Bats Amazing

Aerial view of Semuc Champey pools from the look out
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From Panajachel we needed to head north to Coban. Unfortunately this was not a straight forward journey, all tourist buses prefer to go east towards Guatemala City and then north from here to use the better roads. Added to this was the fact that many agencies in Panajachel have got together to form a cartel whereby they tell you to use their services at a highly extorted rate or risk either your safety or belongings on other cheaper transportation.

Not wanting to give our money away so easily we searched for another option and found it in the form of a rogue competitor charging half the price of the others. The journey involved a change in both Antigua and Guatemala City, the latter a place we had tried to avoid seeing again, especially on buses. But at 21 dollars instead of 42 we snapped it up hoping to prove the other agencies wrong.

It was pitch black as they did this at speed, only the flash of someones camera indicating how close they were to us

The water gushing beneath
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All went well to begin with as our backpacks were thrown onto the roof of the mini-bus. "Are you going to cover the roof?" I asked. "Yeeeas" came the slightly hesitant reply. Sure enough as we aproached the bus terminal in Guatemala City it started to pour down and we got out of the bus to find our backpacks up on the roof completely soaked.

In Guatemala City we transferred from our mini-bus to what we had been assured would be a safe-ish tourist bus to take us all the way to Coban. We were given our tickets and ushered off towards the buses as our mini-bus driver sped off. We turned the corner to see that there was no tourist bus, it would be a local bus for us for the next 5 hours. As the bus crawled out of Guatemala City I kept an eye on all of our belongings incase we had any light fingered latinos on board and we just hoped we wouldn't get to experience an armed robbery first hand.

Shannyn in the pools
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Coban, which we arrived at safely, is a nice little town to visit. Most tourists arrive here to visit the pools and caves nearby. We spent a day in the town itself and it was interesting to see the colourful locals going about their everyday lives. This is the only town we visited in Guatemala yet to be heavily diluted by tourism as most backpackers prefer staying in a lodge 60km down the road.

On our second day here we took a trip out to Semuc Champey, famous for its 300m long natural limestone bridge with a torrent of water gushing under it while a stepped series of beautiful pools sits on top, ideal for swimming in. A steep 30 minute hike to the viewpoint gave us a perfect aerial look at the pools and down at the bottom we were able to cool off for a couple of hours in them. The water flowing underneath is fast and very dangerous, 3 tourists have been killed here in the past as they got a little too close to the edge for a better view. I guess they got quite a good view in the end.

Pools close up
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After this we went to the Grutas de Lanquin (caves) in nearby Lanquin. To be honest these looked fairly ordinary as caves go but at around 6pm we were treated to an amazing display of flying by the estimated 2 million bats that fly out of the caves every night as the sun goes down. We were sat at the entrance to the caves and couldn't believe the amount of bats flying around us and even straight at us, but thankfully never hitting us. It was pitch black as they did this at speed, only the flash of someones camera indicating how close they were to us. Half an hour or so in and they were just everywhere, all around us. We had braved it enough and so left them to it. An amazing sight.

People getting a bit too close to death
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On our return to Coban we were tired and hungry, we had seen an advert for Domino´s Pizza home delivery which seemed like the ideal solution. As most of you are aware nowadays you need to give an address and corresponding phone number when you place your order over the phone - Guatemala is no exception. The hotel "apparently" didn´t have a phone, so I had to walk to a local grocery store to use their phone. This meant I would also need to get the pizza delivered to the store. There was an added problem that I didn´t have a menu with me and my Spanish wasn´t good enough for a conversation of this magnitude. I had to persuade the old lady in the store to be the go-between as I tried to explain in Spanglish what we wanted. I then had to go back to the store 20 minutes later to pick up the order - not quite the smooth home delivery we had wanted but it got to us in the end.

More pools close up
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Gary