A kind and considered reflection on the nature of the average traveller type.

Another 4am start this morning to catch the shuttle to Copan, Honduras. I was the last to bed and the first to rise in my dorm, which earnt me several hearty sighs and tuts... I tried my very best to be silent as I scrambled around in the dark at 3.30, but it is amazing how every rustle is amplified at that hour. It´s also funny how dorm attitudes vary- sometimes there´ll be someone who insists on going to bed at 8pm and giving everybody else an earful for waking them up or keeping the light on, but other times a dorm will happen to be a collection of similarly spineless people too polite to even turn the light off at 2am, simply because one person isn´t back yet (and yes, that actually happened in one hostel in Antigua).

Once on the shuttle, I was greeted by a familiar voice through the darkness. A couple of weeks ago in that refugee-camp known as the Jungle Party Hostel (which I returned to far too many times as a result of friends wanting to drink there, resulting in flashbacks of chicken broth and waves of nausea), I met an Aussie called Grant.
              "Hey Cheeeeka, my name´s Graaaaayyunt!" he said, in his charming Queensland accent.
              "Nice to meet you Grahhnt", I said in my sensible British one.
              "Nah mate, it´s Graaaaaaayyyunnnt!" he said, everything extra amplified and sweaty like some kind of Foster´s advert mockery.
              "No, I´m sorry I just can´t do that. I´m going to call you ´Grahnt´," and that was the end of that.

GraHnt was on the bus. He was whining on about something far too loudly for such an unearthly hour, until he took a sleeping tablet and began to snore like a horse. He fell asleep on an British girl´s shoulder who gave him and the rest of the bus an earful, which was amusing. Grahnt was thrown against the window and the bus slept.

Breakfast was a stop at a very sad looking road-side hotel. The dining room had disturbingly large (as in, mural-sized) black and white photos of 6 or 7 year old girls all over the walls. I had the worst chicken sandwhich in Guatemala and we set off for the Honduran border towards more heat and humidity.

*

San Pedro was quite fun, but not really what I´d expected it to be. Lake Antitlan is impressive, but the visibilty tends to get very poor in the afternoons. I did get up at 4am to climb up the "Indian Nose"- a part of one of the big hills, to see the sunrise, which was well worth it. A group of five of us and a guide, Juan, scrambled up in the dark from halfway up (hell no was I going to do the full 2 hour hike at 3am). We sat at the top, oohed and aahhed and took photos of the pink sky and awakening villages below and shared a pack of biscuits before agreeing to head back and find a fry-up. Juan looked confused, asking "Don´t you want to see the... sunrise?", which is when we realised that the sun hadn´t actually come up yet. Juan no doubt spent the afternoon laughing to his friends about the idiot Gringos. To get back down to the village, we jumped in the back of a pick up truck which was loaded up with the day´s supply of freshly baked bread, and clung on for dear life as we and the bread swung down the almost vertical hillside road.

There is a certain type of tourist that dwells in San Pedro la Laguna. He goes by the name of Giles, wears head to toe hemp, disregards the needs for shoes because he wants to "feel the earth", and spends the whole time off his face on drugs, inadvertantly insulting friends and saying ridiculously patronising things about the locals in his Eton school accent. This may sound a little harsh. But once you´ve been sat next to a charming but repungently smelly, hairy hippy girl at dinner and put off your food, you´ll think my rantings just. And yes I did meet a boy who was travelling around the world on his daddy´s credit card after failing to get into university. I wonder if daddy knows that Giles is spending his pocket money on MDMA and other concoctions of drugs with vague but edgy sounding initials: the hipsters of the drug brands- if more than ten people have heard of it, it´s just so not cool anymore.

Example conversation:

            "Oh man this AMT is really making me see the indigeonous tribes´ conflicts in a whole new light. It´s just such a shame that they can´t get together and do some TCP and feel the peace."

           "Yeah man, I mean poverty... flip... This combination of PIN and ATM is totally buzzing. The Mayans should really just merge all their languages, like make a new dictionary called... Mayan, I AM."

Put some bloody shoes on and have a wash and pay your tourist card fee and go home and get a job. In a mine or something.

So yes, I did enjoy San Pedro for a couple of days, but no mother I didn´t do any drugs. I was staying in a great hostel called Mr. Mullet´s, which was run by a crazy Dutch guy. He cut himself a mullet originally to annoy his girlfriend, but soon realised that to be serious at the front and chilled at the back was the best way to be. Now he runs his hostel with a dog called Whiskey, and offers a free night´s stay for anyone who will get a mullet. Some of my friends might not like my new look, but they should realise that we´re all just one big happy earth family and it´s wrong to judge people based on their cleanliness and ability to string a logical sentence together. In the words of somebody on FRIENDS once, I will wash when Tibet is free. Peace out.