Time has been racing by, and we haven´t been doing as well as we had hoped at keeping this blog up to date. We have a million pictures to post, but have had difficulty posting them (not tech savvy enough).
Anyway, just wanted to share some comments about our trip to the Petén with the Dentists. We left here on Wednesday, March 3, 2016 in a big and very nice Nissan van carrying 8 adults and all of our luggage plus the dental equipment to do screenings in San Benito. We drove down the road to the Atlantic as they call it, and stopped to see the ruins at Quiriguá. That was an important Mayan city on the Montagua River that was a hub of commerce in Jade and Obsidian. The interesting thing about the site to me was the tall stelai with Mayan images and inscriptions telling about their kings. Amazingly these stones were found still standing upright in the jungle after 1,000 years! That is just incredible to me. We travelled as far as Rio Dulce that day and stayed in the Catamaran Hotel on the Rio Dulce, a hotel comprised of separate huts, some on stilts over the water. The next morning we drove through the Petén to Tikal, the famous ruins that Mary Ann and I visited last November. We stayed in the park in the Jungle Inn. We toured the ruins and enjoyed our time together. The hotel was very nice, but they turn all the electricity in the park off at night, and it was a total blackout, like being in a cave! I had to creep through the hotel room with my hands out in front of me to feel my way to the bathroom--it was a hoot.
The next morning the ladies did some shopping buying handy crafts from the Mayans, and then we drove into Flores, the island city on Lago Petén Itza where we had stayed in November. On Saturday, they did dental screenings for future and serving missionaries at the stake center in San Benito. I helped set up and translate. It was fun getting to visit with the missionaries and with the young people heading out on missions, many of them young women. It is wonderful to see these faithful young people willing to go and serve the Lord as missionaries. They are bright and clean and such just plain inspiring to me.
Later that afternoon, the Sanfords, a couple who has a home in Pine Valley, Utah, and we drove over next to the Belizean border to visit the archaeological site of Yaxha. It was a very interesting place to visit, a beautiful lakeside Mayan city with three sisters cities in the area and more than 200 settlements surrounding them. It was a busy place in its heyday. The highlight is sitting atop the highest temple above the jungle canopy at sunset and watching the sun set over the beautiful lake below. There were very few people in the park, and it was a very peaceful, spiritual place. As always it made me wish I could have walked those streets and plazas in the day of their glory and known the people who built such impressive cities.
Sunday morning we attended Church with the Santa Elena ward and then started the long drive back. We drove to Rio Dulce and again stayed in the Catamaran hotel. On Monday morning before we headed back to Guate, we took a four hour river tour down the Rio Dulce River to Livingston on the Caribbean coast and back. We saw many interesting sights, like Castillo de San Felipe where the early settlers defended the entrance to Lago Izabal from the pirates, the mangrove forests, natural hot springs, and the gorge through which the river carves its way to the ocean. There were homes and sailboats and yachts all along the river, the properties of retired foreigners getting away from it all. But all along the river were also little Mayan villages where the native people live in their houses on stilts and fish the river in their dugout canoes, speaking only their native Mayan tongue. It was another world!
