Traveling Applejax

So we´re about to leave Guatemala — this is the eve of our departure. It´s been fantastic, and I highly recommend it to anyone (especially Tikal, which was my favorite spot). Tomorrow we cross into Honduras where we plan to do some scuba diving, river rafting, and (surprise, surprise!) biking. Who knows how things will work out though, so I´ll try not to get ahead of myself.

Today we opted for a bus journey since we didn´t have any info about the road between Jutiapa and Chiquimula. It looked to be a two-day journey by bike without any good sleeping spots, so we cheated. Didn´t work out quite as planned though. As you may have already realized, the town we´re in tonight (Chiquimula) looks and sounds a lot like the town we were in a couple of nights ago (Chiquimulilla). The people running the buses don´t deal in fine distinctions, so despite the fact that we repeated our intended destination several times, we found ourselves trapped on a bus heading back the way that we had biked yesterday. We went about an hour in the wrong direction before we got to a town large enough to have a bus terminal of sorts. We jumped off the wrong-way bus there and boarded a new bus (much more crowded) for Ipala. Ipala, of course, was not our destination, but it was the closest we could get after having gone an hour in the opposite direction. We switched to a minibus in Ipala and eventually made it to Chiquimula. *Sigh*

Chiquimula is pretty close to the Honduras border, so we might just bike ourselves across tomorrow. This morning I was ready for a day or two off my bike seat, but after our bus fiasco I´m perfectly happy to pedal my way.

Here are a few more pics from the past couple of weeks:

A hazy volcano shot at Lago de Atitlan. I like the way the leaves frame the volcano in the background.

I´m a big fan of the dock shots, too.

Here´s a funky tree on the lake.

A cute boat on Lago de Atitlan. Initially we were disappointed by the abundance of motorized boats and giant houseboats, but apparently some of the locals still paddle themselves around.

This is one of those monkey men we saw in Santiago-whatever a while back. I didn´t have a good pic before, but Mike busted out Photoshop and zoomed in to give you this image. I´m not really sure what the story is, but there were other people in similar costumes with people masks on. The people masks looked an awful lot like the Burger King guy in the TV commercials. I think they were supposed to be conquistadors, but don´t quote me on that.

My next blog should come to you from somewhere in Honduras; I hope you´re as excited as I am. Don´t forget to put in your guesses for the latest poll, trivia question, and Jeopardy game. Also, don´t forget about our “Travel Map” linked to the left. Google Earth is pretty awesome and you can kind of make out some of the mountains we´ve been torturing ourselves with. Our Guatemala travels look a little haphazard, but you can look to the key and my descriptions to see when we were where (Google apparently changed their symbology though, so don´t get thrown off by the different color bus symbols). Thanks to everyone who is troubling themselves to keep in touch with us and to keep up with our blog. We miss you!