December 22-25 - Isla Mujeres

After a 20 hour bus ride from San Cristobal, I arrived in Cancun. I met up with a friend from the hostel that I had worked at and we headed out to spend my last couple of days in Mexico on a small island called Isla Mujeres. We basically just took it easy and layed around on the beach the whole time. It was a nice way to finish off this first part of my trip! After flying home for Christmas and staying home for a few months, I plan on flying back into Nicaragua to finish the trip I had planned. Until then!

December 18-20 - San Cristobal De Las Casas

I headed towards San Cristobal after leaving San Pedro. I had booked a flight back home for Christmas flying out of Cancun and needed to get back there for the 25th, and San Cristobal was on the way. We had stopped there back in November on the way to Palenque for a few hours between buses and really loved. I had regretted not staying for longer, mostly because it had a really wicked market, so it worked out nicely that I had to stop there. I decided to stay for two nights so that I could explore the town and do my Christmas shopping at the market. The market was as good as I remembered it, and had a lot of cheap amber since San Cristobal has an amber mine nearby. I picked up a few things, and then just wandered around the town. I had met a really interesting lady on the bus ride down who I met up with on both evenings to have dinner with and share travelling stories. It was a really relaxing few days, but I was excited to leave because I was so excited to come home!

December 1-18- San Pedro La Laguna

Lake Atitlan

Ally and I arrived in San Pedro on a Thursday night. We found a small hotel across from the school that she had signed up for that was reasonably priced. She was starting spanish classes on the coming Monday so I decided to check out the school to see what it was like. My original plan was to spend a few days at the lake because everyone had said it was really beautiful and then to head up to a small town called Todos Santos for spanish lessons. However after a few days here I decided to stay for one week of spanish lessons.
Over the weekend before classes started we kayaked across the lake, went to the local market and hung out with the rest of the tourist taking spanish classes.

Garden at San Pedro Spanish School

On Sunday afternoon we moved into our first homestay. The parents names were Pedro and Deborah. They were super friendly, but the meal portions were really small and I found that I was having to buy extra meals because it wasn´t enough. At the end of the first week of classes, I was still having a really good time so I decided to stay another week if I could switch homestays. There was a group leaving one of the family´s and they said that we would get our own bathroom and the portion sizes were huge so we decided to switch.
On Saturday night of the next weekend there was a full moon party about an hour from San Pedro. We decided to go although it was expensive because there was a zipline that you could do at midnight and because there were a lot of people from the school going. When we got up there it was freezing cold and we basically just sat around and drank for the first hour to try to ignore the cold. After about an hour we went ziplining. It was really fun because you really couldn´t see where you were going on the path or where you were going to be ziplining. There were two, the first being a shorter faster one and the second being a little slower but much longer. I had no clue what to expect because we were walking uphill in a forest. When I jumped off the deck for the zipline, I was still in the trees for about 2 seconds. Then all of a sudden I broke out of the trees and realized that we were ziplining across a valley. The moonlight completely lit up the valley below. It was awesom!

My three favorite people from San Pedro: Jo, Ryan and Ally

After we got back from ziplining, a lot of the people there were already either really drunk or really high. The music sucked and we basically sat around the fire till 6am waiting for the bus to drive us back. That part of the night sucked, but the zipline made it worth it!
That next morning we moved in with our new homestay. It was a new house, the rooms were really nice and as promised we got our own bathroom. We continued on with classes the next week but took it easy in the evenings until the weekend. Unfortunatly on the weekend we ended up getting the same intestinal infection that a lot of the students were also getting. Alli was a lot worse off then I was, but it still wasn´t fun.
I left San Pedro for Mexico on the 18th. I was really sad to leave. The people were awesome and the town was beatiful. It was definitely one of my favorite parts of my trip.