Day 37

Spent a few hours in the morning trying to organize my school for the week after my friend's visit and studying up on some Spanish.  First week of not starting Spanish class bright and early on a Monday morning.  Eventually went back to the room to see if April was ready to start our day.

We headed out to see the island of Flores.  It was fairly quiet other than a strange little procession of people parading through the streets (I'm really not quite sure what that was about).  Also, it was interesting to note that the island was more or less being swallowed up by the lake, with many spots where the water was spilling over onto the streets. 

Shortly, we made it around to the other side of the lake where the bridge to Santa Elena was.  I'd been rushed on my way out of the bus station the night before by the taxi driver and had been unable to purchase our bus tickets home after visiting Tikal as I had hoped.  Therefore, we headed back on foot so I could purchase them now.

Once there, I found a different bus company to go back with because I had felt motion sickness the whole way up.  The bus tickets also turned out to be a little cheaper.  We also spoke with a guy who knew English and had a company that organized shuttles to Tikal.  He told us to come back at 2:30 to get into Tikal later that afternoon so we would only have to pay one entrance fee (if you enter after 3pm, your ticket is good for 2 days).

On our way back to Flores we stopped at the market.  It was a fairly low key market.  Only problem, the streets were made of dirt and it had rained the night before so my feet got quite muddy.  We also walked through the mini-bus depot which were a smaller scale of the chicken bus terminals down in southern Guatemala. 

Once over the bridge again, April purchased some souviners/necessities for the trip up to Tikal.  I tried to stop at another travel agency to check out some other options for getting up to Tikal.  However, though I participated in it, I really didn't understand our conversation in Spanish about their services.

After that we had to rush back to pack up our stuff to get out of the room before check-out.  We had a tiny bit of an argument about whether or not we had time for lunch.  But ended up stopping at a nice little cafe overlooking the lake for lunch.  Then we rushed off in a tuk-tuk for the bus station.

We made it just in time! We went in the office to purchase our tickets in the midst of a worker cleaning the floors by pouring buckets of soapy water on them and then sweeping the water out the door (needless to say, we got a little wet).  Afterward, we went to wait by our little red shuttle for a bit with a couple from the Bay Area before our ride was ready to go.

But instead of heading on our way, we drove through the market area and stopped at that same little makeshift bus terminal we had walked through earlier.  Here we waited for our bus to fill up with the locals and were finally on our way.  In total, other couple counted something like 28 people on our 15 passenger van.

In Tikal, we checked into the Jungle Lodge and then went into the park explore the Gran Plaza at sunset.  Afterward we showered up and went in search of food.  The restaurants outside the park were all closed so all that was left was the really expensive one attached to the hotel.