Portland

I arrived in Portland smoothly this morning, already back at Lindsey's house and ready to take a nap.

Returning Home

Tomorrow I will be flying out of Guatemala City Airport just after 2 pm here. I first go through Miami, and then fly to Las Vegas where I have an 11 pm - 7am layover, and finally will arrive in Portland at 9 on Wednesday, just a few hours after Lindsey gets back from Alaska. After spending some time there I will go up to Seattle for a bit before continuing on to Wenatchee for a little while. I dont have any solid time frames yet, just that I have a rotation in Spokane starting July 7th, and am hoping to spend the 4th of July in Wenatchee.

This past week I went to Semuc Champey, a beautiful natural limestone bridge over the river that is 300m long and forms gorgeous pools that you can swim through. There was a very exciting cave exploration as well. You go about 1 km back into this cave with just candles, swimming through deep water, climbing up waterfalls, and having to make a few leaps as well. Definitely not something I would ever have been able to do back home.

Semuc Champey

I worked it out to leave for Semuc Champey tomorrow morning, will spend Thursday and Friday there then come back to Guatemala City on Saturday. The weather looks like it might rain a lot, but hopefully not too much.

Here are some pictures from my trip to Tikal

Update

We just came back to Guatemala City last night at midnight. The majority of the Guatemalans returned on Saturday but a few of us went with the group here up to Tikal, which was very cool to see. Its quite spread out in a humid joungle, with big stone pyramids all over the place. Very cool to walk through. It started absolutely pouring rain when we got back to the hotel to shower and load up to leave, and so loading the pickup with equipment under the tarps was quite interesting, hah.

The trip to the villages near Puerto Barrios was great. We visited two different villages, the first one was about 1.5 - 2 hours by pickup into the jungle, and the second was a half hour closer. it was interesting to see the difference, the first village we went to was a relatively new clinic location, they have only been going there for a year or so and the people were much more reserved. The other village has been site for about 10 years and the people there were much more eager and seemed happier to see us. It was incredibly humid as well as quite hot, basically as soon as the pickups stopped moving and I got out of the back I would start sweating and not stop until we left, often drenching through my scrubs entirely. Virtually everyone had parasites or amoebiasis. The group that came from the US was a bunch of high schoolers that had just graduated, maybe 17 of them or so, so when I first met them all I was a bit worried about how things would go but they turned out to be great and worked quite hard without any complaining.

Now I am hoping to arrange to go up to Semuc Champey this week, maybe Wednesday or Thursday, nd stay for a few days. Trying to get that all figured out now but it looks like it should be really fun. I think the other interns here are hoping to join me, which should be good.