Semuc Champey -> Antigua.

Fire, lava and really wild things.

Antigua. Fabled city of dreams, hehe. It used to be the capital city of Guatemala until some government big job got annoyed at the fact that his pens kept bouncing themselves off the table and his roof kept collapsing (Antigua is an earthquake and volcano paradise, you frequently see them skipping down the street together, merrily breaking things) When it got to much for the countries leaders they abandoned ship to the imaginatively named ‘Guatemala City’ (I kid you not) 100km further away from the shaky hotness.

I was impressed!

The city is built in the Central American colonial style, and if you don’t know what that means imagine the stereotypical Mexican style towns from Hollywood – ish. Someone goes to lengths to keep it that way too, they even drew up some new laws to that affect. You are NOT allowed overhanging street signs (which makes identifying shops a smidgen harder, as McDonalds doesn’t look a brick different from one of their high end jewelry stores when your standing down the street. Kinda nice that you have to actually draw level with an establishment to discover what wonders lie waiting to pounce their fantasticisms at you) All overhead power cables are now underground, and a few years back they even ripped up their smooth, modern tarmac surfaced roads… and re-cobbled them! Amazing town! I’m not sure of this is an official law as well, but it would definitely be a ‘guideline’ to have red tile roofs as well. At the very least your neighbours would look down upon you as if you had given the wrong address to the compost deliveryman, and he had deposited it on their doorstep instead.

We arrived early evening from Coban, and 1 and a half hours late for our briefing on the volcanoes we were climbing… whoops. The company we were doing it with was called OX (Outdoor Excursions) and, as predicted by Sean, didn’t care a fiddle we were late. It was run by some seriously cool people who greeted us warmly with exclamations of
‘Hey the Diablo Double duo! Glad you made it!’ (Diablo Double is the name of the tour we were doing)
I was quite surprised to find that not many people go for their bigger tours of 2 or 3 volcanoes; most people are content with one. How boring.

Was up at the crack of dawn the next day to get ready (actually that’s a lie, not even dawn is up that early) Downstairs we were given the five minute version of the briefing we missed the night before and were introduced to the group who were going up Volcan Acatenango with us. There was Chris & Matthew, Jordan & Leia, Amy & Arno, and Maeve representing America, France and Britain respectively. Our fabulous guide for the excursion was a cool character called Kevin who exulted in everything outdoors.

With everyone packed (and at least in my case, psyched) it was into the minibus which took us up to the starting point. While hanging about waiting to start there was a gentle rumble like a giant examining his fingernails and up from over Acatenangos ridge came a massive mushroom cloud of steam, ballooning into the blue. Acatenango itself isn’t active, but it’s sister volcano, Volcan Fuego, is. The two are joined by a ridge, which is maybe 1500m long, and their bulks overlap below that. First taste of the volcano action!

We began, and for the next 8 and a half hours I can only remember 2 flat sections and 1 downhill. It was grueling from the off. The first hour or so was up well trodden paths servicing the fields which line the lower part of the volcano. These were like mini gorges, worn deep by generations of footfalls and the occasional small river. As a surface to walk on the only thing which might have been worse was sheet ice. Instead we got billions of small pieces of pumice and volcanic rock, no bigger than half a centimetre, all of it VERY loose. It was the sort of surface that you take a massive metre long stride and end up a foot further on. Damn that stuff was slidy. As the farms petered out and progressed into cloud forest so did the trail improve in quality (and traction!) Before our transition from farm trail to cloud forest we ran into an elderly gentlemen in his 70’s who had been farming the land since he was a kid, and he walks up the paths that almost broke our groups spirit every single day (and highly likely in half the time…)

As we ascended through the cloud forest there were some truly epic cloudscapes to behold. For miles around the volcano it was clear but then the sky transformed into a tumult of writhing white and grey beings, twisting into one another in a dance of heavenly abandon. It felt constricting to not be able to fly…

Four hours after starting the slog we broke for lunch, which was heavily appreciated! 5 members of the group had a controlled collapse and fell asleep for an hour while I struggled through my irritatingly tasty sandwich (I had a stomach parasitey thingy and had ZERO appetite) The behemoths were hoisted onto our backs and we resumed the vertical trudge.

