Jagged Little Pili

Got up at 4:30am and packed in total darkness since the electricity in the hotel is generated from solar panels and a generator. Unfortunately there had not been enough sun recently and so they only turned the generator on from 6pm - 10pm. We woke up Paive and said goodbye to her and headed off back to Coban on a minibus full of locals and some other tourists. Got to Coban at around 7:30 and set about looking for the supposed direct bus to El Estor and hunting down some money. Two of the cash machines were broken, third time lucky though. Taxi driver then took us to a place where there were minibuses to El Estor... supposedly.

Got to the place and the only minibus was going to Teleman, since we had no choice and wanted to get to El Estor asap we took it. It took 4 hours on an incredibly bad road to get to Teleman, it was no better than the dirt track (and in fact worse) that leads from my grandad's house to his fields. For anyone that has not seen it, you don't want to...

In Teleman we managed to get a connecting minibus straight away, which was good, since the place was a dump. In fact, all the towns along the route were no better than a collection of mud huts (I may be exaggerating.) I was glad every time we were on the move since I was having nightmares about getting stuck in one of these places.

Eventually got to El Estor at around 2pm. We'd been on the road for 9 hours at this stage. Called up Finca el Paraiso (some 30mins away to make sure they had room) and once that was confirmed we set about finding a pick up going towards Rio Dulce to drop us off at the finca.

Went over to some guy that was supposedly going to Rio Dulce and asked how much he would charge us to go to Finca El Paraiso, 10Q. Seemed reasonable, he said we had to wait for more people to want to go to Rio Dulce though. He loaded our bags and we waited. A few minutes later he said to me something along the lines of "It seems like people don't feel like going to Rio Dulce, so you'll have to pay me the whole trip." I wasn't sure what he was talking about so I asked him to be more clear and tell us how much he wanted us to pay him. 100Q!!!! We took our bags off and said we'd rather pay that to go on a taxi.

Went over to the taxi rank and asked a man how much for Finca el Paraiso. 200Q. There were at least 5 other taxis there so I thought I should try my luck with them instead. They seemed interested in the conversation as well, so I shouted out:"Who will take us for 100Q?" Everyone seemed to want to, but we went over to some guy who then increased the 100Q to 150Q. So we walked off with the guy that gave us the 100Q price. It was the best car there as well.

Got to Finca El Paraiso, which was as its name describes a paradise after the day's travels. We lay in the hammock and chilled out.