We  know you've missed us these past two weeks, so we're back, and with a huge surprise! Not one, not two, but three whole photo albums for you to look at!

 

Some pics of a coffee plantation tour we took in Angitua, followed by a few days  on Lake Atitlan, which is a huge and gorgeous lake surrounded by several volcanos and dotted with small towns. We enjoyed the town of San Marcos the most, and visited three others - San Pedro, Panajachel, and Santiago Atitlan. Very relaxing few days.

 

We've been in Colombia for about a week, and if you read the entry below, you know that I really, really love it here (Oliver loves it here, too). We are staying in Bogotá with Angela (pronounced "An-hel-a"), a friend of Oliver's from college. She's simply amazing and she, her friends, and family have made our stay completely unforgettable.

 

This is a tiny colonial town about 6 hours' drive from Bogotá where Angela's dad has a farm. We went up here for an extended weekend with Angela, her sister Maria and her boyfriend, Jose, and a bunch of their friends. The long weekend was so much fun, but the highlight was Sunday night, when we played the game Celebrity (do you hear that Sean Purcell? They play Celebrity here and they're really good!). Eleven of us fit into Maria's jeep to make a  journey across a very rocky road to the farm, and we spent hours playing. Everyone was incredibly friendly and spoke lots of English with us the whole weekend.

We're approaching the half-way point of the trip. On the one hand, it's gone by so quickly, and on the other, it feels like I haven't been home in months! The past week in Colombia has been amazing. We're staying with a friend here, so we get to experience everything through her perspective and recommendations, instead of the perspective and recommendations in a travel guide (not that that's so bad, because the whole trip has been great). 

 

Colombia has been incredible. Angela ("An-hel-a"), the friend we're staying with, is an incredbile person and we've met a bunch of her friends and her entire family (that's how they do it here!) and they are so happy to show us around and tell us about all the wonderful things this country has to offer. They have a pride for and a knowledge of their country that I haven't seen in many places.

 

Also, the food here is unbelievable. There are a million different fruits here I've never heard of before: lulo (like an orange, but different), pitaya (kind of related to the pear and I'm still working up the courage to eat it), and guanabana, which I don't even know how to describe, but it's really good in popsicle form. Everyone drinks fruit juice here all the time. I haven't had vegetables in a week but I've had fruit and fruit juice about 10 times a day. They also make arepas here, which are essentially deep fried corn tortilla, and you can fill it with egg and cheese. YUM! And my favorite: yucca bread. It is bread made from the flour of a yucca plant, which is related to the potato. It tastes like cheesy bread. And imagine how good it tastes when you get yucca bread with cheese in it!

 

We have about a million pictures on our camera that we want to at to Spaces but we've been too busy seeing the sites and eating! Hopefully tomorrow the pictures will go up...

Oliver posted our itinerary. It's subject to change.

 

We think we´re total bad-asses traveling for 2 months, but most of the people we´ve met have put us to shame. For example, we met a nice Australian couple, our age, with jobs similar to ours, who are on month 5 of a one year journey!!

 

Week two of our trip! It's been amazingly fun so far. It feels much, much longer than two weeks, in a good way, of course!

 

After lazing about on the beaches of Belize and visiting the Belize Zoo, we took a bus to St. Ignancio, in western Belize, where we spent two relaxing days hanging out in that cute town, including a full day of cave tubing on the Mopan River (river that runs through the town). Then we were off to Guatemala, straight to the ancient Mayan city of Tikal (to get there we had to take a bus, followed by a taxi to the Guatemalan border, then once we crossed the border we took another taxi, a mini bus and then a second mini bus - this all took about 4 hours).

 

Tikal was incredible. Most incredible was a hike to we took to the top of one of the temples to watch the sunrise. We hiked in pitch darkness at 5am to the sounds of howler monkeys. Apparently a howler monkey's howl sounds exactly like a jaguar's. Gulp.

 

After Tikal we stayed briefly in Flores (nothing exciting) on our way to Antigua (we actually flew from Flores to Guatemala City, then took a mini bus to our hotel in Antigua).

 

I love Antingua so far. We're here for a week, studying Spanish. It's a charming town of about 40,000, surrounded by volcanoes and with cobble-stoned streets. There are many students here from all over the world studying Spanish, and those students, combined with Antigua's rich history and gorgeous architecture gives the town a cosmpolitan and romantic feeling. The climate is temperate, there are no mosquitoes, and it's a perfect blend of authentic and comfortable. This is my favorite place so far.

 

Next stop is Lake Atitlan for about five days before we head off to...Colombia!