Thursday 18th: We got up at 7am to say farewell to Penny and Duff and then Jennie, Jo, Matt and I took the chicken bus to Flores at 10am. We had to stand for the first hour but then we managed to get seats....very bouncy seats!! We arrived at 2pm and headed straight to Hostel Mon Ami in El Ramate which had been recommended to us by a fella at Hacienda Tijax. A nice spot by the lake ....which we dived straight into as soon as we'd dumped our bags in the room!!
We chilled out in the hostel bar / dining area and had a few beers and went to bed early in preparation for our 5am start in the morning!!!

Friday 19th: We opted for the 5.30am departure to Tikal because we were informed that there would be more chance of seeing wildlife, particularly big cats, at that time and there would also be less people....it seems that the pumas and jaguars there might be that chance of seeing are somewhat elusive at the best of times - the guide we spoke to on the bus had been working there 6 years and hadn't ever actually seen any more than the back end of an ocelot disappearing into the undergrowth!!
In any case, Tikal was beautiful at 6am...and we did see a couple of Spider Monkeys sitting in the trees!!! The ruins are surrounded by jungle so its a fab place to wander about in and the jungle makes it feel like there's noone else there.

We walked around the whole place, climbing the temples where we could, including the really high scary one!! It was funny watching other people going up and down the steps on that one. One guy we watched was sooo petrified he was shaking as he came down!!


We wandered around til just after noon and went to meet the bus back to the hostel. The hostel had made us sandwiches for lunch to take to Tikal (ham and cheese, of course - except Matt had chicken so we were all jealous!!) but we'd eaten them by 8am so we went to the Italian place just up the road for lunch!! The rest of the afternoon was a fairly chilled out affair.
We headed into 'town' for dinner. El Ramate isn't the biggest place in the world, there isn't really a 'town' as such, there's just a few restaurants / bars / hotels dotted around. We had dinner and a couple of beers in a bar by the lake. The sound of bugs around the lake were incredible and at the edge of the lake you could see hundreds of tiny little insects lighting up and flashing as we walked past!!
There was also the sound of a party happening somewhere across the water, which I later found out, from another traveller in Flores, was a local 'festival'. We hadn't checked out what it was as we'd just assumed it was a dodgey nightclub or something... ..shame, it could have been fun!!
 
Saturday 20th: I said goodbye to Matt, Jo and Jennie as they left for Coban, unfortunately time wouldn't allow for me to go with them as I had to head to Mexico to meet Chris. I took the local bus for 8Q to Santa Elena which took around an hour and a half and then took a 5 minute taxi ride to Flores for 10Q (the taxi driver saw me coming!!) I checked in to the Hostel Los Amigos which was the first Guatemalan hostel I stayed in with dorms. The dorm I was in cost 40Q for the night and had 10 beds, but noone else was in when I got there. The hostel was having their staff Christmas party in the afternoon so I went out for breakfast / lunch which included a delicious coconut smoothie, but I made the mistake of having it made with milk. They don't seem to have fresh milk in Guatemala, it's all UHT, so my body rejected it pretty swiftly if you know what I mean!! I can't really complain though, I had't had any problems of that nature with any other food throughout my stay in Guatemala :o)
Flores is a fairly small island on the lake linked to Santa Elena on the mainland by a bridge. I took a walk around Flores and sat in the square at the top of the hill and admired the views across the lake for a while and then chilled outside a cafe and read my book in the sun for a couple of hours.
I booked my ticket to Chetumal at the San Juan Travel Agency for 5am the next morning and went back to the hostel where I sat in the bar and chatted to a couple of bizarre American girls and a couple of Swiss guys for a few hours before having a shower and heading to bed.
Unfortunately the 2 most irritating American's I have ever met were staying in my dorm. Almost every person in the dorm was getting up at 4.30am either to go to Tikal or to catch a bus to somewhere, but these 2 guys decided that noone was allowed more than an hour of sleep at a time and insisted on coming back into the dorm every hour to wake everyone up!! AAAaaaaaaahhhh!!