In the morning we maneuvered the bikes off the hotel porch, and loaded up.\u00a0 Found a bookstore (the owner claimed that she had the only open used bookstore left in the country!), and stocked up on reading material.\u00a0 Off, in the rain, to the border, only a few miles away.<\/p>\n
The border crossing was an experience.\u00a0 Had to pay to exit Belize, and then deal with incredible third-world weirdness with Guatemala.\u00a0 Immigration was a snap – stamp, stamp!\u00a0 No customs AT ALL!\u00a0 But the vehicle importation required photocopies of all sorts of papers, and, of course, there was no copy machine in the border station.\u00a0 We had to walk through ankle-deep mud, 1\/2 mile down the road into Guatemala, and across a two-way one-lane bridge, to a roadside hut that sold photocopies, and then back, in order to complete the entry process.\u00a0\u00a0 Fortunately, there was an english-speaking Guatemalan hanging around waiting to help confused foreigners like us, for a small fee.\u00a0 Without his help, who knows what we would have done!\u00a0 All very silly, but not too bad and no-one was nasty or threatening.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Quiet the contrary, everyone was very friendly and patient;\u00a0 just the normal crazy bureaucracy, I guess.<\/p>\n
We found an ATM in the nearby town, and got some local currency, then set out for Tikal.\u00a0 The road west started out as greasy, slippery, nasty mud for the first 5 miles or so, then changed to badly rutted and washed out gravel, then changed again to pot-holed and un-maintained blacktop.\u00a0 Nice first impression for Guatemala.\u00a0 The rain continued without a break.\u00a0 We rode all the way to Tikal, only to find that there were no affordable lodging there: so we back-tracked to the small town at the turn-off from the ‘main’ road, and found a place there. $16 USD.\u00a0 We celebrated our first night in Guatemala with an expensive dinner, and cuban cigars.\u00a0 Rain, rain, rain. Got in some internet time.\u00a0 Both bikes are running good, at last.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the morning we maneuvered the bikes off the hotel porch, and loaded up.\u00a0 Found a bookstore (the owner claimed that she had the only open used bookstore left in the country!), and stocked up on reading material.\u00a0 Off, in the rain, to the border, only a few miles away. The border crossing was an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[12,6],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=874"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":878,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874\/revisions\/878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.longridesouth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}