Three hours later, after some VICIOUS switchbacks in the trail (the sort which is only 5m long before it doubles back on itself, and so steep that when you’re one switchback higher than the bloke after you, you could quite easily step onto his head!) we reached… a ruddy false summit… Urgh that was disheartening. Walking over the smaller summit there was a small downhill section and then the actual slog up to the crater stretched out in front of us. Covering around an eighth of the slope was evidence from a previous eruption. A scar like gash had been opened in the side of the volcano with small fumaroles steaming away merrily near the base of it (guess an inactive volcano is never ‘really’ totally inactive)

By now our bodies were screaming a silent cry of anguish at being put through 7 and a half hours of switchback after endless slope after eternal tramping,

“Only about an hour, and hour and a half to the top guys!” Kevin merrily informed us.

…

“What! We can see the crater, can’t we?!?”
“Oooh, you’re in for a treat”

The crater lip was literally 500m horizontal distance, but a good 200-300m vertically. Plus it was all scree…

Urgh.

True to his word we flopped over the lip an hour and 10 minutes later and happily lay on the black volcanic pebbles breathing in the thin air and trying to shake the effects of the altitude from our confused brains (the summit is at 4000m, which I’m pretty sure is higher than I’ve ever been before (well except when I’m wrapped in a metal tube) and it was definitely the first time I’ve drawn a lungful of air and thought ‘Hey, that feels funny, and not the ha-ha kind of funny…’) And we had a whole night of that ahead of us.

After huffing and puffing the tents up we were presented with mugs of red wine, instructed to ‘Drink up, we’ve got 4 boxes to get through’ and directed to the edge of the crater where the sun would set. As it meandered its way down the sky towards the horizon and we drank our wine the heavens moved into a higher plane of colour. Tasty yellows gave way to ‘burn your eyebrows’ oranges, which were shoved rudely aside by an ‘eat your dog when you aren’t looking’ red. As the last vestiges of frozen blue seeped onto another plane, the neighbouring volcano Fuego (Spanch for fire) belched forth a towering plume of night black smoke and rumbled contentedly.

Having concluded it’s nightly art affair (well until the stars came out later on. Lets just say that the heavens at 4000m, with a crystal clear sky and less light pollution than a piece of onyx in a coal mine on the dark side of the moon are something spectacular to behold) Supper was a safe vegetarian curry followed with encouragement to drink more of the wine (which was refused by everyone as we had been pretty inundated by the potent mix of altitude and alcohol) The temperature was quickly dropping without el sol and we had a serious lack of decently warm clothing and so crawled into our sleeping bags and started failing to get to sleep.

My eventual sleep was truncated by Kevin calling us for sunrise and I don’t think I have ever been so confused in my life! I had 15 seconds of ‘Arg, where on earth am I? Why is it cold? What am I doing in a tent? Why is there a big man snoring next to me?’ Before my brain rebooted and reminded myself that I did in fact know the answers to all these questions.

Sunrise was just as stunning as sunset, with the added benefit of having enough light to see the volcanoes gently puffing away in the distance. Breakfast was eagerly consumed and then Kevin gave us a speech about descending the slopes,

‘Ok guys I’m going to show you the safest and easiest way to get down the scree. You’ll use less effort and are less likely to twist an ankle or something nasty like that’

He then promptly turned around and sprinted down the incline as fast as his fully laden pack would allow, leaving our gaping mouths in his dust.

It took all of 3 seconds for me to follow him, arms in the air, yelling something.

