Good bye Guatemala, hello Nokia.
Published by bbt September 17th, 2006 in bernard, personal, runningwithbulls.com, scuba diving, travelSo, 3 continents, and 4 timezones later, I am back.
create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide
Belize was excellent. Belizeans are so much different to Guatemalans. I have not been to any Caribbean Islands, but I can guess they will be like the Belizeans. For a country that has alot of poor people, they are happy and cheerful. The diving was simply out of this world. Viz. of 30m. I have never seen anything like it. Nurse sharks swimming between your legs and nudge you to see if you are scared.
Electric green conger eels with flash blue eyes.
My body really feels like if its been battered. Its weird. I have pains in my legs, arms, all down my back.
I dont know what time my body is on. Like Cayce. My left side is on Miami time, and the right side is somewhere over the Atlantic.
This time yesterday in Guatemala I was sitting on a plane coming back from El Petén (specifically Florés and Santa Elena), after spending 7 hours hiking around Tikal. (Get a VR tour around the sites of Tikal)
Tikal is amazing. To witness waterducts built almost over 2000 years ago, still in operation, with astronomical time device, with the confusingly complicated Mayan calendric systems.
After arriving back in Florés from a 2 hours minibus journey, driven by the Guatemalan Alonso, we had a swim in Lake Petén Itza, and watched the fork lightening coming our way.
The flight back via Miami was horrible. As some people already know, I was not looking forward to entering the USA. And as a was travelling there with Taca, I thought maybe I was wrong to think that.
– Of 15 public telephones I tried to use in Miami airport, I was unable to make an international call from any of the, either with American money, or Mastercard.
– None of the security personnel were able to answer questions. Simple specific questions like “may I borrow a pen”, “I am sorry, which form do you want”, “where is the nearest public toilet”.
– When I asked what US government departments would have access to my retina scan and finger prints I was asked to stop asking questions and move on.
– 3 security personnel did not know where Ireland, or Europe was.
– Asking airline officials, simple, specific, yes/no answer questions was useless.
Maybe I just caught them on a bad day, but my worries seem to have been correct.
Has anyone else had problems like this?
There was no Internet access (not even mobile access in Belize, or El Petén) so there was no blogging. Although I did write some pieces, I will try and post them when I organise the scribblings.
Anyway, the 3 hours I had to wait in Miami airport was well worth it for the fantastic experiences I had in Central America.
Now I have Belén returning and my new job to look forward to!
Technorati Tags: runnningwithbulls.com , guatemala , belize , travel , american airports , exhaustion
2 Responses to “Good bye Guatemala, hello Nokia.”
Leave a Reply
Search
- (199)
- runningwithbulls.com (199)
- Belén (9)
- bernard (325)
- food (9)
- comida gallego (1)
- recipes (1)
- music (13)
- personal (94)
- scuba diving (2)
- politics/world affairs (37)
- basque politics (4)
- irish politics (17)
- tech (269)
- apple (14)
- mac os x (11)
- cisco (1)
- comment-spam (2)
- data protection (35)
- data retention (30)
- digitalrights (35)
- digitalrightsireland (38)
- internet (137)
- irishblogs (190)
- nokia siemens networks (23)
- privacy (33)
- software (8)
- treo650 (10)
- voip (15)
- *@home (2)
- asterisk@home (2)
- wifi (34)
- fon (21)
- apple (14)
- travel (20)
- travel galicia (3)
- travel spain (3)
- travel vasco (5)
- food (9)
- General (12)
- media (3)
- video (3)
- nokia770 (7)
- sanfermin (12)
- el-encierro (6)
- la peña de vodka (1)
- pobre de mi (1)
- Jack Lukeman - When The Moon Is High
Played on 11 Oct 2008 @ 11:02:04 - Cyril+Pahinui+%26+Bob+Brozman - Ku'u Lei
Played on 11 Oct 2008 @ 10:53:57 - Mme. Rivier's Hawaiians (The Moes) - Mai Kai No Kauai
Played on 11 Oct 2008 @ 10:51:45 - Benny Nawahi - Tickling The Strings
Played on 11 Oct 2008 @ 10:48:19 - Kalama's Quartet - Sassy-Kalama's Quartet
Played on 11 Oct 2008 @ 10:44:57
Syndicate



I though the black helos come to take you away after the last post Bernard.
hi adam,
yeah. i didn’t feel too happy walking through the “border control” desk. and then talking to those ignorant security people.
hopefully i won’t have to go there for a very long time..