On the road to Copan, Honduras

 8 hours on the road in a bus. At least we will have rest stops on the way.

In case you think “oh you’re smart, you’re at the back and can stretch out — well, you’re kinda right, but I am sharing the back…

Antigua, Guatemala

I’m sitting here in a park in Antigua, Guatemala, admiring that I have “5G”, but it takes 2 minutes to load this blog entry with no photos. (Update: I have some wifi)

So instead you’ll have to deal with my poor vocabulary of adjectives to describe this beautiful town. The streets are literally cobblestone, all of them, and the maximum speed a car is able to drive over them is 20kph — any faster and the car is disassembled faster than any car “chop shop” on the planet.

There’s a rather large conical volcano that dominates the view from pretty much anywhere here. Look south and there it is. It becomes very clear to me how Pompeii happened.

The town itself has a Spanish Colonial/South American blend (unsurprisingly), with a regrettable modern west influence — I’ve seen a Starbucks, a Subway, and a Wendy’s. At least they have the common decency to keep with the local aesthetics and not plaster gaudy neon lights and glass windows everywhere. 

The hotel I’m staying at is quite lovely, it reminds me of some in Nepal.

This afternoon I meet my group and find out what the plans for the next two weeks. In the meantime I’m going to continue to explore, and keep an eye out for pyroclastic flows.

Welcome to Guatemala

 Have landed. Almost didn’t get here as the agent at the gate in San Jose pulled me aside as I didn’t have a return ticket and they wanted proof I was going to leave Guatemala. It was at that point that I realised I couldn’t remember where I had saved my invoice/confirmation for my bus trip out of here. A lot of cursing at the speed of the wifi later and I was able to dig it up.

With that discovery I predicted an even more difficult time when I hit immigration in Guatemala, only to find a very bored agent who was more interested in what my NZ passport looked like that where I was going. The entire conversation consisted of “hola”, then a grunt as he handed it back to me.

I’m currently in a taxi to the hotel — fortunately I looked ahead and new it was going to be expensive, and the hotel is actually quite far from the airport, because right now we are speeding down a very dark and winding road. My Spanish has served me well enough that I was able to make basic small talk and establish its $60 to the hotel. That’s about what I was expecting, maybe a touch on the high side, but I’ll be his last fare tonight, no more flights coming in by the time he gets back to the airport.

More later, assuming this is in fact a legit taxi, and I’m not about to meet some “not nice people”. 

I've lost weight, and not long to wait!

 

It's not long until school finishes -- 6 more school days. In preparation for the next part of my trip, I took everything I want to take on the road from Guatemala to Panama and put it all in my shiny summit pack. This is a 36L backpack that is very comfy to carry. 

Since I'm not having to take all my winter, hiking, and climbing gear with me on this part of the trip, I can shed all that weight and volume. This smaller backpack should feel very nice carrying around -- first measure is that it's only 10kg and will easily fit in an overhead locker or probably even at my feet on a plane.

I don't need hiking poles, sleeping bags, jackets, gloves, etc. all of that stuff is remaining in my big backpack. And all of that weighs a lot, so now I'll have less weight on my back. How much? Of course I had to measure, so I used the trick of standing on the scales with and without my backpack. 10kg, not bad, but I also noted that my personal weight is now down to 100kg. Wow!

Next steps confirmed

Late February I'll be continuing my adventure to Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and then back to Costa Rica! Yes, these aren't countries people normally line up to visit, but I'm not over here to visit the big destinations -- I'd have stayed in Europe if I was.