We ran for about 10 minutes and then looked back satisfyingly at what had taken us over an hour to climb the other way. The trails we took back to the start were different from the ones we climbed up, so we got to see more of the cloud forest. In a quarter of the time it took to get up the volcano we flopped back into the shuttle bus and were mercifully whisked back to Antigua. Between micro naps and general body recovery I listened to the others salivating over the prospect of getting a massage when we returned, which made my muscles ache all the more vehemently as they reminded me that I was climbing another volcano in around 5 hours.

After a delicious lunch I had a seriously needed crash nap. While dozing I was rudely awakened by my bed shaking. Then I realised my bedside table was also shaking, as was Sean in the bed next to me. In fact the entire room was performing a merry jig to some unseen orchestrator. To those of you who have never experienced an earthquake before I can’t quite describe how totally unnerving it is to have the ground – something you have counted on all your life to stay completely motionless - suddenly decide that it actually wants to stretch out those kinks a bit, and therefore just mildly shake AN ENTIRE FRIGGIN CITY! It only lasted 10 seconds and was nothing special on the Richter scale, but for that brief moment of time my entire world was rather inconceivable. Strange times.

Long before my body was actually ready to leave, we did. Thankfully we were informed by our new guides Ed and Sophie that the amount of walking on Pacaya was a lot less than on Acatenango. While with Acatenango we had the entirety of it to ourselves, Pacaya is very much the tourist volcano. It sees 500-600 people in foot traffic daily. Fortunately as we were camping half way up we got to walk up to Pacaya’s coup de grace long after anyone else. Lava!

Just short of the crater is where the rivers of lava flow, seeping out of fissures and scorching their way over the solidified flows from weeks previously. To get close to the flow required walking over patches that we were told had only a few days ago been actual hot stuff. You could definitely feel it through the soles of your shoes! There were two rivers that we got to see, poke with sticks and roast marshmallows over. The hearty glow lit up the night sky and the surrounding smoke like a well-tended heath on a cold night. It was beautiful.

On our way back down over the treacherously sharp solidified lava field we met a stray dog. Which was odd.

After another cold night, which with my knackered body I slept unbelievably soundly, and a failed sunrise (way too much cloud, like ‘where’s my feet?’ cloud…) we returned victorious to Antigua. So ended my epic volcano expedition (well back in November… Gees I feel bad about how long it’s taken me to write a blog again…)

It was definitely one of the highlights of my gap year so far, which is why it has merited over 2200 words to tell you about it! Hope you’ve enjoyed reading this long overdue entry and I promise to get some more done before I leave (in just over 2 months now, so very close)

Remember, poking lava with a stick in more fun than with your fingers.

The Mountains are my Church.

Honduran Yan.

p.s I’d just like to say a massive thanks to OX for being such a great bunch of people to do this experience with. You guys most definitely rock!

Dangriga -> Semuc Champey.

This is taking a ridiculously long time to get through, but I’m determined to get down all of my travels, which were now completed about 2 months ago… Ah well here is the next section.

From Dangriga we ‘chicken bussed’ it all the way back to Flores in Guatemala. Incredibly (and not in a good way) the price to cross the border into Guatemala was $42.50! An 850% mark up to what it cost to cross from Honduras.

It was nice to be back in Flores again (if only for a day) Got to go for another beautiful sunset swim in the lake and then fell asleep in hammocks that night. Fun times :)

Another day of long buses with short leg room (I hate being of medium UK height here, it basically equates to being a giant when it comes to public transport. Many times I have forgotten my lower legs are there as the seat in front maliciously creates an anti-blood barrier that deadens all feeling below the knees…) and we arrived late to Coban, a mountain town/city in which we didn’t see another traveler. The hotel had rooms like prison cells (and me and Sean debated if this had been the buildings previous use) before drifting off to sleep.

While traveling throughout Guatemala we were being constantly assaulted with the name

‘Semuc Champey’
‘Go to Semuc Champey’
‘You’d be a fool to miss out on Semuc Champey’
‘Semuc Champey esta muy bonito y fantástico!’

