We’ve had a couple of screw ups so far. In fact, we probably made more errors in eight days in Guatemala than we did in eight months in Africa.
1) Although we used points for our flights, I accidentally booked the wrong time for a flight from Guatemala City to Flores. I had to cancel and rebook, and by then the points cost had doubled.
2) I wanted to hike to the lava at Fuego volcano near Antigua. I didn’t communicate that to Kate and we failed to put it in our itinerary. On the + side, we found out that the lava is actually not visible right now and it turns out that there is a much better volcano to go to when we get to Chile.
3) My trip planning did not turn up any hotels we could book for free with points in the cities we were going to be at in Guatemala. However, when we got to Flores, I saw a very nice Ramada that would’ve been great to stay at. That would have been a good free stay with points if I had only known about it.
4) The national instrument of Guatemala is the marimba. I used to play the marimba and one of the things I had hoped to do in Guatemala was to hear some live marimba music. But, despite our best efforts, we could not find a single marimba player in any of the areas we were at.
5) Not really a mistake, just bad luck. On the day that we took the sunrise tour in Tikal, while we were on top of temple #4 watching a washed out sunrise; we missed out on a jaguar that was right at the national park entrance. It killed a coati. The park rangers filmed it and showed us the video.