Monday March 24th back on Stray Catz, it looks like everything will be ready for a Wednesday departure for Honduras. That is everything but the weather. According to the forecasts it will be Monday March 31st (Kylan’s birthday) before there will be good weather. Five extra days to wait. We hadn’t seen Tikal yet so…. Thursday morning we were on a bus to Flores, Guatemala. In the interest of saving money we didn’t spend the extra $20 for the luxury bus and ended up having to stand in the overcrowded isle of a bus for 3 of the 4.5 hour trip. Not fun. But we got to Flores found a hotel and made arrangements for a sunset tour of Tikal the next day. Flores is this neat little town on an island in Lago Peten Itza. Like Lake Atitlan, Lago Peten Itza too has risen several feet in the last few years and most of the outside road that circles the island is under water. The town is a little touristy, but all the locals seem very nice and friendly. Just to give you an idea of the size, you can walk around the outside of the island in about 30 minutes.
Tikal was impressive. The shear size and number of the ruins alone was incredible. We climbed most of the Temples. We saw two kinds of Toucans, spider monkeys, coatimundies, tarantulas, parrots, toads, and many other types of birds. We climbed to the top of the tallest temple to watch the sunset, then gazed at the stars from the main plaza. After that we hiked back to the van in the dark. A wonderful trip except for the fact I left the camera on the van and somehow the next day no one could find it. Kylan had some great shots of one of the toucans, and some of the shots from the top of the temples were good too, but we can’t prove it. I was bad enough about putting pictures on the blog before, now who knows what will happen.
We took the luxury bus back to the Rio Dulce, which enabled us to watch and listen to some Latin singer who by the looks of it, is as popular as Elvis Presley once was for 3.5 hours. But at least we had air conditioning and a seat.
We left Sunday morning the 30th so we could pick up our main sail. This enabled us to hike up to an underground river just off of the Rio Dulce.
On Kylan’s birthday, we checked out of Guatemala and headed out to sea.
It seems that the weather has it in for us every time we try an ocean passage. It was beautiful when we left, but by night fall the winds had picked up, and the seas which were directly head on, kept pounding us, so we headed for Puerto Cortes again. This time we checked into Honduras and looked around the town some. I don’t believe they get a lot of tourists there. We were looked at a lot, and many people spoke to us for no reason. If only we knew more Spanish.
Two nights there and it looked like the weather would be good to go the last 70 miles to Utilla, but alas we were wrong again.
The last 20 miles the wind had shifted to straight on the nose and the seas had risen to 10 feet, so Stray Catz was taking a beating. Up every wave and slamming down in the next one. Moving along at about 2.5knots. We pulled into Utilla Harbour at 8:30 at night in total darkness.
Praise God we had been there before and were able to follow our previous track through the reef, and praise God when we dropped our now repaired anchor, it grabbed and held the first time and we were set for the night.