And the not so eloquent,

“T’is gouud”

Coban is the nearest big town to it so we powered on over in an irritatingly long 3 hour ride, to this highly beheld gem of a place. I’d have to say that everyone was not wrong! Semuc Champey is a series of 13 pools of beautiful turquoise water which slowly step down into each other and are slowly filtered through the volcanic layers in the region. Above the pools there is a raging river, which conveniently disappears underground before the start of the first pool. The two water course re-meet when the underground river comes out some 400m further down, and the run off water from the pools cascades into it over a waterfall. Surrounding all this is lush jungle trees and a steep sided valley. At the time of day we were there the sun was shining elegantly along the length of the valley, picking out everything in golden and mandarin hues, which melted into the alluring azure of the pools, endowing you with one gorgeous, warm swim.

We left there with heavy hearts, but unfortunately we had a date to keep to, the most exciting thing yet…

Volcano Conquering!

Live life Lava.

Honduran Yan

Flores -> Dangriga.

Flores was left with a heavy heart, it's a smashing little town, but we had a schedule to keep to! (not that we'd been doing much of a good job sticking to it so far...)

Crossing the border into Belize was a strange experience. All of a sudden everytime someone spoke to me I understood them! It was amazing! (And totally not down to the fact that Belizes national tongue is English...)

We had an interesting time in the countries capital, Belmopan, catching buses to Dangriga. It was every man and woman for themselves as we valiantly tried to push everyone else out of the way to squeeze onto the 'chicken bus' (for those uninitiated on chicken buses, they are ex American school buses from about the 17th century which ply up and down the country jammed to the brim with whatever and whoever needs to get from A to C (even though they wanted to go to B) It took one failed attempt (by my hand, much to Sean massive annoyance!) and the ensuing hour and a half wait before we secured a place down to Dangriga.

Stepping off the bus in Dangriga was like going home (Punta Gorda that is) Eveyone looked he same, interspersed with a few tourists who were doing a smashing job of ignoring absolutley everyone who wasn't a local.

"No, I am here on my own, I am cultured and have found this festival all on my own! I am not surrounded by people who are thinking the exact same thing. Lalalala, original, lalalala"

Thankfully the place wasn't swarming with the cheesy large-camera-short-shorts wearing fiends that are found in such abundance elsewhere. The Garifuna festival was mainly attended by the sophisticated backpacker with an appreciative eye for this historical event (yes we're a modest lot :)

The Garifuna know how to party! Festivities took a running headstart at around 6pm on the 18th and continued full force until about 4pm on the 19th! No self respecting local slept in that ensuing time, the 'sophisticated travellers' however were mildly bushwhacked from the epic chicken bussing and so crashed on the only accomadation they could find,... a sofa in a hotel. Which I will also point out was the most expensive place we'd stayed in yet at US$10 (standard is about $4...)

When I re-woke at 7am, it was to the sound of drumming emmanating from the rivers edge. Inspection revealed that, as I had feared, no-one else had gone to bed and were busy playing their drums, sax's and turtle shells from boats on the water. There was a great vibe to the place as people took it in turns to dance infront of the band (funniest guy was a frenchman who was standing next to me, he looked so out of place. Good dancer though!)

Eventually stumbled into Sean, Gemma and Tori again and the rest of the day was spent chilling out with 52 numbered friends.

Sorry that one took so long, there's actually so much more to say about travelling, not to mention Christmas, New Years and having my family here... But UCAS is done now so I should be able to get some online :)

Life is a journey not a destination.

Honduran Yan!

Rio Dulce -> Flores.

