Blogs from Flores, Petén Region, Guatemala, Central America Caribbean - page 28

The trip to Flores was brutal. It started in the afternoon with 2 shuttles to Guatemala City, that part wasn´t too bad but then we hopped on a bus at about 9 at night and drove across the entire country to Flores. It was a 10 hour journey, no stops, no bathroom breaks. It sounded like a good idea to take a bus in the night, you go to sleep and wake up at your destination, but that only applies if you can actually sleep. Unfortunately for us we pulled an all nighter. Flores is kinda a cool place. It´s an island in the middle of a big big lake. The first day we arrived we walked around half the island and found it a little boring and dull. Later, we walked around the other half ... read more

Back in Antigua after a long weekend traveling from Antigua to Livingston, Rio Dulce, and then on to the infamous Tikal ruins in the northern Guatemalan jungle. Check out the map. (Antigua to Puerto Barrios to Flores and back) It was another great weekend with a few friends from the trip to Semuc Champey last weekend, and a few new friends from Holland, England, and Israel. We left Antigua early early early (4am) and started our journey towards the smaller set of Mayan ruins at Quiriguá which is on the way to Livingston. This trip we did not have guides, but our driver Bernabe would take us to each stop. Only an hour or so needed to explore Quiriguá and then back in the minibus heading toward the Carribean coast. You need to take a boat ... read more

You know that email where the jar is empty and the professor fills it with large rocks and asks if it´s full, the class says yes and then he adds small pebbles to show it´s not really full and asks again...the class says yes and he adds sand and when you think there´s no more room at all, the water still fits in (showing there´s always more room in your life...)....anyways, that was my first impression of Guatemala. The chicken bus we were on was full and when people were completely squished in, 10 more people got on. a few moments later, another 7 managed to get on, and so went the next 50 miles (I looked around to see if Mr. Guiness was counting a new record). that bus ride, along with seeing a dead ... read more

After my Semuc Champey and Las Marias adventures i headed to Peten. Peten is the northern department or state of Guatemala and my last stop before Belize. Peten is mostly flat lowlands full of forests and much less indigenous than the rest of guatemala. I stayed in Flores, which is a tiny island on the Lago Peten Itza. Really there is not much to this town (you can walk around the whole city along the picturesque lakeshore in less than an hour), but it gave me a homebase for exploring and chance to get to know some new Guatemaltecos. The ruins of the ancient city of Tikal are the main attraction here. It was the site of an ancient Mayan empire going back 2500 years or more and just petered out around the year 900. There ... read more

Guatemala: Flores and Tikal The border crossing from Belize into Guatemala was a bit interesting. They have a compulsory bribe of about 3 dollars you have to pay to be allowed across and apart from that they barely look at your passport and the actual border looks like a market. We just kinda meandered through the throng of people and were told that if anyone wanted to search our bags we would know about it… we didn’t even see one official while on the Guatemalan side of the border. Anyways, no-one was searched or shouted at so we got back on the bus and continued to Flores in Guatemala. Flores is a little tiny town built on a hill in the middle of a lake and the streets are concentric circles which made the town more ... read more