Ruins and things....

The past week we've been hitting a ton of the Mayan sites as the time is coming where we will now longer be residing in Maya country. We will miss it. Uxmal, Kabah and Dzibilchaltun. I don't have pictures from Dzibilchaltun, but you can google it if you'd like. Uxmal (left) and Kabah (right) were great, here is what they looked like.

We headed on up to Merida, a pretty old city with some cool building and history. And the ruins of Dzibilchaltun just north of it, which we don't have pictures of. We decided to buy a small hot plate and a pot, which has already payed for itself in the first week. I decided the dollar a day for coffee in the shops was too much, it´s home made coffee from now on. And also it´s surprisingly difficult to find a decent cup of coffee here in the first place.

We took an overnight bus out of Merida and on down to Chetumal on the Mexican/Belizean border, crossed, and then headed to San Ignacio on the western side of Belize. The plan was to visit some of the ruins of Xuanantunich, and then head south down the coast and take a ferry back into Guatemala. Then we noticed that the immigration officer for some unknown reason only gave us a 2 day entry visa and we nixed that idea. Which was fine with us as Belize is the most expensive country on our whole trip, doesn´t even feel like latin America (English is the 1st language), is full of tourists and feels pretty much like a run down Florida. Not into it.

So out of Belize we went and on into Guatemala, again. I look forward to the days ahead of fewer border crossings! They are coming. I believe this was our 7th border crossing. It´s fairly easy on the paperwork/official end of it, it´s just the bombardment of people on both sides of the border asking if you want a taxi, food, gum, trying to change money, pretty much just bothering you in general, all the while you are fumbling with your passport, currency, bags and paperwork. It´s not that bad, but not that good either. People just hang out on both sides of the border, just sitting there staring, and it doesn´t seem like they do much of anything else. Ever.

A couple of hours later we ended up in Dolores, Guatemala. There is an archeaological site there that houses the 2nd largest stela (a tall carved stone) in Guatemala. We got in kinda late and didn´t have much options on lodging and ended up staying in a room that had about an inch of standing water on the concrete floor. It wasn´t quite enough to creep over the top of the sole of our sandals, but almost. After Rachel was done using the restroom the lady handed her a bucket of water, Rachel wasn´t quite sure what she was supposed to do with it, and neither was I. I think it was to flush the toilet but Rachel dipped her hands into it instead, for some reason.