A mildy harrowing 4 hour bus journey brought us up to the quaint little city of Flores (harrowing from the fact of some of the poverty we saw from the windows, Guatemala is A LOT poorer than Honduras) The city (probably technically a town) is right next to another city called Santa Elena, the seperation between them is a 750m causeway which puts Flores out on what could be called an Island, but which could also be called an insanely out of proportion peninsula! (the causeway is only the width of the road running down it, the causeway is natural though)

Stepping into Flores was like stepping into San Giulio at Lago Orta in Italy (a favourite holiday destination of our family, and damn right too!) It was amazing to find such a European place so far from, well Europe! It has cobbled, close knit streets teeming with touristy shops all trying to sell you the same thing...(San Giulio doesn't have this, I'd just like to point out I still far prefer San Giulio, nice as Flores is) We were staying at a fabulous backpackers called Los Amigos, easily the best one yet. They had a parrot! And trees in/outside! (it was hard to tell where one started and the other began, it was VERY overlappy)

In the evening we went up to the main square at the top of the hill for some music performances/festival thingamy which had been paid for by one of the national beers. Rather amusingly they weren't immune to the gods of electricity and the performers were cut off mid song on more than one occasion, amist raccous laughter from yours-truly :)

While observing an hilariously emphatic tourist speaking fluent Spanish to a food vendor he noticed us and came over to speak to us. Now, I thought I was pretty special with a Canadian mother and an Irish father living in Scotland, a fairly unique combination and all. John-Oliver has a Russian father, a Jamaican mother, he lives in Guatemala (wrong about the tourist bit...) and his official nationality is Bulgarian! Plus throw in his amazing ability to speak to ANYONE instantly in English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Bulgarian or French and you have one superhuman!

The next day was spent relaxing in Flores itself. As the sun went down we went swimming down in the lake with some of our new travelling friends. We took some Incredible sunset shots, one of them THE GREATEST PHOTO I HAVE EVER TAKEN! Which none of you will get to see before I get back to the island :P At night we went for a wander around the town with Trevor (an amazingly cool German guy) and his trumpet :) Playing the cheesy Mexican song before going for some midnight swimming, such wonderful times!

Tikal was explored the next day. It's the biggest Mayan city in the world and stands partially recontructed about 50km north of Flores. For some reason unknown to anyone, especially us, we got up for the 5am bus to the ruins... This doesn't get you there for sunrise, something coveted about Tikal, as this has recently become illegal, so basically there was nothing desirable about getting there so darn early, but we did it anyways.

The ruins were pretty amazing. You walked along well maintained jungle paths to emerge into these clearings where a temple would rise majestically out of the trees, ancient skyscrapers brushing the clouds (ok, they weren't that high, but the tallest was about 70m!) One of the nice things about it being situated so deeply in the jungle was the plethora of wildlife which hung around the edges of the path, watching, and in the monkeys case, throwing things at their visitors. We saw two different types of monkey (one was bigger than the other and so could throw heavier objects...), a strange anteater type animal which snuffled around the paths and a few different species of birds, including a toucan from afar!

The day after we left Flores (frick that was about 2 weeks ago now!) and moved onwards into Belize! Land of the slightly odd-english speaking Garifuna.

Nearly forgot how to write a blog there...

Guatemalan Yan :)

Omoa -> Rio Dulce.

After exhausting all the wonders of Omoa (they were few, very nice town but not a lot to do there...) we jumped onto a bus heading the Guatemalan way. It was an interesting 60km, given that it took us 2 hours... There was a perfectly good paved road all the way there, but I guess that wasn't exciting enough for our driver who decided that a head-hitting-the-ceiling bumpy route would give us all more of a kick!...

Crossing over the border was an incredibly easy affair, no one cared who we were or what interesting concoctions we were carrying in our bags (none, but we could have) just as long as we paid the exit tax, and bought a drink, and got over-charged for a bus that didn't go very far for a lot of money...

Three buses (and one irritating conductor who charged us for putting our bags on the roof, mid-journey... Oh I'm sorry, was someone else going to sit there?? Urgh...) later we stepped off (fell out? there was 20 people sitting on 16 seats in something the size of a small van) into Rio Dulce, a charming yachty town situated next to the longest bridge in South/Central America, which covers the gap between Lago Izabal and it's run-out river to the sea. Our guidebook said that the bridge would take 1/2 an hour to cross, I don't know what the author was dragging behind them, but it only took us 10 minutes!

