el mirador

This is Chapter Ten of the El Mirador Odyssey, and since it only took Odysseus ten years to get home, this will be the last one. If you’re just arriving … Read more

Kris and I got up early the next morning, mostly courtesy of a wild turkey who was squawking his way back and forth across the clearing. They really do make a sound that could be called a “gobble,” by the way.

This is part eight of the El Mirador Odyssey. There are links to parts one through seven at the bottom of this post, if you want to back up and … Read more

I was perhaps being a little dramatic when I ended the last episode of the Saga of El Mirador with “Next Episode: Bees!” as if we we’re going to be attacked by Killer Central American Bees.

So Eric and I walked along toward El Mirador. And except for constantly hiking up my pants which were being pulled down by the water bladder, things were going much better. Soon after he relieved me of my camera bag, the path became a lot smoother–packed soil strewn with leaves mostly.

As I was staggering in the heat toward El Mirador, I thought back to a couple of hours earlier when Maria had stopped us all about ten minutes into the walk. She had gathered us in a circle, asked us all to bow our heads, and then offered a rather long prayer to Jesus to protect us and guide us in our walk into the jungle.

“Jesus?” I thought at the time. “I have to rely on Jesus? I thought that’s what Maria and Eric were for.”

I’ve been dreading writing installment four of My Death March to El Mirador almost as much as I dreaded actually doing it.

In general, we love what we’re doing, and don’t mind so much the “travel days” when we actually have to schlep bags to a train station or airport and give up the comfort of a hotel room for the discomfort of actually moving.

We were finally on the road, eggs and all, although I didn’t have much faith that the eggs would actually make it to Carmelita.

In Mexico and Guatemala there are almost no traffic cops. There aren’t many traffic signs either. What both countries do have in abundance, though, is speed bumps. And, by speed bumps, I mean hard, sharp concrete tank traps at seemingly random spots in the highway where somebody, for some reason, wants you to slow down.

After our three-day visit to Tikal we were taken by another taxi Thursday afternoon to a hotel in Flores, where we would be picked up for the van ride to Carmelita and our jungle adventure.
We knew we were getting up early the next morning for our 5 a.m. pickup so we decided to eat an early supper and go to bed to catch up on all that important stuff we do when we have an internet connection. Facebook and Twitter own us, basically.

If you don’t make a colossal screw up now and then, you’re not trying hard enough. There are a lot of smart people who have said something to that effect. … Read more