This part of my blog has never been writ­ten down.    I’m going to  try to recre­ate it from mem­ory.  It’s only going to get fog­gier as time past.

I watched the scene in (the two tow­ers?) where Frodo is going to Mor­dor via the black gate, Smeagol tells him about another way – a bet­ter way. I took that to heart.  I decided to go no fur­ther.  This was too stress­ful, and not fun at all.   I’ve decided to return to the States, and make my way back to Seattle.

From Coban, I decide to head back via Tikal, in Guatemala.  I don’t remem­ber too much about this leg of the trip, but Tikal was some­what inter­est­ing.  The first night I was there I got a hotel near the ruins that let you get into the park early (Pho­tog­ra­phers Curse.)  It was pretty inter­est­ing in that it was pretty iso­lated.  We had a some­what early din­ner, and retired shortly after sun­set.  There was only one gen­er­a­tor for the entire place, and it shut down about 30 min­utes after dark.  Once the gen­er­a­tor shut down, it was some­what noisy.  It was insects, mon­keys, birds and god knows what else.    There was also a young-ish (hon­ey­moon?) cou­ple.  This first night they were fight­ing quite a bit.   Very unpleas­ant to say the least.

The next morn­ing we get up early to be first at the ruins.  It was pretty cool, which was unex­pected since you’re in the foggy (steamy?) jun­gle.  We were in a group of about seven peo­ple (includ­ing the new­ly­weds.)  The com­plete ruins are huge, and there were many really cool things to see.  On the tour, they just took us to the biggest, most impres­sive ruins (the tallest tem­ples), but then let us run loose.   After wan­der­ing around for a while, I found myself chas­ing some mon­keys in a tree with my cam­era.  There was a chubby British girl doing the same thing.  We spent some time look­ing at the mon­keys, and spend the next few hours together.  I was  a nice respite from the soli­tude.   After going our sep­a­rate ways, it was time for din­ner at the hotel again, and then an early night.  The hon­ey­moon cou­ple had made up, and were mak­ing love just as loudly as they were argu­ing last night.  Eeeww…