We stayed in the Hotel Backpackers (which was on the wrong side of the bridge for just about everything...) The building reminded me of a childrens indoor soft play area, with wire 'walls' you could see through, but couldn't actually get to the other side :) The place was practically empty, and the one guy who was staying there was a bit distant to talk to...

The next day we went to a place that had been recommended to us called Finca El Paraiso. This was a swimming hole with a twist :) Namely a 50°C waterfall pouring into it! This swimming hole itself is not unlike Gracies Linn (please may I have remembered that right) up Glen Esk, though obviously with that massive difference. Hehehe. It was absolutely gorgeous to stand on a rock underneath the waterfall and let the hot water (and it was HOT, none of this warm rubbish!) pour over my shoulders. All the worries seem to pour away with it (well, not that I'm particularily worried about life at the moment, ahhhhh)
It was also very neat to go beneath the small overhang to the air space behind the cascade. Here the air was hot and you could have a mini-sauna! Bliss!

Another unimpressive night was had at Hotel Backpackers, before we moved off the next day.

Guatemala is pretty damn sweet. It's incredibly poor in some places, moreso than in Honduras, but the people are as nice as ever and the scenery is epicly jungly :) If anyone happens to be thinking about travelling to this corner of the world I highly recommend it!

Photographs are like captured souls.

Belizean Yan :)

Roatan -> Omoa.

Ok, the People in my Life vein is going to be put on hold for a while, for the simple matter that,

I'M TRAVELLING!

Yay! It is so amazing to finally get off Roatan. As Adam and Casey so correctly pointed out it was getting up to Island Fever stage. Nice to spread my wings around Central America :) To anyone reading this from Coll, I salute you most wholeheartedly. (and four-fingeredly?...)

The Galaxy Wave (sounds more like a spacecraft than a passenger ferry) was sleepily taken (I messed up with packing and only got 1 and a half hours of sleep, that physically hurt to wake up...) to La Ceiba on the mainland. From there it was an interesting jaunt through the city to try and locate the bus terminal. A steamy walk later we were instructed onto various buses that were apparently going to San Pedro Sula (none of them were...) When we did find the right bus a nice man came aboard and tried to sell us some vitamins. Then later in the journey someone tried to sell us a medicine entitled Neuro-(something) Emmm....No thanks!

The plan had been to get from Roatan to a town called Rio Dulce in Guatemala in that first day, considering we got to San Pedro Sula at about 3 (with three hours of sunlight left) and still had 200km to Rio Dulce on slow buses it was time for a plan alteration! (something we haven't stopped doing yet...)

We picked at random (joke) a town from the guidebook called Omoa, which is situated a nice distance from the Guatemalan border. It had a fantastic little backpackers called Roli's Place, which for $4 a night gave you a comfy bed, free drinking water, bike and kayak rental and free entrance to his mini zoo! (well his pets... rabbits, dogs and snakes though) We liked it so much we further skewiphed our plans by staying a second night!

A semi-permanent resident of the hostel was a man who we shall call 'Ray' (more because I can't remember what his actually name was...) Up until the recent earthquakes (July) in Honduras he lived on the neighbouring island to Roatan, Utila. The earthquakes were apparently caused by a chunk of magma moving under the volcano Pico Bonito on the mainland. He did the calculations and if the volcano blew its top Utila would only have 3 minutes before being annihilated, I get 5 on Roatan...joys. (if you didn't get the picture already Ray is a bit 'eccentric', bordering on conspiratorial. He was fiercely intelligent though!) He then proceeded to explain how the worlds economy is going to collapse on the 28th November (again pretty sound reasoning behind it) and how the governments of the world will then electronically tag everyone with the Mark of the Devil. Yeah some pretty heavy stuff. (oh and to top it all off the American government is controlling the population via CNN, you have been warned!)

But anyways, he was such a great character and after rambling for so long actually got down to some seriously good life skills, all of which I wanted to remember! and sadly didn't, stupid leaky brain...

