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Five days later and I’m still here. I’d expected to be gone by now, but will stay yet another night. On arrival here in Livingston, we were greeted by an old Garifuna man, offering to show us a hotel just around the corner. No pressure, if we don’t like it, we don’t have to stay. It was cheap, at 25Q per person. It had a kitchen, showers, bathrooms, hammocks to hang out in.. it was perfect. As we were being shown the room, I heard from the next room over two voices speaking Japanese. Two very familiar voices. I shouted “Akira!?” and sure enough, Akira and Takara come out of the room. Two Japanese kids I had met and lived with for almost a month in San Cristobal, Chiapas. I had known that at some time they would be in Livingston, but never thought we would be here at the same time, let alone in the same hotel, in the next room over.

This of course led to a huge reunion party which required a complete day of recovery. Sunday night we met an Austrian guy named Thom. Pretty cool dude. The next day Thom, Akira, Takara, Vincente and I all walked 90 minutes from the city, along the beach to a Siete Altares, or Seven Altars. Siete Altares is a succession of waterfall fed pools that were absolutely stunning. The water was a beautiful opaque sky blue, and one of them was quite large and very swimmable with an overhanging 12 foot cliff. Needless to say there was plenty of swimming, cliff-jumping and an excellent time had by all. On the hour and a half walk back to town we say w a really beautiful bungalow set right on the beach. We asked the price, and were told 40Q per person. We left, but decided we would come back the next night.

So yesterday, while preparing our supplies for our night at the beach, we ran into two more friends from San Cristobal, Josue and Nanako. This took quite a bit of time, to catch up and such. When we finally split off to go to the beach, Josue and Nanako went to stay somewhere cheaper, and we somehow ended up with Josue’s dog, Damon. Along the hour long walk to the bungalow, damon had quite an excellent time chasing sticks Akira threw into the ocean. When we arrived at the bungalow we got the price from 160Q for four people down to 100Q, by telling them we would buy beer in the restaurant. It didn’t take long to realize we needed more than one night in this beautiful spot. We’ve got four chairs surrounding a table on a balcony overlooking the Carribean. No more than 40 feet from the water. We’ll head back to Livingston for food and supplies today, then leave tomorrow morning for Flores. From there we will camp in Tikal, before heading back to San Cris City.