The road to Antigua was quite an adventure. From Lake Atitlan to Patzicia is a secondary road, which involved rough pavement and pothole dodging. Also my first "river" crossing.

Woo! When the tarmac ended and we ended up on a rough dirt road, we finally realized we were lost.


Nice scenery though, in any case.


Antigua is quite an interesting place. It's name means, roughly, "Old Guatemala", and it definitely has it's historical side. We saw many old cathedrals/covenents, some over 500 years old.



Motorcycles are quite popular. Huge stretches of street were designated for motorcycle parking.

Also saw my bike's twin! Another Kawi EX250! The only other one I've seen in two months.


It's also quite the hopping vacation/2nd home spot, and can be quite upscale. We explored the hotel/museum "San Domingo" which was housed in an old covenant. Very beautiful, and on our way out we asked the price out of curiosity. $750usd per night!! Just a little bit out of our budget, but it was very cool how they built a 5 star hotel around the ruins. Very beautiful.



We found a little Hostel, "Hostel Viajadores" and were pleased with the Q$100 price, the cheapest we found, so we took it. We ate meals in the market down the street for as little as Q$10 per person, with drink. Very cool. We generally walked around and saw the sights in our two days there.

A textiles museum, with a personal guide.

As I've mentioned before, Michelle loves clothing design and took dozens of pictures of different fabric patterns.


1/18/11 Guatemala City
After two days it was time to continue on to Guatemala city. As I rolled the bike out, I noticed the front tire was flat. Couldn't find a puncture, and since it's only 30 miles to Guatemala city I filled it back up with my trusty hand pump and just pulled off the road every few miles to check the pressure. It was losing 3psi every 10 miles, so it was a serious leak.

We stopped at a Yamaha dealer in Guatemala city to see about a new front tire. None there, but the service guy sat us down while he spent half an hour calling a dozen different tire shops. Ulimately we didn't find exactly the size I wanted, but I was very impressed by how long this guy took with two customers he would never see again. This sort of beyond-the-call-of-duty service is common in central America. If they don't have the part, they'll call around for you or they might walk you to where you can find what you're looing for.

Guatemala City is super confusing. It's divided into 22 different zones, which as far as I can tell, are arranged randomly around the city. There are also major roads going through the city which have no traffic lights or U-turns and are impossible to cross unless you duck down into the sidestreets and hope to find a bridge or way across.

We found a bunch of seedy hotels in Zona 1, the historic zone. They ranged in price from Q$40 to Q$100, very reasonably priced, but we were warned it was a dangerous area. The clerks of the hotels were a strange bunch, and didn't seem to trust us or be interested in our business. While I was waiting for Michelle to check the price on one three young homeless looking guys came up and in perfect college-fraternity english: "BRO! We just got deported bro! Damn man, can you spare a quarter bro!" The one doing most of the talking had crazy huge scabs covering a good part of his inner arm. I didn't have a quarter and wasn't interested in donating to whatever the hell was going on, so after two minutes they moved on. Very strange, but somewhat illustrative of the randomness you'll experience in Guatemala city. Paraphrasing the "Lonely Planet" book: "some people find Guatemala city dirty, dangerous and unpleasant, other people find it dirty, dangerous and unforgettable." I'm not exactly sure which side I fell on.

Overall we didn't hear of or see anything really amazing in Guatemala city, just an enormous sprawling metroplex. I will note that almost every American food chain was represented here, from Pizza Hut (mostly a breakfast place here, opéns at 6am!) to Taco Bell (huge restaraunts) and Chili's. We had a few mundane errands to take care of. I used the soap and water trick to locate a tiny leak in the center of the front tire tread, which I patched with my Stop-and-Go patch kit. We also updated the blogs and loaded more photos. We did get a chance to relax a little bit though.

One street had cool lights hanging the whole length of it.

We saw a movie "The Tourist" in a little theater on that road, about $2 per person. The last showing at all the theaters was around 6-7pm. We got in a few minutes late. I didn't care what movie I saw, I just wanted it to be in Spanish. Unfortunately this movie was only subtitled, but the tiny screen, crappy projector and wavery sound made things more memorable. It was like I was watching an 80s VHS tape.

The city:


And so we leave for El Salvador.