The food in Omoa was also brilliant. There was this lovely little restaurant by the pier called Bella Mar which served sparklingly good chicken!

Right, gotta run I'm writing this from a mysterious location in the future of the past paragraphs...That kinda makes sense. I will eventually write up to my current location!

Always Jive to School.
Always Slide to Work.

Guatemalan Yan :)

People in my Life - Mary Lou.

My Honduran Mum! A stupendous, rotund Garifuna woman who provides 2 of my daily portions of rice and beans, I mean meals.

She lives in a quaint little concrete house, roughly similar in size to ours, about two thirds of the walk from our house to the beach. Ergo this is our most travelled route; in fact I’m not sure the road would exist without us religiously tramping up and down it 4-5 times a day! It has a rather stunning mural on the side of a beach scene, which was painted by Teacher Ben many years ago now. (Ben is also the artist of the mural on the side of the school office building (which is even betterer! a picture can be found on facebook) if your reading this Ben, you’re amazing!) Outside of her house is a delightful little shelter/corner-bench setup of which a similar thing is much coveted for our house’s steadily growing outside seating area.

For cooking she has a gas hob but also outside there is a rather smashing homemade oven set. She’s done this by taking a (if you’ll excuse the pun) ‘burnt out’ old oven, packed all the fissures with hard clay and set it up so that you can burn a fire underneath the main chamber (and also I think above on one of them) These marvels of cobbling together can then be used to bake delicious bread and the odd cake. Tastyful!

Family wise she has a daughter, Kiomy (kee-yo-mee) of about my age and a husband, Yolandi (that ones self explanatory) We’ve also met some sisters and cousins, but only very briefly. The house is always filled with Mary Lou’s cries of ‘Kiomy…Kiomy?’ (which most of the time go unanswered) followed by a rapid fire burst of instructions in Spanish or Garifuna (I do actually struggle sometimes to tell the difference…) More often than not these are ignored.

All three members of the family speak excellent English (which is having a detrimental effect on our Spanish learning…I do make the effort now and again, but it’s so easy to not…) We were asked by Mary Lou in the first week if we could give English lessons to Kiomy (she goes to a different, older school in another town) to which we agreed to but later realised,

‘What on Earth could we actually teach her? She speaks better English than I do in the mornings!’

No lessons have been forthcoming though, mainly I think from Kiomy’s lack of enthusiasm for it (I’m assuming the volunteers have taught her privately for close to the last 10 years, no wonder she knows everything from similes to street slang!)

I can’t think of a context to put this in so I’m just going to write it down. This was an amusing conversation we had before lunch one day when she was preparing the meat.

(I point at the meat she’s washing)
“Is that pork Mary Lou?” (she does some MEAN fried pork)
(looking up) “Hmm?”
“Is the meat pork?”
“Oh,… it might be. It looks like pork, so it may be pork…”
“…eh”

How can you not know? I was baffled. Plus I never did find out what it was…

Oh I nearly forgot. The latest addition to the family is a 10 week old puppy called Lion! He was born roughly a week after we arrived and Mary Lou got him from a friend in the 2nd or 3rd week. His is an adorable little thing, right up to the moment he bites your exposed ankles… and then relishes in the challenge of you wiggling about trying to keep your bare-skin out of his open mouth… He is an amazing wee fellow though and we will have that rare thing of being able to watch him grow into the apparently-not-so-big-as-we-thought-he’d-be full size over the year. One of the funniest things I’ve watched him do is sit on a prone cat and try to bite its ears and neck. Strangely the cat bore this for a while before whisking around and trying to scratch his nose off. Then there was the amusing stalemate of the cat waving a paw in the air at Lion, hissing while he sat on his haunches debating how best to get round those claws? Teehee.

But anyways here’s to the amazing Mary Lou, who makes my life incredibly easy and who is slowly teaching me how to cook! You couldn’t craft a nicer person.

Clumsy puppies are funny!

Honduran Yan.