Guatemala: 15. - 22.12.2009

No, this time we didn’t want to get in the arms of a Transmitter. But that is not so simple. As soon as they identified potential prey, the do not let go of it anymore. But we’ve been hard and so you could hear us say “NO, gracias!” over and over again. Also as we talked to the immigration officer they repeated every word again …in Spanish… in the end they realized it was us useless cause, they gave up and we have been through in a bit more than an hour. Surprised how easy it was.

Our fist target was Tikal, one of the most famous Maya Ruins. With great expectations about a fabulous sunset over the ruin we arrived in the late afternoon, but clouds came up so the spectacle fell into the water. In the morning it meant to be early again, one for the sunrise and second because the animals like dawn as well. Again we woke by the now familiar howling of the Monkeys. But sunrise: not really, with all that fog around. Nevertheless, we went for the “old piles of stone” and kept looking into bushes and up to the treetops, we did get rewarded for it with Toucans, Parrots, Spidermonkeys, Coatis and so on, besides the fog, we enjoyed it a lot. In the end we even got rewarded for our staying power and the sun came out.

Back on the road southwards we got caught up by the rain again that only quit the next morning. Fortunately, because the next 199 Kilometer (123 miles) would have taken even longer. A road straight and wide like a 4lane highway, but it was gravel and looked like a Swiss cheese, full of potholes on speeds larger 20kpm (12.5mph) was not to think, so the hours passed it got later and later, an end was still not visible. It got dark and we still where hours from our destination, we were looking for a place to stay, but in the meantime the road got curvy and went steep uphill, with only mountain villages to pull out. It went on till we reached Semuc Champey, exhausted we built our camp at 8pm, after 10 hour driving we called it a night. This site is famous for its 300 Meter wide limestone bridge, which holds several pools that invite for swimming, with the Rio Cahabon under it. Of course we had to go for a swim the next morning but since the sun was shining with absence, we continued that same day towards the alleged most beautiful drive of Guatemala. We cannot deny that, but we also cannot confirm it because rain clouds followed us through the whole day and released their heavy loads from time to time. Driving a bit grumpy along the road we asked ourselves, where did we read that it is supposed to be the dry season? Beside that the signs caused us quite some troubles, on our route we passed quite some towns and normally there was a sign telling the direction before a town. However the next such thing if it existed was only once you passed it, so everything in between was tentative and normally built of a labyrinth of small bumpy one way roads, that one has to find his way through. In this search, markets seemed to draw us magically, at least in every second town we could be sure to drive and get stuck in one of them.

Not really surprising also at that day we would not reach our target before dark, but that day we have asked in small town at the police station if we could spend the night in front of their office. “That’s a matter of course, naturally, just go on!” We were a bit surprised by how little of a question it was, but a bit later we got our answer. It seemed that there was also the “bus station” for minibuses and pickups and the locals who didn’t want to miss an early departure or where passing the town with an overnight stop just slept there as well. So we were surrounded by some 30 other people sleeping mostly on the ground.

Without breakfast, the bakery was still closed and we didn’t want to draw even more attention on us with cooking, we moved on. Our hope of a bit sunshine were eliminated by the thick rainclouds, instead we have seen many children waving at us. Did they want to get picked up? No, they just seemed to have fun waving and so we busily waved in return.

With a little side trip to Quetzaltenango we got to the Atitlan Lake. At least that is what the maps where telling us, we barely saw it with all the heavy fog and clouds around. Nevertheless we went to one of the biggest markets in Guatemala in the town of Chichicastenago. Of course the rain god was not on holidays and opened his ports with a regular frequency. But we defied the wet cold and mixed with the locals to celebrate the soon arriving Christmas and the colorful market. That afternoon we went back for the Atitlan Lake where we met Angie and Phil again and had a great night out in Panajachel.

The next day we had our first sunshine in days and we were on the way to Antigua a nice tourist town where we spent our last evening with Angie and Phil cooking at the police campground, it was a great time with you, thanks. Originally the plan was to spend Christmas on Roatan in Honduras. But the weather there and the pressure of the shipping company because of our date in the end of January let us change those plans and we took the route to El Salvador.

What we experienced there, you can read in the El Salvador report.

The rain hampered

Sonja and Markus

Here it goes to the pictures…