Rio Dulce, Guatemala - 10/22/2012

The blog has been pretty quiet lately, Sunny has been tied to the dock at Mario’s marina since the last update and we haven’t been doing a lot of blog worthy stuff. For 2 months, I (Carolynn) was up in Southern California helping to take care of my brother; Chuck who has been very sick. I left Tom and Ginger back in Guatemala to fend for themselves. Chuck is doing very well so I’m now back on the boat. Unfortunately only a few days after I returned, Tom got the bad news that his mother had fallen and broke her hip. He is now back in Northern California helping her with her recovery. It is very unclear as to when we will be moving on. This is a nice place though to be "stuck". The river is safe year round and there are enough cruisers moving in and out that there's usually something going on.

Looking back, I had not updated the blog since we first got to the river so here are a few things we did before I left for California:

Fourth of July party at the marina. Whole roasted pig in a pit, live music with a local band and xylophone and lots of friends and laughs:

One morning a group of us went up the river a mile or so to the old fort "Castilla de Sa Felipe". The fort guarded the Spanish galleons from the pirates while the Spanish were off plundering the Mayan gold. The river, and especially the bar at the entrance must have been much deeper back then.

Here we are at the head of the flotilla, about to be passed by the other, much faster dingys  (look at the concentration on Tom, but almost everyone's dingy is faster than ours).

On the way we saw this sign on the river, it says roughly: "I sell marijuana".  I verified this with a local who confirmed that yep, that's what it says and the authorities don't care as long as they sell to other locals, gringos if caught will get a "fine" (probably pocketed by the police).

The fort is set on a point of land with views both up and down river.  The fort is in the process of being restored and the grounds are beautifully manicured.

The fort, complete with a small moat and draw bridge:

View downriver back toward town:

View upriver toward lake Izabal:

The fort was a maze of narrow corridors and steep steps, good for thwarting invaders:

How do I load one of these?

A few weeks later we took a one day trip to Quirigua; a midsized Mayan site with some of the tallest stelas, or carved stone monuments. The local sandstone is very strong and not prone to shearing or fracturing, allowing the sculptors at Quiriguá to erect the tallest freestanding stone monuments in the Americas. Restored from the jungle from 1974 through 1979, it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981.  It was quite impressive, unfortunately the few signs were in spanish, so we probably lost a little in our understanding.

Stelas protected by palapa roofs:

Intricate carving

We then walked to the "ball park", those stairs were steep!

Well, that's about all for now.  There were a few other minor excursions and a few pictures from our trip back to California, but this update is long enough.  Our long term plans are very unclear with Tom still up north, hopefully we'll be able to move on sometime this winter.