looked at me as if she saw a ghost and said to me in a way only fat middle-aged African American women can say it: "Whááát?!? Lawrence? From San Salvador? Maaan, they thought you weren't gonna make it so they gave away yo' seat to somebody else!". The lady - just a skinny white woman with blonde hair by the way - gave me a new seat and I asked if my luggage would be on this plane too. The lady - who in my memory will slowly be transforming into an actual African American woman anyway - laughed hard and said "darlin', yo' luggage got here waaay before you did. It caim on wheeeels.".

With a smile she checked me in and I was on my way back to the Netherlands.