Lanquín, Semuc Champey, and Cobán....and back to Xela I go

From Rio Dulce we took a shuttle to a little town called Lanquín. It's the town closest to Semuc Champey, some beautiful natural pools with limestone bridges. The road from Rio Dulce to Lanquín is short, but terrible, mountainous, not really paved, and narrow (which means when there's a car coming the other way someone has to pull over to let the other pass), thus it took some 5 hours to get there. It was raining a lot. We went to the hostel office to check in (I actually made a reservation here, but only because I called the day before to make sure they had space and they just made me a reservation) and the girl in front of us was trying to negotiate the room price for her and her friends using very English-y Spanglish....like really really really! "Um, I came here dos weeks ago and paid one hundred quetzales for dos noches." I thought about helping with the translation, but I was tired and kind of entertained. Well it got to our turn and we were checked in and showed to our dorm (since it's not tourist season they're offering the second night free in the dorms), and it turns out we were the only 2 in the dorm. So we basically had a private dorm for the price of half a night....at this point pretty much all our stuff was wet/moist so we hung our stuff up all over the dorm. Unfortunately more people arrived the next day and we had to move all our stuff.
Well we wanted to do the Semuc tour the day after we arrived, but like I said, it was raining a lot. Really hard. All morning. So they cancelled the tour for that day for safety reasons and Erin and I just had time to walk around the little town for a bit. Unfortunately this also set us back a day in our travel plans, but we figured we'd done really well sticking with it so far and in reality we had a couple days' leeway. So we relaxed, used the sauna (normally Q.10pp, but free that day because they cancelled the tour), explored Lanquín, and enjoyed an Italian buffet for dinner.
The next day the rain was pretty much done and we got to go on our tour. But because there wasn't a tour the day before, we had about twice the number of people than normal. The first part of the tour is a cave tour: everyone gets a candle and we start walking about waist-deep in water into a cave. As we traveled deeper into the cave, there were some stronger currents and eventually a waterfall that we had to climb up via ladder....we couldn't really see anything so we were basically climbing a ladder with our eyes closed. It was awesome!! After the cave we went inner-tubing down a little stretch of the river, some people jumped off a bridge into the river, and then we headed to Semuc Champey.

Erin saved some kid's b-day party by
teaching them how to make balloon animals.

At Semuc we started out by climbing up to the viewpoint. When we got there Erin realized why every photo of Semuc Champey looks like it was taken from an airplane....in the same place, from the same angle. But it was so beautiful! Then we got to climb down and go swimming. Our guide took us to a mini-cave...but when he said mini he wasn't kidding!! Carol Heath would have loved it! You swim under a rock and come up in a little space underneath, then you keep going for a couple meters, sometimes having to duck under some low-hanging rocks, then to get out the guide told us to go under the water and just go straight, that we'd make it out. It was further than you'd think. I ducked under and went straight, always feeling with my hand for when I'd make it back to open-air....but the rock above me kept going. Finally I made it out! Every single person thought the same, it was fun to see their faces when they popped out saying Oh my gosh! I thought I'd never make it out! 

Erin got a job really quickly

The next morning we headed for Cobán. Erin didn't feel so great. Actually, she felt terrible. We got to Cobán and walked around town, went to the mall, bought some Subway, and then went back to our hostel. We pretty much just watched television and tried to figure out how to get to Antigua the next day and if we'd have time to do a coffee plantation tour...one with a zip-line portion. We found out that we'd have just enough time to do the tour and get back in time for our shuttle to Antigua. Sweet! Well Erin didn't seem to want to wake up the next morning and I thought it'd be a lot better to let her sleep and potentially get better than to try and go to a coffee plantation and rush to make it for our shuttle while it was raining really hard (apparently the rainy season isn't over yet). Turned out well because the guy who was going to drive us was sick too and he really wanted to go back to bed. Poor guy. Every day during our two weeks together Erin got up by 6:30 at the latest, on this day she had to force herself to get up at like 10:20 just to get her stuff ready for us to jump on the shuttle. We got on the shuttle and she passed out again. Yikes! Thankfully she eventually woke up and wanted to eat something and drink some coffee (when she doesn't want coffee in the morning, you know something's very wrong). We finally made it to Antigua only to find out that Eder, Carolina, and Sammy were all sick too. Double yikes! But Erin woke up the next morning around 6 again, so she must've been getting better (hopefully she's all better now....or at least still getting better). She took me into town and we got some coffee at Refuge Cafe (it's also where we caught our shuttle from Antigua to Flores, so we began and ended there). After that she took me to the bus. Wow, those two weeks sure flew by!
I was so excited to get back to my apartment. The only laundry I did during our trip was in sinks with shampoo or expired laundry soap, and most of the places we went were really humid, so pretty much all of my clothes were damp for many days. Everything smelled terrible! But my awesome friend Ivan had brought me a clean towel and I took a shower right when I got home and put on cleans clothes that I hadn't brought with me. Oh my gosh, it was great! I smelled good again, I didn't feel damp for the first time in days, and I finally got to use conditioner! After that I got to start the loooooooooong process of uploading my photos....I'm not kidding, it took over 24 hours to upload 315 photos. I think the internet here isn't that great for uploading, or else the Picasa uploader is terrible! But now it's done, I'm back home and my mom is here to visit for my last few days in Guatemala. Those two weeks traveling with Erin were the perfect way to bring my time in Guatemala to an end. It was a great adventure that I won't soon forget.