Flores

Once again at our hostal in Guatemala City, Lori and I awoke at 5:00 a.m., met Beth at arrivals and went right upstair to departures. In a stroke of trip-planning genius Lori had booked our flight to Flores for just about exactly as long after Beth's arrival as it takes to get through the check-in line and through security, and to walk out to the gate. It wasn't long after we sat down to wait, that we heard the first boarding call.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="424" caption="The lake from our room"][/caption]

Fourty-five minutes later we were in Tikal's "gateway" city of Flores. A dense little of node of hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops and tour agencies on an island in Lake Petén Itzá. After stashing our bags at the hotel we learned that we had five hours before our room was available. Not being one to sit on her laurels, Lori promptly found us a cave and we set off through Flores' dirtier big sibling Santa Elena, past a power plant and down a dusty dirt road .

An oldish gentleman with decent English tooks us on a rather unscientific tour of the cave, mostly pointing out mineral formations that resembled things like horses and women. He was careful to point out all the photo-ops and even made sure to ask us if each picture had come out okay. Some highlights included seeing live bats and scrambling on our bellies through narrow passages. My favorite part was when he turned out all the lights and it was just pitch black. For a while we even stood in perfect silence and in perfect darkness.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="430" caption="Climbing into a cavern"][/caption]