Adios Mexico, Hola Guatemala

Rossco’s Hostel was comfortable and friendly with good Internet and a great bunch of travellers coming and going. I met people from many countries and although it didn’t do my Spanish much good I enjoyed meeting up with many fun travellers and locals.

I stayed for four nights and finished some long overdue blogging and loading up of pictures to Facebook. San Cristobal is a fascinating and popular town with several churches with long staircases to access them. 

I went for many long walks, spent hours over a couple of coffees along Calle Guadeloupe that is closed to vehicles and enjoyed some people watching. 

My first night there was a massive hailstorm that caught me out in just a t-shirt. I was only 300 metres from the hostel but was soaked well and truly. I really enjoyed the company of a few people I hung out with and left feeling recharged, motivated with my blogging and happy with life in general.

I was planning to go back to Palenque to visit the friends I have made but some were away and the day I wanted to leave had a protest blocking the road so I wasn’t sure if I would get through. I looked at a map and noticed that the road to the Guatemala border was less than 200kms and it immediately made sense to me to head that way. The decision was easy and obvious. It was time to move on from Mexico, the place I have enjoyed for four months now. I was excited to go to a new country and started turning my mind to Guatemala and the people and places I would see.

I decided to ride the 200kms slowly to the border town of Cuauhtemoc and take a hotel so I could do the border crossing first thing in the morning. When I arrived I met Chris and his son Dexter travelling on a Suzuki V-strom 1000, loaded up well and heading into Guatemala to volunteer at a place where they do up old bicycles for distribution to communities. I'm sure I took a photo but can't find it... We swapped details and he entered Guatemala straight away. I could have done the same, it is a very quiet border crossing but I stayed until morning.

The Aduana office was opening at 9am according to what I was told in the afternoon before, but by 8.30 it was open and operating. I was in a hotel across the road, a good cheap place to stay but expensive to eat, so at 9am I was in the office and ten minutes later I was out with my temporary import form cancelled and the $US300 deposit in my hand in cash. I walked next door and had my passport stamped out, another two minutes and I was away for the five kilometre ride to the Guatemala border. Two hundred metres before the border was a shanty town of stalls selling the full range of artesenales, clothing and food with hundreds of people milling along and across the road, making it a narrow path to get through and lucky not to take any casualties on the road!

The border was a large metal gate where I was stopped and the bike fumigated with a guard and his backpack spraying Ziggy like a weed. I paid the 16 Quetzales ($2) and rode ten metres to the Immigration office where my passport was stamped in. I rode another 30 metres to the Aduana office where the friendly and helpful officer spent twenty minutes filling in forms, taking copies of my licence, passport and registration, then without checking the numbers on the bike issued me with a temporary import sticker good for 90 days. I was riding into Guatemala just before 10am. I hope all of my border crossings are this easy. I suspect they won’t be. I didn't want to push my luck with the armed guards by taking photos.

I had a wonderful morning riding through the stunning mountains of Guatemala. Small villages one after another rolled by nestled in scenery of peaks and valleys stretching in all directions. It was a postcard at every turn and typically it is impossible to capture the beauty with my little camera and hard to find places to pull over where the scenery is best. It is amongst the best scenic routes I have taken on the trip. The road followed a river that was flowing strongly through the rugged valleys with villages nestled on its edges and I wondered how many dogs, cows and children had been swept away over the ages.

At one point there was a convoy of vehicles full of indigenous folk, traversing a cable suspension bridge over the flowing river.

 A crazy little town looked like it was recovering from a local market or fiesta

Eventually the country opened up a bit more and became a little more settled with busier towns. I stopped at a few small places to eat and drink along the way and it was apparent that the food was not going to be as plentiful or varied as in Mexico. Still it was a similar cuisine and easy to find. Hour after hour rolled by winding through the mountains and rising to some higher altitudes. I don’t have an altimeter but the temperature dropped from thirty to below twenty, and even down to thirteen at one stage, challenging my choice of hot weather riding gear.

The day wore on and I started looking for a place to stay. I stopped at a high-set shop with lots of artesan gear and saw a magnificent lake in the distance. The shop owner told me it was Lake Atitlan so I headed back to the last town and found a motel with the plan to approach the lake the next morning. It was a love motel for $13, basic but has a bed and a bathroom so it did what it needed.