moving mountains: Turtle gal? Tortlegle? Tortugal!

Posted by Alexander

Buying nuts in Fronteras. This guy saw us coming, and definitely charged us the tourist price. We didn't do the math quickly enough, and didn't figure it out until after we got back to the boat.

We have arrived at the vacation destination! The place everyone’s been talking about! And since nobody has ever heard of it I’ll describe it to you.

We rolled into Tortugal just a few days ago.

Walking into Fronteras, the main town on the Rio Dulce.

(This blog was written a few days after a few days ago). When I say rolled I mean sort of shuffled into a space. It was kind of like parallel parking a boat. We had to tie our front to the dock then edge our back around and tie it on to two posts in the water. Once we did that we were free to check out Tortugal, which is the marina where we are staying. The pictures are of Fronteras, the town near Tortugal, and not of the Marina itself.

The main street of Fronteras. Really just a spot on the highway that is lined by markets and stores. There are no sidewalks, so you have to be careful not to get hit by a car coming by.

The marina has a little swim platform out in the river which is really great for when the day gets hot; which it does. There is also a bar which is great for when the kids get bored! (Kidding!) What is great for when the kids get bored is that they have a pool table. They also have a ton of movies but I’ve never heard of any of them and the only ones that look decent are in Spanish.

This is what your mom would look like is she was a luchador who fought for the cause of low prices.

There are also washrooms and showers but those are everywhere.

Mom and Dad are planning an awesome trip for us while we’re here in Guatemala. We’re going to go on a big drive and see a bunch of cool places like Mayan ruins! I’m very excited and we should be going in a few days. We’ll take tons of pictures and the blog will most likely flood with blogyness.

On our first night here we got the bar’s pizza which was really good. They were supposed to show a movie too but it looked pretty boring so instead we hooked Katie up with Despicable Me 2 and Christopher and I watched the Dark Knight. (This movie is kind of dark but really awesome so if you haven’t seen it and your not four you should watch it).

Yesterday we went on a little trip into town. By town I mean the highway which was covered in stores and people and trucks and cars. It was pretty crazy but we were determined to go get some ice cream. (We ended up with the lame stuff from Nestle). So we set off down the road. Now I’m pretty sure that we had like a 52% chance of being run down while walking on this highway so it’s amazing I’m writing this at all. Even this cat was almost run over! (Actually, the bike is stationary).

Cool cat hanging out by his bike in Fronteras.

Apparently chicken is a big deal because unless we walked in a circle we passed a Pollo Express, (Chicken express) walked two more minutes and passed another one. We finally got our Ice cream and got out of there but it was kind of nice to get a look at the town.