Right ho! After spending a fair chunk of time at home in India, it was time to hit the road again. But we weren't quite ready as yet..so we decided on spending a few days at our home away from home - Nirupa & Steve's (Aunt & Uncle) place in Miami. My cousins Peter and his wife, Kristin, along with Kristin's family, joined us in Miami for the weekend too, and we had a great time together. Some of the highlights were - Nirupa Atya's cooking, Uncle Steve's made-fresh-daily-home-made bread, attending Puccini's opera, 'La Rondine', and a picnic at the open air concert of the New World Symphony. Taking advantage of the awesome weather, we decided on heading to the Everglades for some canoeing. We proceeded to canoe through Nine Mile pond and were just admiring the perfect weather, when we were dumped on by a short but intense shower. Thus passed by 5 idyllic days in Miami.

Hiking up Pacaya

From Miami it was onto Guatemala (Picasa link) and having heard not too good things about the capital city, we promptly hightailed it to Antigua. Antigua was the capital city for the past five centuries and was where the Spaniards setup base when they made their way over in the 16th century. The result is a city choc-a-bloc with historic buildings and churches, built over the centuries by Spanish rulers and missionaries. Antigua in the 17th and 18th centuries suffered the indignities of multiple earthquakes that left most of the churches in a state of ruin and you certainly seem to run into one really frequently. However, and this is why the city will always be a firm favorite, it is surrounded by five volcanoes that lie in various states ranging from dormant to active, and each and every one of them is climbable. Upon reaching Antigua in the evening we dumped our bags at our hosts' place and made plans for climbing Pacaya - one of the dormant ones. The next day saw us waking up at the crack of dawn and making our way up the volcano. Steam vents are to be found on the higher reaches and our guide made a big show of toasting bread and roasting marshmallows up there. We then spent a very agreeable afternoon wandering around town, exploring the various ruins and checking out the few buildings that were still upright.

Told you there were no roofs!

We next made our way over to Lago de Atitlan. In keeping with the volcanic theme, the lake is ringed by no fewer than seven volcanoes, though we stuck to the lake shore this time round. The lake has really nice small towns, that, in a few cases, are only accessible by water and we spent the next couple of days here. One of the days we decided to hike from San Marcos, where we'd spent the night, to Santa Cruz, a town a couple of miles along the coast. The path was high above the water-line and we enjoyed stunning views of the lake framed by volcanoes throughout the hike. After gorging on avocado and pineapple smoothies and nachos at Santa Cruz we then caught the launch back to San Marcos. Heading out from the lake the next day, we were still undecided on our next destination, so we headed back to Antigua to figure out our course of action.

After a bit of research, we finally settled on the Mayan ruins of Copan in Honduras. As is with these things, the actual ruins are called Copan while the town outside the ruins is called Copan Ruinas, which is where we headed to the next day. The ruins made for a fabulous morning of walking around and the on-site museum could not have been put together any better. Hats off to the Hondurans for putting together a really informative and interesting site. From Copan, it was back to Guatemala, specifically Livingston. Livingston's history bears special mention. The town is populated by the descendents of slaves that were bought over from the Caribbeans by the Europeans in the 17th century.

Casa Rosada

Livingston, being semi-isolated from the mainland, resulted in the development of an independent populace and culture, called Garifuna. The people look different, speak a different language and the food's different too. The plan was to spend a day or two here before moving on, but then came Casa Rosada. We had no bookings when we got to Livingston, and based off some online reviews, walked over to a hotel by the name of Casa Rosada to inquire about their availability and prices. It was love at first sight. The place consists of a main house and 10 small shacks - all on the water-front. They have a jetty running into the water with a small open hut at the end, in which are slung a couple of hammocks. Our day and half stay quickly turned into four. At only one point did we even attempt something more strenuous than lowering ourselves into a hammock - a long walk along the beach to a series of seven pools called, predictably, Siete Altares. The rest of our stay was occupied reading, surfing the net, and figuring out where we were having dinner. On day five we finally roused ourselves and made our way up the Rio Dulce to Finca Tatin - a basic hotel in the jungle. So basic, in fact, that they didn't even have electricity. Still, we had a good time there and met quite a few interesting travelers, who we sat swapping travel stories with well into the night.

Ole King Jaguar's Temple

Onto our final destination in Guatemala, the ancient city of Tikal. Tikal is regarded by many to be one of the most important Mayan ruins around and we decided to honor that opinion. We managed to get ourselves talked into an early morning tour and found ourselves at 4.30AM the next day, piling into a van heading to the ruins. I did say it was early! Tikals' heydays were from the 7th to the 14th century, and man, did they go on a building spree. Similar to Angkor Wat, each ruler felt the need to immortalize himself, and the ruins are filled with pyramid shaped temples, each bigger than the previous one. After the civilization collapsed in the 14th century, the jungle took over and covered all traces of a city, that at one point housed over 200,000 people. The ruins were only discovered in the 19th century and its only in the last 70 years that formal archeological work has been carried out at the site. The entire site is still under heavy vegetation and it makes for a pleasant surprise to round the corner and come face to face with a 200 foot temple. We spent a few hours tagging along with our guide and then the next few wandering around the site on our own. After having shot a boatload of picture we made our way back to Flores (the base town for Tikal). From there we caught the overnight bus to Guatemala city and then the flight back to Miami. Another two days of R&R with the family and then its onto the last big leg of our journey - four months in S.America!

- Ashish