We’ve started our next set of nine months of living abroad with Guatemala. Because of safety concerns, we did not spend any time in Guatemala City. So after landing at GUA, we went directly to Antigua. Antigua was the original capital of Guatemala until 1773. But by that point, they had had too many earthquakes there and decided to move their capital to Guatemala city.
We found Antigua to be a beautiful laid-back city with many ancient cathedrals. We toured some ruins going back to 1500.
I was surprised by how much nicer everything in Guatemala was than in Costa Rica. The food was better, the climate was better, the people were friendlier, and there were less bugs. Of particular note, avocados are way better than they are in the US.
After Antigua, we went to lake Atitlan and stayed in the very small town of Santa Cruz. This beautiful lake is surrounded by volcanoes and small villages. We did some hiking from village to village.
Next, we went back to Guatemala City and took a domestic flight to Flores. We stayed on the beautiful small island of Peten. The island is filled with restaurants and hotels. But it was primarily a stop on our way to Tikal National Park.
Tikal was the home to the Mayan civilization. There are 3,000 ruins dating back as far as 1500 BC. There are only three lodges that you can stay at in the park, and we stayed at the Hotel Jungle Tikal Lodge. This is one of those places where you are a captive audience at their restaurant. Fortunately, the food was excellent and the prices were reasonable. The temperature got up to about 92° during the day, and their pool felt great. We toured the ruins during the afternoon and had a sunset view from the top of a temple. Unfortunately, the sunset was mostly washed out by clouds. Animal sightings were Coatis and Spider monkeys and a gulf coast toad.
We followed this with a sunrise tour (for which you have to get up at 2:55 AM). The sunrise also got washed out by clouds. But we saw more coatis, spider monkeys, frogs, Keel-Billed toucans, Great Kiskadees and other birds. The most interesting thing was that while we were on top of temple #4 watching the sunrise and listening to the sounds of the jungle turn from night to day, we heard roaring that went on for twenty minutes. We thought that there were a lot of jaguars making this noise. But it turned out that it was the sound of Howler monkeys.
We were able to use points for the business class flight from the US to Guatemala, for the internal flights and for the flight from Guatemala to Panama. But we weren’t able to book any hotels with points so we had to pay cash for those (more on that in the next post).
