Monte Rico, Guatemala
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
So we came down to the coast as we are fed uo of waiting for things in antigua so thought we would come down to Monterrico for one or two days to wait for the things to arrive. The drive down was pretty chilled, good road for most of the way, a newish bridge (opened in 2007) to get us onto the road to Monterrico, then a rather bumpy road into town. I use the word town quite loosely. The beach is a volcanic beach on the pacific coast with huge surf, warm water and warm sand. The town itself is pretty run down, definitely not the typical beachside town resort aimed at tourists, which is nice. It's very genuine, with mostly locals around, and a turtle sanctuary. Three types of turtles come here to nest between july and december. At one time there were 250 species of sea turtles; now there are only eight worldwide. Of those eight, three species are indigenous to the southern coast of Guatemala: Parlama Blanca (the Olive Ridley), Parlama Negra (the East Pacific Green), and the largest of the sea turtles, Baule (the Leatherback). The Parlama Negra and Baule both nest on the beach in montericco, with the Baule nesting from late october to december. Unfortunately a lot of the locals collect the eggs to sell either for food or for potions etc which are thought to be aphrodisiacs. Luckily the turtle sanctuary collects some of the eggs either from the collectors or from tourists who donate them, hatch them in incubators, then let tourists release them back into the sea. We are hoping to go along and do this tonight. We will also be looking for any mums coming ashore to lay there eggs, but this is apparently quite rare, so unlikely we'll see it happen.
We drove past 3 volcanos on the way down here, ague, fuere and pacaya. Fuere and pacaya are both still active. We couldn't see much of pacaya as it was completely engulfed in cloud, and was all but the top of fuere, but interesting scenery none the less. I had read about a nice family friendly hotel a couple of kms out of Montericco which we headed for as most of the hotels in town looked deserted and pretty run down. Having stayed in a lovely hotel in Antigua, we were a bit reluctant to stay in the hotels in town. The place we are is a lovely beach side resort, with 10 rooms, 2 swimming pools and a restaurant and bar looking out over the beach, pretty idillic to sit and chill for a few days whilst hopefully our plates for the car wing their way to us.....
