After El Ceibal we entered the beautiful mountainous region of Alta Verapaz. Every turn of the narrow dirt road revealed either an impressive view or a big truck hammering towards us.

Colourful hillside cemetary

This area is pretty remote and populated solely by indians who are friendly once they get over the shock of seeing us, although some of their directional advice left a little to be desired on occasion. Wednesday is market day and every one of the many villages we drove through had stalls lining the single track road. Fridges' doris who had been with us since Belize needed to catch her flight home the next day, so at Lanquin we parted ways, arranging to meet up again at the weekend.

	Market day
Semuc Champey natural bridge	Where the water thunders under...	...not very safe for swimming!

Semuc Champey is described in the guidebook as a natural bridge over a river with pools of water in which you can swim. This conjured an image of a graceful arch over a roaring river in a deep gorge. It wasn't really like that but was still pretty awesome anyway. The river flowed underneath a long area of limestone which had a lesser amount of water flowing over itself. The main river emerged about 300 metres further downstream. It is a beautiful place and its great to swim in the pools and imagine the eroded limestone bottom suddenly collapsing and being sucked under.

A local man happy to have been given a lift on the landy

Chatting with some guys along the way

Unable to find a decent clearing, we were forced to camp on a hairpin bend on the side of the valley. The occasional bus or truck roaring past during the night didn't help us sleep much, but we had no problems as usual and set off the following day towards Rio Dulce.