A Journal, with Pictures

 

We are in the air on sched­ule at 9:00 AM local, and our route takes us to the north of Cuba out of sight of land. The flight is unevent­ful and we see only a cou­ple of cruise ships until we see Mex­i­co at Can­cun, then turn south over Cozumel and fly along the Yucatan coast. We do an instru­ment approach into Belize City, and our han­dler gets us through the for­mal­i­ties and on our way. Belize City is a very busy air­port and there are some dif­fer­ences in pro­ce­dures, but we work our way through it and get back in the air. We arrive in Tikal air­port after an inter­est­ing instru­ment approach in clear weath­er down a very pret­ty val­ley and by a big lake. We are met by our han­dler, tie down, clear cus­toms, and head to Las Lagu­nas resort. The resort is very nice on a small lake with mod­ern rooms over­look­ing the lake. We arrive first, but the group fly­ing from Mex­i­co arrives a short time lat­er. It’s time to show­er, relax, have a cock­tail and enjoy our first din­ner with the entire group.

The next day we are off to tour Tikal which was the cen­ter of the Mayan world dat­ing back twen­ty five hun­dred years. Over 3000 struc­tures have been mapped, and we will vis­it the cen­tral area that has been exca­vat­ed, essen­tial­ly reclaimed from the jun­gle. We have break­fast are briefed by Peter and John and off we go to meet our guides after about a hours dri­ve through the Guatemalan coun­try side. The tour was fas­ci­nat­ing with lots to learn includ­ing the local flo­ra and fau­na. We met a fam­i­ly of Koaty­mundi’s (Eng­lish Coaty­mun­di) dig­ging for insects, their lunch on the way to our lunch. This tour alone was worth the trip, and of course we had a shop­ping stop on the way back to the resort.

 

A chance to fresh­en up, relax then we went into the city of Flo­res for a din­ner at a Guatemalan Ital­ian restau­rant, anoth­er adventure.

The next day after break­fast we took a tour by boat to view a fam­i­ly of mon­keys and oth­er local ani­mals that live on the lake shore.

In the after­noon we went into the city of Flo­res for lunch and a tour of a zoo island and the city.

We returned to the lodge to brief our flight for tomor­row. It will be a long day of fly­ing with cus­toms to clear in three coun­try’s with refu­el­ing in two and we will fly over five coun­tries. Our des­ti­na­tion is Golfi­to in the south west­ern most cor­ner of Cos­ta Rica on the Pana­ma board­er. Golfi­to is non-tow­ered and clos­es at five forty five which is sun­set there. It sounds like anoth­er adventure.