(28) Guatemala - Tikal to Antigua
We’ve had a couple of tiring days so we decided to take a couple rest days here in Antigua, Guatemala. I was here in 2009 and rented a motorcycle for 5 days and rode around the area. I was looking forward to seeing the place again. More tourists than 13 years ago but other than that pretty much how I remember it.
So since I have time I figured I’d catch up on the last few days from leaving San Ignacio, Belize to here in Antigua. Our departure from Belize didn’t start out too auspiciously. San Ignacio is about 10 miles from the Guatemala border and we needed Guatemalan Quetzals in order to pay the boarder fees to get into the country. Unfortunately we had pretty much spent all our Belize Dollars and didn’t have enough cash to change at the border to pay fees in Quetzals.
Not to fear there is a town between San Ignacio and the border with two bank branches and ATMs. So off we set to make the crossing into Guatemala. So off we set for Benque Viejo Del Carmen. Stopped part way there to gas up the bikes and have a gas station breakfast and continued on in search of an ATM. As luck would have it both ATMs in Benque were out of service. One needs cash in order to change money and the border only accepts cash and in the local currency. So there is nothing to be done but turn around and ride back into San Ignacio in search of a working ATM. That was a pretty painless process, but did set us back about an hour and a half from when we had anticipated crossing the border.
The crossing its self was pretty painless. The Belize side went quickly. Due to getting our TIP the Guatemalan side was a bit more fun (read that time consuming). The first part of getting into Guatemala is getting your vehicle disinfected. Disinfected for what I’m not sure and didn’t ask. For cars you just drive into a big tent and a machine sprays the disinfectant on the car. I assumed for motorcycles we would ride in the tent, dismount walk out and get the bike sprayed. Well, I’d be wrong. As soon as I came to a stop in the tent the spraying began. So I got disinfected along with the bike! Thankfully I had the visor down on my helmet as there was no warning the spraying was about to commence.
Immigration and customs were a breeze. We got through them quickly. The TIP process seemed to drag on. When it got to time to pay we were told that the officials at the border are not allowed to take our payment. For that we have to go into the office in the town just up the road. However, since we don’t have a TIP yet we cannot ride our motorcycles there. We have to take a taxi in, pay the fee, get a receipt, take a taxi back and show them the receipt before we can ride the bikes into the country. The phrase Catch 22 came immediately to mind!
Of course there was a way around this whole process. You could pay one of the local guys Q40 (7.5 US to a Quetzal so a bit more than $5) and he will do it on line for you there at the border and print out the necessary receipt for you. It seemed like a cheap five dollar spend to us so off we went. Paid our fee and “processing fee”, got the receipt and finally obtained our TIP and crossed into Guatemala. Total time at the border about an hour and a half. It was so hot and humid at the border though that I kept dripping sweat on all my paperwork. Oh, and we had to wear COVID masks the whole time we were in the Guatemalan border buildings. Our clothes and masks were just soaked with sweat by the time we were done!
Our next stop was the Mayan ruins at Tikal. Terrie and I visited Tikal on our first trip to Belize in 1990. I was interested to see what 30+ years had done to the place. In the grand scheme of things it turns out not a lot had changed actually. One thing that changed was that we have to buy our tickets to the park at a BanRural bank branch prior to showing up at the park entrance. There is a branch of this bank in the town just inside the border. So we stopped in there to buy our park tickets only to find that branch closed. While stopped trying to figure out what to do next we got absolutely drenched in an afternoon thunder shower. We couldn’t put our gear on fast enough and got soaked to the bone. The hotel at the park was the source of my info that we needed to buy the tickets before entering the park. Since that branch wasn’t open we decided we just needed to set off and figure it out as we went.
What the hotel didn’t mention was that there is a branch of the bank just outside the park boundary who’s sole purpose is the selling of park tickets. We stopped there, got our tickets and headed into the Tikal Inn for the night. It’s the same place Terrie and I stayed 32 years ago. Not much changed at the hotel. It’s off the grid, so no cell service, electricity by generator from 8-10 in the morning, 12 to 2 in the afternoon and 6-9 each night. It did have internet in the lobby when the electricity was on though. LOL It had reasonable food, cold beverages and showers so all was good as far as we were concerned. The showers had hot water, but it felt so good in the heat and humidity to take a cold shower I never even tried to turn the hot water on!
