Flores

Our first destination in Guatemala sounded pretty darn lovely from the offing. Flores is spectacularly located on an island in Lago de Peten Itza. Most of the hotels and restaurants are on the lakeside streets so unless you're quite unlucky you're bound to get a lakeside view, and we did. Its a beautiful little place, quite built up, but nicely done, where all the roads are haphazardly cobbled.


Lots of prettily painted buildings.








Clair particularly liked this one. I liked the fact that it seems to say it is the national institute of statistics, delegation department. Maybe not a lot gets done there then.


Clair also loved their phone boxes.


The Guatemalan people we met were hugely friendly and helpful. Having read through a brief history of the country on the bus over, it was quite astounding how totally upbeat and just getting on with things everybody was. According to the lonely planet Guatemala was recently rated the worst democracy in Latin America, and there is some stiff competition for that title.

In terms of what we're likely to encounter on our travels it is deemed one of the safer countries for tourism. The only directly noticeable difference to Mexico that we could see was the heavily armed guards at all cashpoints, and unique drive through banks for cash deposits, where you put your money in a little container and it gets sucked up a pipe into the bank! Neat idea!

Transport around the island of Flores and the small town that it is joined to it by a causeway is normally by tuktuk. I love these things having raced around Bangkok in them. Clair was not quite so keen initially.


This chap was a total legend who raced us around the island a couple of times whilst Clair's nails nearly pierced my thigh.


The village of San Miguel on the opposite side of the lake to Flores.


All around the island were these guys trying to get you to go for a lake tour on their lovely lanches.


Oh hi! A floating house to go with the floating hedge! Doesn't really look like the most practical shape for a boat. Clair was nearly beside herself after spotting this whilst I was out of our room. Apparently there was a chap playing the Marimba onboard and a fully licensed bar. Unfortunately we didn't get to go out on it.


We spotted tonnes more bizarre little lizardy fellas whilst chilling on the island. This guy was making funny little noises, and we noticed him inflating this very odd yellow air sac beneath him.


On our first evening, we watched a couple take a rented kayak out on the beach, and thought that looked like an ideally chilled activity for us two. So the next day we got ourselves a nice picnic together and hired it for a couple of hours before sundown.

All was going totally fine until we noticed the wind seemed to be picking up, and we looked behind us to notice that a vast thunderstorm had sort of crept up without either of us noticing. We decided that it would probably make sense to head back to shore. Unfortunately the wind had suddenly got to such a speed that 15 minutes of solid paddling had got us about 50 yards and we were still miles from where we really needed to be.

Just as the rain started to really hurl it down (massive drops that actually hurt when they hit you), we cut our losses and pegged it over to another tiny island in the middle of the lake. Luckily, the island was inhabited by an extremely cheerful and rather eccentric half-German Guatemalan whose family had owned it for the previous 50 years. He helped drag us up onto the jetty and we pegged it into his little house with his 2 very excited dogs.

It then transpired that he ran an (admittedly very rarely visited) private Museum of Mayan artifacts. He was eager to show us, and we soggily traipsed into an amazing Aladdin's cave of the stuff. He talked us through loads of the pieces, and then proceeded to get them out and actually let us feel some of them. It was utterly incredible to be touching these genuine artifacts. One of them was a 2500 year old obsidian axehead. Clair was immensely excited with all the touchy feelyness.

He then managed to somehow retrieve our kayak and helped us back into it and sent us on our way. What a total legend!

Here we are looking back at his island, with the storm in the distance.


Beautiful skies.


Looking back at Flores from the kayak.


'Stop leaning over or you'll tip us both in!'


Here's Clairy in the water after our kayaking escapade. It was beautifully warm (not suprising really as it was outrageously hot out of the water).


Thats our friend's little island again and a loverly sunset.