I’m going to backtrack slightly in this post, as I finished the last one mentioning I had gotten to Antigua and was looking for a Spanish school. Which was true. But I actually ended up postponing the start of lessons slightly. It has had a negative effect on my budget planning but I’m a few Guatemalan experiences richer, so I’m happy.

It was a longer bus ride to Antigua than anticipated but it didn’t lack for beautiful Guatemalan landscape. And it was lovely to be back when I finally made it there. I like the vibe in Antigua. Coffee shops, cafes, bars that play The Cure (without me harrassing the bar staff), markets, frozen yogurt shops, street food, ATMs that let you withdraw money. The kind of place that makes me happy.

I spoke to several language schools and apparently it’s the busy season because none of the ones I spoke to had both classes and a host family available till the following week. I had already been thinking of just doing 2 ½ weeks of classes and then head to Semuc Champey for a few days before having to be back in Antigua at the end of the month but suddenly it seemed more logical to change the order of things. I had a night when I woke up at 3am and couldn’t fall back asleep. So I put on London Grammar and ran the days, bus times, prices and general options through my head and eventually decided to let the language school gods dictate how to re-plan things. I fell asleep again at some point before the end of the album, only to be woken up again around just before 5.30. By an earthquake. The epicentre was in San Marcos, near the Mexican border, so quite far from Antigua so we just felt about 30 seconds of shaking, the beds and lamps were moving but it had subsided by the time I really realised what was happening. But I was definitely happy to have relocated from a top bunk that night.

The first hostel I stayed at in Antigua was a bit quiet so after 2 nights, I changed to another one. Which was very noisy (expected, given the name was Jungle Party Hostel. My brain said ‘ew, don’t even think of going there’ but I didn’t listen) so I’m thinking that overall the two even themselves out. We went on a pub crawl on Monday afternoon (oh how my Mondays are different in Central America) – the kind that’s ridiculously social and you chat to loads of people and by 8pm the people who made an effort to learn your name at the first two bars refer to you only as ‘the Danish girl!’ when they stumble past you. But hey, at least they remembered my face.

So after a few extra days of not studying in Antigua, I booked a bus to Lanquin to visit Semuc Champey. My pre-departure research was clearly poor because I hadn’t even heard of this place until meeting people travelling through Guatemala in the opposite direction who have talked about it being one of their highlights in Guatemala. It was a place very consistently described as amazing. And it worked out that I could do the round-trip from Antigua and back in 3 days which meant I’d be back in time to start Spanish classes at the weekend.

I’d been warned that it was a long drive and that roads aren’t great and not to expect to be able to nap along the way. That was all correct. A chicken bus would have been more comfortable than the one we were on, it took 8 ½ hours to get there and we spent a significant amount of time driving up and down the hills of central Guatemala on gravel roads. I got no sleep.

The hostel I stayed at in Lanquin was the best one I’ve stayed in on this trip so far. The cold showers and non-existent wi-fi was made up for by the setting – right on the river, dorm rooms and cabanas strewn across the hillside, connected via stone paths. There was a deck right on the river with a few hammocks and the bar had an open-fire BBQ. The day I arrived they had on a huge BBQ dinner so for 60Q we ate mountains of barbecue chicken, mashed potatoes, salad, omelette and stir-fry vegetables. An expensive but welcome change from tortillas and frijoles. Afterwards, we got a team together for the quiz and showed the rest how it’s done! I think the team-building drinks, instigated and insisted upon along the way by the American guy on my team, were a contributing factor to the victory. As was the unimaginative (and uninformed) guess of ‘Sanchez’ for one of the questions in the ‘Guatemala’ category. We won 6 litres of not-so-chilled beer. Which were then used for a boat race against the neighbouring team so we felt like quite the generous crew. That evening, I also realised that I have become too conditioned to the San Pedro version of ring of fire because there were some rules I was really struggling to get people around to in Semuc.

The next day was the actual day-trip to Semuc Champey and for lack of a better description, it was amazing. I feel like I’m throwing that word around a lot these days so I’ll try to expand my vocabulary going forwards but this place was seriously incredible. My photos don’t even come close to doing it justice. Nor does my account of it in writing. It was without a doubt the best day I’ve had in a very very very long time, I just felt really distinctly happy and excited. If I could live that day over again, I would in a heartbeat. 100 times. Even though I regret not jumping off the bridge. But oh well, perfection isn’t really something I’m familiar with.