It was into the park the next morning. We spent about three and a half hours wandering around, reading the signs and checking things out. Since it’s not the easiest place in the world to get to the visitors in the park were minimal and there were only a couple of souvenir stands. The souvenir stands were all in one place and outside the park so you weren’t bothered by them constantly like in Chichin Itza in Mexico. Tikal was far and away our favorite archeological site we visited so far. The pictures just don’t do it justice.
Rather than spend a second night in Tikal we decided to make the hour long ride back out of the park to the town of Flores and overnight there. It’s a nice place and the old part of town is on an island in the lake accessible by a causeway. Unfortunately by the time we arrived we were too tired to walk over. It was just a mater of have some food and head to bed. We knew we had a long day ahead of us the next day.
Our friend Serge, who is a few days ahead of us at this point, suggested we head to San Agustin Lanquin (or just Lanquin on some maps) and see Semuc Chemay park. So that’s where we headed upon leaving Flores. CA13 and Guatemala Highway 5 is the main connector road between Flores and Lanquin. Serge warned us that there was a 10 kilometer section of the highway that wasn’t paved but that “we could handle it”. So off we set the next morning. I have to say that the pavement in Guatemala has been fantastic. It’s in great shape and nowhere near the number of pot holes and other obstacles as there were in Mexico.
Then we hit the “unpaved” section. Unpaved turned out to mean totally unmaintained goat path and 10km turned out to be over 10 miles of it! It’s easily the most difficult riding either of us have ever done. Thank God we took the off road class at the beginning of the trip. While we didn’t practice this type of stuff exactly it did give us some background and enough confidence to make the attempt. In the end that 10 miles took us an hour and a half to complete. Going the direction we did, it’s almost entirely up hill. As the water rushes down it washes away most of the dirt leaving just a bunch of 4 to 6 inch in diameter rocks to go bouncing through. I have a video of me and some pictures in the gallery but they really do not do justice to how difficult this was for us. We did pretty well though. Neil got through cleanly. I had one spot where I choked out the engine and couldn’t hold the bike up in the position I found myself in and had to set it down on the ground. So not a fall technically! About that time a tour buss (yes there were small busses on this road and one tuk tuk) and they hopped out to help me push the bike back upright. Neil shot the video of me just after I started off from this tip over.
On the plus side the scenery was absolutely gorgeous on this section of road. We needed (or maybe it was just me that needed) several rest stops along the way. I snapped my pics during those. Man do we both wish we had the go pros on line for this! By the time we got into Lanquin we were completely exhausted and just ate dinner at the hostel and went to bed. In talking to the folks at the hostel they said with the rain they’ve had the road (another 10 km) into Semuc Chamey was likely to be very muddy as it’s unpaved. So in the end we chose to skip that. Maybe next time.
Yesterday was a long day through the mountains into Guatemala City, through the city and on to Antigua. The mountain roads were fun when we could get up to speed, but there was a lot of truck and bus traffic that we got stopped behind. So every little town we hit we’d use the Topes (Tumulos in Guatemala but the same things) to pass all the vehicles in front of us. We can go over those much faster than the cars and trucks.
Apparently Monday was market day in some of the villages in that area. The main road from our hostel there was closed and we got rerouted through a bunch of steep cobbled side streets to get around the market and onto the highway. In one other village the market was on both sides of the highway and all but closed the highway with people, dogs, tuk tuks and stuff for sale. We had to just creep along with our feet down to make sure we didn’t hit anyone there.
Unfortunately there isn’t really a good way to get from east to west in Guatemala without going through Guatemala City. It has somewhere between 9 and 10 million people. So by definition the traffic was horrendous. But, all it did really was slow us down. We managed to get into Antigua about 4:00pm yesterday. So we still had good daylight. Last night it was dinner and a beer on the rooftop of Antigua Brewing Company with a nice view of Agua volcano just outside of town. Two other volcanos are visible from here, Acatenango and Fuego. Fuego is still active and has erupted recently.
That’s it for now. We are still here tomorrow and then we will go up to lake Atitlan for a night in Panajachel before turning south for the El Salvador border. Whew!!
