Greetings from Guatemala

A friend of mine has a blog on this same site that I follow she is a truck driver and does a real good job of keeping it updated. I am going to attempt the same thing here, although I have never done a blog before. We have been in Guatemala for a week now, and I can verify that Guatemala knows how to rain. I am posting this at midnight on Monday the 21st of March, couldn't sleep so thought I would try to get this going. May not have pics for a little bit, but they will arrive. Maybe I can start by going backwards in time. This past weekend was quite the little adventure. After 4 days of fits and starts at the job site (rain slowed us down or kept us away almost every day) we left Saturday morning for Livingston, attainable only by boat as no roads go into or out of that town, to my So, our fealess leader, Laura, who puts together Really Good Trips (Yeah, You, Laura, You Go Girl)had sered passage for our group of 26 or so on a tour boat out or Puerto Barrios, Teacher Tours I think it is called. We made that boat full, took off across the bay and landed in near Livingston a half hour later, and I cannot remember the name of the hotel on the beach that we landed. It was a rustic location, with various huts and buildings that contained rooms of varying watertightness, all grass roofed, and very simple. On the beach was the restaurant, again very simple and rustic, but the breakfast Sunday morning was great, and the best tasting coffe that I had yet in Guatemala.
After checking in and getting roomed up, we got back in the boat for a fairly fabulous tour up the Rio Dulce river, through El Golfete, to the town of Rio Dulce. Think Mosqito Coast, maybe Apocalypse Now, or any other jungle river movie you have seen. This was a pretty cool ride through some real thick jungle, a protected area that you could feel was just crawling with life, in the water and on the shore and beyond. Well, we got back from that trip just as dark was setting in in Livingston, disembarked and made arrangements for Ricardo to pick us up again at 10:30 the nerxt morning. Of to tour Livingston, which to my mind had the best roads and most orderly appearance of anyplace I had seen yet in Guatemala. It is a Garifuna town to a great degree, descendants of shipwrecked slaves, plus the Mayan descendents and the Creole Guatemalan culture. An iconic hithchikers destination I suppose, Ricardo (our skipper) vividly described the expressive dance and music of the Garifuno, but we did not see that this Saturday night. The rain began, like we don't often see in the northern climes, and we headed back to the restaurant where most of us tried the heralded Tapata, a Garifuna tradition. More on that later. Then, it was how to get back to the hotel. Well, load half of us into an old pickup with a ladder rack on the back, drive the wrong way for half an hour till the streetlights are no more and the road turns to mud and eventually to a trail, where we are met by an emissary with a flashlight from the hotel on the beach, and we follow a path along the beach for a mile or so till we get to the lodge. These words do not adequately describe that trip, I will spend some time editing later, I hope the pics i post can help do it justice. That night, the rain came down fiercely, but the couple of times I woke up it just put me back to sleep and I slept like a baby for 9 hours or so, not my usual habit. Others were not so lucky, disturbed by insects or being directly under too many leaks. The morning dawned with some pretty stiff winds kicking up some pretty good surf under some pretty wet skys, as that pattern continued for a couple of hours after morning light, we wondered of Ricardo would be able to make it across the bay to pick us up as scheduled. All in all, an adventurous little trip to Livingston, a great time on the boat, nobody got sick, and we did get back to Puerto Barrios Sunday afternoon.