Kenny and I were expecting to make our Belize/Guatemala trip a fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants kind of deal: we figured we wouldn’t really book hotels, and would only chart out a loose itinerary.
But I started reading about Tikal, and how it would be nice to have a hotel near the ruins rather than staying in Flores so that we could see the sunrise in the park. Since there are only a couple of hotels near the ruins, I decided that it would be best to book something. So I did.
Then we got to talking about the fact that we’ll be arriving in Belize rather late in the day and we might not want to go traipsing around Ambergris Caye looking for a place to sleep. So I booked a hotel there too.
Three days later, we have hotels booked for our entire trip, except for the last stop in Antigua. My guess is we’ll book something for Antigua soon.
So much for being spontaneous. I guess we are “planners” after all.
He, I’ve been to Guatemala five years ago, we just went whereever we felt like, never have booked a room in advance.
We always been lucky, when we fell sick on the bus to Flores (I ate all kinds of stuff from the street markets and never had a problem, but eating one bite of the sandwich coming with the expensive luxus bus ride killed me for five days) we found the nicest place to stay in Flores, we had no trouble at all to get a room anywhere, even at Tikal we found one immediately.
Speaking of which, viewing the sunSET from pyramid No. IV (or was it V? Or VII? Dammit, got a memory leak here) would probably the most memorable thing for any vacation.
Not because the sunset is stunning, but because first the climb up the steep stairs is an adventure (I stopped halfway), but because after you watched the sun set it will be pitch dark in a matter of mere minutes, you’ll have to climb (fall?) down a pyramid in darkness *and* walk back through the jungle to your hotel.
When I was there I’ve been lucky. We watched the sun set from down below, found ourself in darkness right in the middle of the jungle, but been lucky, a park ranger took us with his jeep back to our hotel. I wonder what became of all those who’d been watching the sundown from up there ;)
Oh, and if you hear anything growling like a big man eating cat in the night there, it probably will be the apes who have a lot of fun scaring lost visitors this way ;*)
Ah yes, Tikal, what a nice area. Fancy birds, lovely spiders in holes in the ground, scorpions at the bedroom window. I’d visit it again if it where not that far away from europe.
Have fun on your trip!
Last year in Israel, two of my Polish friends decided that they were going to teach me how to be spontaneous. I never really succeeded, though they kept springing things on me so I learned to be more easy going. Really, I have found that the only way for me to be spontaneous is to be apathetic. If I am apathetic then I don’t plan anything which of course just ends up proving Newtonian physics. I don’t think that I could be terribly spontaneous, though, about international travel; it would make me too nervous. In fact, having the hotels planned will probably make spontaneity easier in terms of sight-seeing because you won’t have to spend time each day figuring out where you’ll be sleeping. Now I will cease my spontaneous checking of blogs and go back to writing entries in an annotated bibliography on Orthodox Judaism in Germany in the nineteenth century.