Hello everyone! First of all I am very sorry that I have not posted on here for so long. I have been very busy, but also a little bit lazy. It takes so much time to write on here so I hope that you can understand!

At the moment, I am in Belize in a place called Placencia. It's really amazing here. Today I went snorkelling and swam past a Nurse Shark and various other marine life.. (think Finding Nemo). I really enjoyed it and definitely want to do it again before I go.

For this past week I have been travelling through Guatemala and have now eventually landed in Belize. Me and my friend Lucy firstly went to a place called Semuc Champey in Guatemala. It's a beautiful place. It is a huge river which over time has eroded in to huge pristine blue large almost lakes. There is a massive limestone cave system underneath these lakes, so we decided to do the caving aswell. This was also very cool, a little bit scary as out guide just seemed to disappear into the darkeness, leaving us with just (very short and fast burning) candles in the middle of a wet cave. Wonderful. We stayed at a place called El Ritiro which was again a lovely hotel next to a river.

After we stayed at El ritiro for 2 nights, we then travelled onto the Rio Dulce which is closer to the Caribbean side of Guatemala. We stayed on the river and kayaked round it. Had an interesting experience at the hotel, and then after that we then travelled by boat to the Caribbean port of Livingston. From there we got the smallest most un seaworthy boat possible to Belize. It was a little scary and the captain of our 'boat' looked exactly like the sailor guy off the Simpsons. When we got to Belize we had no idea where we were going. We knew that we wanted to get to Placencia but we had no idea how or when. Luckily we met this crazy american guy who didnt wear any shoes and had what seemed like a 20 year old girlfriend when he was about 60. But anyway, we had to get a Chicken bus (public bus) from here to a place called Independence. Again when we got to Independence we had no idea where we were going, but there was also a group of lost looking american tourists in the same situation as us, so we followed them, got another boat and eventually wound up our way here.

It's nice to have a break here. I am really enjoying working at the school but from three months of constantly working with the kids (excluding the bike challenge) I needed the break! Working with the kids has been great though and a few of them have managed to move up to the next class. Unfortunately though my Spanish doesnt seem to be improving, I seem to be at a wall and Im sure that being here in English speaking Belize isnt helping matters.

I also just wanted to say thankyou so much to everyone who sponsored me on the bike challenge. I dont know how I managed to do it, it was an absolutely amazing trip but it was very hard. We cycled through places that had never seen any tourist before, through a desert with dead cows littered along the road, through rivers and jungles and basically everything really. I got chased by dogs a few times and overall I think that there was 89 flat tyres between 15 of us... (I got 2). hehe.

Im now going back to school next week, and will see from thereon whether I am going to go to Nicaragua or Honduras or just stay in Guatemala. We shall see.
I hope that everything is alright with everyone, and I will try and post more regularly from now on!
Sophie