Guatemala: Guat are you looking at?

After cruising through 5 countries in 3 weeks our tour came to an end in Antigua, Guatemala. We spent a few days in Antigua with a little posse that was left over from the tour and generally just bummed around the awesome little town that is Antigua for a few days.

Some of the locals in Antigua doing their thing - I think they are actually huddled around a mobile phone...

Tom with Michelle and Laura overlooking Antigua

Once we had recharged the batteries a little bit it was time for us to head off to San Pedro La Laguna, a tiny little town full of hippies, cheap beer and the main reason we were there - Spanish Schools. After an absolutely horrendous bus trip - the term "bus" gets thrown around a lot in Central America, they are more a kind of glorified van but exceptionally uncomfortable and usually quite late - we made it to the home of our host family for the week, where we met Elsa, Bartolo, Juantia and Bartolito. The next day we began our week of Spanish School with our teacher, Maria, who was not only an excellent teacher but also showed an insane amount of patience throughout the week.

KG with our awesome Spanish teacher, Maria

Katherine with our host family (L to R: Else, Bartolito, Bartolo and Juanita)

Tom with the host family - Bartolito was quite the fan of "Thor"

We settled in to a pretty cruisy routine in San Pedro, 5 hours of school, lunch followed by a  much needed nap (learning is hard) and then we would head down to the school again where WE would teach English... The process started by someone at our school asking if we would like to volunteer at a local school, we agreed and met a a guy at the school who spoke absolutely no English and whilst we were using our extremely limited Spanish, he told us to wait a moment and returned with 3 kids and then promptly left - only after telling us, "Just teach them some English." So we did. We tackled the tough topics of colours, days of the week, body parts and animals - the kids were incredible and spoke better English than Tom and we think they taught us more Spanish than we taught them English. Most of our lessons just ended up with us playing Go Fish with them for 20 minutes!

Katherine with her pupils for the day, Estrella, Marteo and Phillipe

Some of the in depth English we taught the kids

Katherine making a chatterbox for her school kids 

We had an incredible time in San Pedro learning Spanish and living with our host family, some of the highlights including Tom breaking a chair at school using nothing but his massive girth, Katherine spewing in front of some young children enjoying a horse back ride thanks to some hidden avocado in her dinner the night before, Barolito (the son of our host family) introducing Tom to everyone as Thor and the fact that we could now hold a semi-reasonable conversation with people in Spanish!

Our next destination was a resort on the lake where we would spend 4 days, including our 1st wedding anniversary (take that Kim Kardashian you slag, you only managed 40 days!). Katherine was in charge of booking the resort and found us an awesome spot on the lake with an incredible view of the surrounding volcanoes, our own private villa known as the 'Zen Dome' - the place had everything - except for meat. Yes, that's right, it was a holistic resort that served only Vegan food (thank god they served beer). Despite Tom's persistent whinging and complaining he a) Did not die and b) Actually enjoyed the food they made. Our stay at TOSA La Laguna was incredible and is definitely going to make it tough to find something as good for our 2nd anniversary.

The giant mass in the back of the Tuk Tuk is actually Tom

TOSA La Laguna - our room is the yellow dome in the top right of the photo

It's a tough gig - KG relaxing on the patio of our resort

Tom relaxing on the patio...

Katherine reading A Sacred Union - a book by the hippies that owned the resort we were staying in

After 4 days of luxury it was back on the road for us in what we easily one of the worst travel days of our trip. Our journey started at 7 am with a boat ride from our resort to a small town where we jumped in the back of a ute with some locals and take us to a slightly larger town where we caught a 4 hour bus back to Antigua. After stopping in Antigua for 2 hours, giving Tom just enough time to eat a gigantic burger with extra bacon, we were back in another bus for 8 hours. We can comfortably say that this trip took 15 years of our lives, it was small, slow and the only word that can be used to describe the quality of overtaking in Guatemala is "seedy" - around corners, up hills, it doesn't matter - they overtake anyway and seeing as we were sitting right up the front with the driver, we had an amazing view of all of it unfolding. But finally we arrived in Lanquin, where we assumed our hostel was, only to be informed we had to spend another 45 minutes in the back of a ute... shattering! So at 11:30pm we had actually arrived at the place where our bed was, which ironically enough was called Utopia. After that god awful experience we were rewarded with a day at Semuc Champey, an amazing series of water pools in the middle of this epic valley - awesome place. After yet another shithouse bus trip we made it to Flores, where we visited the awesome Mayan ruins at Tikal.

The pools at Semuc Champey - amazing place!

Some huge pasty white thing Katherine saw splashing around in the water

Tom at the Tikal Mayan ruins

Katherine with one of the temples at Tikal

The next day we were up at 4 am and walking through the deserted streets of a small Guatemala town to catch yet another bus, this time it was a local bus as opposed to a tourist bus, meaning any semblance of safety is completely gone. We were sitting on the centre console of a bus next to the driver which had maybe 18 seats on it but held close to 35 people. The speedo, fuel and temperature gauges did not work and we were pulled over by the Police where for some reason, every person of the bus had to get us, except us and hand over some cash to the authorities, they must have been breaking the law... strange place Guatemala. But after 2 immigration stops, separated by a boat operated by a 9 year old child and another 4 hour bus ride we made it to Mexico!