13 February – Coban
We like the idea of being what are called independent
travellers, going where the mood takes us, choosing as we go, free and
easy. Of course it’s all an illusion,
we’re really all a bunch of plastic ducks in a river, pitching up occasionally
in an eddy, caught in the reeds for a while before we move on. We all seem to move in the same direction
and we meet the same people in different places hundreds of miles apart. There don’t seem to be too many tourists
here, or travellers, as we like to call ourselves but we do keeping meeting up..
Coban is even freer of tourists and a reasonably pleasant
place to be, not much to see but a
bustle about the place with lots of locals, a small street market, where we buy
some oranges, and the ugliest edifice in
a central square I’ve seen anywhere.
Very difficult to adequately describe but it’s a vaguely pastel coloured
two storey concrete structure with a curving open sided staircase leading to a
first floor open circular area like a bandstand. Oh and built right in front of the big
church in town. They’re building an underground car park here
too which seems totally pointless in this town but at least it’s not more European
Union money, or at least it doesn’t say so anywhere. For the oranges, I hold up two and the stall
holder, well not a stall, it’s all on the floor on a cloth says three and a
half, I hold up a five and she nods. I
haven’t a clue whether I’ve negotiated and saved two or been done out of one
and a half. One quetzal is worth about 8p so I don’t break into too
much of a sweat about it. It’s
afternoon and at this point we are due to leave in the morning, we have no
hotel booked and the agent we hoped to get a ticket from is now no longer in
town. Could be a bit of an irritation
but we tend to the Micawberish in these situations. Something’ll turn up.
I like photographing people but don’t like either sticking a
camera in people’s faces or asking. So I
take candid shots from a vantage point.
Near the edge of a café looking out or from a raised area are both good
or I take shots of H with a wide angle and get the real shot of people on the
periphery. Some of the old people have
faces that look like contour maps of hilly areas but they’re often looking
down and are difficult to get shots of.
We meet two Americans from Washington State at the hotel who
suggest having dinner together, something we would never think of asking. I suppose that’s just us uptight Brits for
you. The best restaurant in town is
where all four of us go for a really good meal.
I manage to knock a glass of beer over David before any food arrives. He has a mind like mine, full of useless
information and he’s very well travelled
and informed. He describes himself to us
as ‘just a simple country lawyer’ which causes H and me to laugh like
drains.
An almost imperceptible light drizzle being to drift down
and gradually increases as we head back to our hotel. We’re due to be picked up at 10.00 for the
journey to Flores, gateway to Tikal, the famous Mayan city remains. At 10.30 to their credit the shuttlebus
company phone to say 11.30. When we
speak to one of the other passengers about the delay it was a lorry broken down
in the middle of the road that no one could get past. This was Tommy, half of Nina & Tommy, a
Swiss couple we’d been on a bus with 3 days previously and were to see again as
we drove past them at 5.00am waiting for a bus two days later. All ducks.
Shuttle booked via internet and series of emails, hotel
ditto. Micawber wins again !
!4 February – Flores
However, our late booking almost didn’t work here. Flores is an island on a lake joined by a
causeway to the mainland and according to the net was all booked, so we had to
stay on the mainland although it was a very smart hotel with a pool, a Jacuzzi
and an armed guard. Armed guards are
everywhere here. We’ve seen them outside
hotels, inside a TV shop and bizarrely, at a diabetes clinic. The uniform is military style with trousers
tucked into high boots set off with a belt of shiny cartridges. The guns are always the same, a shotgun with
a handle like a revolver. This not at
all the sort of hotel with suicide showers but towels twisted into decorative
shapes on the beds, dogs one day, frogs the next. I suppose somewhere there’s a hotel maids (plus whatever a male maid is called)
course called “Towel Sculpture - everything you need to know.”
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