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Sorry guys... Well seeing as that didn't work I'll replace it with something that happened to me in Guatemala as I was travelling north on a second class bus filled only with locals winding its way through the mountains, to see Tikal, one of the most famous Mayan ruins. This also happened to be the only day since I have been travelling that I didn't speak a word of English all day. A Guatemalan man sat down next to me and asked me where I was from. When I replied Australia, he just looked blank. I said 'kangourou'? He shook his head. I tried, Thailand, Indonesia, China, Malaysia, and even Asia & Africa, again with no result. In the end I had to explain that it was basically on the other side of the world to Brazil... which made me realize that 500 years after Colombus discovered America, in at least one way nothing has changed! There are probably at least 1 billion people in the world who don't really know about much outside their own village... that thought opened my eyes. I guess it's one thing to know that in theory and another to experience it in reality! It was also interesting to hear my Guatemalan Spanish teacher in Antigua say that she felt lucky to live in Guatemala compared to somewhere like Africa. It really is all a matter of perspective!
Idle musings aside, it has been an interesting fortnight. I spent a week on Lago Atitlan burning through cash drinking alcohol at a hostel called La Iguana Perdida in Santa Cruz, where for the first time I found other Australians on this trip, and for the first time we outnumbered the Israelis (a rare experience when travelling through Central America.) There were 3 other girls from Melbourne and one guy from Perth, and it was actually great to hear the Australian accent after 5 months of travelling and I happily re-Australianized myself, since I had begun to refer to thongs as flip flops!! Londoners were even labelling me as 'that Danish girl from outside of Copenhagen' because they found it so hard to believe i was an Aussie. So on the lake me & the other Aussies got drunk at night-times, and jumped around listening to Machine Gun Fellatio and generally behaving like bogans, much to the disdain of civilized European types. We actually came at the right time to celebrate La Iguana's inaguaral annual Olympics, and I am proud to say the Aussies kicked everyone else's ass, taking home the most gold and I even got the gold medal for the Shuttle Shots (basically taking shots of vodka and running in between shots). As soon as I get the photos I will post one I have of me falling onto my ass off the podium as I was accepting the gold medal also.
From the Lake I went up to Flores where I met the Aussies again, and they FOMO'd me into going on a 3 day trek through the jungles of Northern Guatemala. I paid $95 USD for three days of hell struggling through mud infested monkey infested mosquito infested spider infested JUNGLE, i was sweaty, tired, scratched, muddy, dirty, rained on, sprayed on WAY too much 98% deet, in fact there was no opportunity for a shower the whole three days so we stunk like hell by the end, normal showers were replaced by DEET showers which didn't work at all to get rid of the mozzies, but made us sneeze heaps and smell real nice and probably gave us cancer to boot. I probably contracted malaria as well(i'll let you know in a month or so), and the food was godawful, noodles, pasta with cream, cornflakes, tuna sandwiches, no meat and no veggies. It was especially good for the person with wheat tolerance that was doing the trek. BUT it was all made worthwhile for one moment when on the second night we camped in this enchanted forest and just on twilight there were fireflies all around us... :P poetic. Apart from that we just told bad jokes to each other (well me & this israeli guy had all the bad and distasteful dead baby jokes) to help us get through the torrential rain that poured on us, the pain, mud, swamp and prickly trees (prickly trees like to grow in swamps and when you walk through and slip on the mud you get a handful of prickles in your hand, its sweet). We complained and swore a lot and nearly ran into a lot of spiders and three different types of poisonous snakes (I was glad I wasn't the tall guy in the group as he got all the sticky spiderwebs on his head), and finally got to Tikal where we were almost too tired to see the temples. The sad thing is the whole trek we missed out on seeing howler monkeys, they scream so loud you can hear them from 3 kilometres away, and apparently if you get close enough to them they will throw their own shit at you. We missed out on that, but we did get rained on with bat shit on the first night when we checked out a bat cave at twilight. The guide was something to gawk at in his own right, he was a Guatemalan who was born in the States, so he turned out to be the biggest gringo of all of us! He was a good guide, but insisted on 'burning' and 'cooking' us through the jungle 'you know what i mean? you see where i'm coming from?' as fast as he could go, so that we didn't really get to stop and see anything along the way, and even at one stage when I was about to faint on the road he insisted on running us at breakneck speed so that if anything had been seriously wrong with me I would have been left behind for dead. He also regaled us with stories of the last time he had smoked pot 'back in '83 at a Black Sabbath concert', and started singing Bon Jovi unrequested. At the end he also bragged to me he could have done the 3 day trek in 1 day and still do 60 pushups after it, when i challenged him on this he actually got down and gave me 10 just to prove his machismo! But he definitely made the whole trip memorable and apparently compared to a lot of the guides you can get in South America he was a dream. The last night it was heaven just getting back to the hostel, having a shower, ordering a double cuba libre and getting heller drunk after 3 days of an enforced lack of alcohol.
Well, I'm in Honduras now, I have no idea how I got here since I never intended to ever come here in my life, but it's beautiful anyway! I will post about this later...