Day 51 - Semuc Champey is the furthest south I'm going on this adventure motorcycling trip. I was about to head back today, but decided to take a rest day and do laundry, and will head out in the morning. It is hard to turn around and point the nose of the bike north, because even though it's a long way back, mentally it means the trip is over.

It rained really hard last night, and while waiting for my laundry to be done, I caught a ride back to Semuc Champey from Lanquin. Click here for a video of what the shuttle is like. Wow, what a difference from yesterday. The river is now too high in volume for the cave to drink all of it, and the water is flooding over the tops of the pools. They are completely flooded and brown, unsafe for swimming, and quite unnattractive as compared to the beautiful turquise of yesterday. Compare the first photo above to the shot of the same location from yesterday. It was quite exciting being right next to the raging river, and what a contrast from the day before. Click here for a video the river at flood stage.

In other news, reports are starting to come in from arriving tourists of two separate natural disasters to the south: Pacaya has erupted! After 12 years of being a good little tourist friendly volcano to roast marshmallows in the lava, it erupted, covering Guatemala City in 2-3 inches of ash, closing the airport, and destroying the road where you hike from (in fact the whole town nearby is evacuated). It will be weeks or months before it is reopened to tourism, so that's a real bummer for me.

Secondly, the storm sitting off the coast became the named Tropical Storm Agatha, and flooding from the rains destroyed dozens of bridges in the country, wiped out a lot of roads with landslides, and killed over 170 people in mudslides. It's going to be tricky getting out of here.