We started out the day on the back of a pickup truck for the 10km drive, down an even more narrow gravel road, to get to the entrance of Semuc Champey. Semuc Champey means “where the river hides beneath the earth” in the Mayan Qéqchi´ language, which turned out to be a pretty sensible description. We climbed to the mirador for an incredible view of the pools before making our way down for a swim in them. Then our guide took us on an exploratory wander through the pools – we climbed over rocks, swam across the pools, went down rock water-slides, dived underneath rock overhangs. At one point, we stopped at the edge of a pool and looked down a 10m waterfall and the guide asked if we wanted to go see a little cave underneath the smaller waterfall next to it. Once we got reassurance it would not involve jumping down the waterfall we were looking at, all 15 of us agreed. We walked down a path from where we climbed over rocks and then swam to a larger rock, perched in the river. In front of us, a river flowed out from under the mountain with a pretty ferocious-looking current. It was probably only about 5 meters across to a rock face on the other side with a waterfall running over rocks alongside it. The guide then demonstrated that we needed to dive in, swim as fast as possible so the current didn’t take us too far away to get to the rock, then grab on and climb up the rock face. I feel quite comfortable in water and consider myself a pretty decent swimmer but I must admit I was slightly worried about what I had gotten myself into when I came up from that dive. That current was most definitely not to be taken lightly.

A group of us ended up getting across (don’t worry, nothing happened to the others, they just didn’t want to attempt it) and proceeded to climb up the rock, literally just putting feet and hands in crevices. About 6 meters up we then had to get across the waterfall to get into the cave. The guide stood with one leg in the cave and one leg on a rock in the middle of the waterfall and we then had to put our left leg across his and then let him pull us across to grab onto another rock so we’d be able to pull ourselves into the cave. Somehow, we all made it unharmed. I can’t for the life me work out how. He told us a story about a time when two people fell into the river further up the mountain and came out in the river we had just crossed as bones after 42 days. And then we needed to get back. At that moment, I wished I hadn’t stood at the back of the group because it meant I had to go out first. We could gently slide about halfway down the waterfall but from there, it was jump and swim to get back. No demonstration from our guide this time, he just pointed into the river where to aim the jump at and then said to swim as fast as possible and I literally put all my trust in this random guide that he was telling me the right thing to do and jumped in. We all made it safely back across as well, but I have a renewed respect for water.

Part of the Semuc Champey experience I had been told about from others involved going into the Grutas Las Marias, carrying just a candle to light up the way. I had also heard stories of people dropping their candle into the water and having to rely on the glow of other people’s candles to find their way so I brought my headtorch as back-up. It took about 10min. before we had to swim through a pool of water and it lost its life. My candle lasted the entire way. I clearly need to learn to trust the system more. The route through the caves took about an hour in total. We walked across rocks, climbed up unstable ladders, swam through pools of water, hung onto ropes for guidance. At one point, we got to a small pool which the guide told us we could jump into by climbing up the rocks along the side. It was a jump of about 4 meters. The pool was tiny and the first guy from my group that jumped said he touched the bottom when he landed. Safety didn’t seem to strike me as very high on the agenda. Four people had jumped and I was still deciding if I should do it or not. It took one of the fellow Scandinavians in the group to respond with a resounding ‘JA!’ when I asked him if he thought I’d regret it if I didn’t do it to get me to even attempt the climb up there. When I got to the top I was seriously regretting the decision. It looked a freakin’ long way down and the area we needed to land in to not hit the rocks on the shallow side looked freakin’ tiny. Please bear in mind that despite spending the better part of 8 years of my childhood in a swimmingpool, I have never jumped off the 5m board. And I can count the number of times I jumped off the 3m on one hand. I said I couldn’t do it and was just going to climb down again but the guide just laughed at that suggestion and said the safest way down was to jump. On the first count to three, I didn’t. On the second count, I did. And it was an awesome feeling!

At that point, I felt confident that I’d do the 8m jump off the bridge we came across on the way into Semuc Champey as well. The night before, someone had told me how much he regretted not having done that jump and tried to get me to promise I’d do it. I’m obviously not the kind of person who would make that kind of promise without having assessed the situation myself first but I said I’d keep his sentiment in mind. After some rather uneventful tubing down the river, we were back at the bridge. And I didn’t jump. No one in my group did. Which is annoying because I think that it would only have taken 1 or 2 people to have done it and I would have done it too (that saying “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?” comes to mind. In this case, that might have played out as “If one of these random people you met 7 hours ago jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?”. The answer to the second version would probably have been different from the answer to the first. Travelling is probably starting to affect me a bit). In hindsight, I wholeheartedly regret not jumping. So I’m secretly hoping for other 8m jumps off bridges in the near future.

As I’ve already mentioned, my photos don’t do Semuc justice so if you get the chance to go there, do it. But promise me you’ll jump off the bridge so I can live vicariously through you. We finished the day with another feast of a meal at the hostel, plotting everyone’s onward travel plans the next day. The trip was short but sweet. I could have done a few more days just chilling in Lanquin but I have Spanish to attempt to learn so back to Antigua I’ve gone. But with awesome memories of one of the best experiences ever.

Today I’m listening to: London Grammar – ‘Nightcall’