Guatemala!

After 3 weeks of enjoying the holidays with friends and family we are on the road again. It is great to see everyone but 3 weeks was just enough of 39 degrees and rain so we are now back in Central America. Guatemala is a new country for us and we are excited to compare this to our experiences in Costa Rica and Belize. We flew into the capital, Guatemala City, and stayed our first 2 nights even though we had heard from many people that it wasn’t that exciting. Most people just fly in and head for Antigua or the tourist towns. We had one full day to explore the downtown and wish we had another day or two. We walked to the main square and saw the main church and market. We couldn’t get into the history museum because it was closed for a political ceremony of some kind but we did find a museum on the history of Guatemalan currency. It was free and worth 15 minutes but not too exciting. The coolest thing we found was a 3D map of the country that was built in 1904 and the heights were exaggerated at 5X the scale. It really showed the difference between the separate regions of the country. We ate some good food and so far it seemed a little more exciting than Costa Rican or Belizean food and it wasn’t that expensive.

The prime attraction in Guatemala is the Mayan ruins in Tikal National Park. My parents went there in the late 60’s and brought back a painting of temple #1 that has been their living room the whole time I was growing up so I needed to see it in person. They also had an adventure getting there in a DC-3 where the flight attendant had to hold the door closed for the whole flight and I’m sure they didn’t find the same tourist accommodations or number of tourists that we encountered. The bus ride from Guatemala City was 11 hours long so initially we thought we were going to skip Tikal. We then found a really cheap roundtrip flight from Guate City- but they charged more for the luggage than the actually flight. Not a DC-3 but it did have propellors. We left our roller bags in storage at our Guate City hotel and just brought a few clothes in our small book backpacks for our 2 night mini-trip. We haven’t done that before and really like how nice it was to travel so minimalistic. We plan to do more of that on our trip to Europe next fall.

The ruins were incredible. We have been to a lot of Mayan ruins already but these were amazing. We paid for a guide to tell us more about the history on how the Tikal people lived and interacted with many of the other Mayan and Aztec cities. There is so much to learn about this and so much that nobody really knows. I will be doing some more research and reading about this because we plan to see a lot more Mexican ruins in the upcoming year. It was also cool to picture my parents climbing these pyramids 50 years ago with nobody else around.

It was about 90 degrees at times but didn’t seem to be as humid as some of the Costa Rica beaches where we just suffered. We were just fine if were in the jungle shade during the hot midday sun. We stayed at the Jungle Lodge hotel in a really cool hut with a lot of mosquito nets. We saw more monkeys, coatis, and lots of birds including toucans, parrots, and wild turkeys. My bird lifelist is at 495 and I am hoping to break 500 at our next location. We got new phones so our wildlife pics should be way better than Costa Rica.

We only stayed one night in Tikal National Park because we wanted to spend a night in the island town of Flores in the middle of a lake. There is a bridge out to the island town that only has a few hundred people living in it but many people used boats instead of cars. It is quite a beautiful little tourist town with colonial style hotels that all have beautiful views of the lake. We happened to visit during a festival week so the town was really busy with parades, fireworks and live music. Each day of the week was dedicated to one of the 7 major large families of the town. The extended family would parade around the island with fireworks, brass bands and dancers while holding a bigger than life-size puppet of a woman on a stick. At night there was a ceremony transferring power from the queen of 2023 to 2024 and then a live band played late into the night. People everywhere with food stalls, drink stalls and more fireworks. We didn’t understand everything but enjoyed it all. It would have been fun to stay a bit longer than one night. The lake is actually rising so the perimeter road is actually unusable on parts of the island. Much of the transportation to the mainland on both sides of the island was done with small boats. They were used to transport cars, motorcycles or just trips to the grocery store. We took lots of pics.

We are now headed back to Guatemala City to pick up our luggage from storage and then head to the old town of Antigua for a few days.