In the last post, we finished our second leg of the journey in Mexico and got back to the Guatemalan border.
We woke up early in the morning to cross the border as early as we can, knowing how much time we needed last time to cross the border and get to a decent spot to camp in Guatemala.
We got an email that we didn’t expect on our way to the border. Our shipping has been delayed for two weeks! That wasn’t a news we were prepared for. We had to skip some parts of Mexico and Belize and rush back to Guatemala to meat our shipping deadline and now we had two more weeks with nothing to do in Guatemala. We were still in Mexico when we heard about it but it was such a remote location that we almost had no option that crossing the border to Guatemala anyway. We called our shipping agent and tried our best to bring the date forward but it didn’t work and we crossed into Guatemala knowing that we had to spend three more weeks in Guatemala!
After an easy border crossing, we droved toward Flores and camped in a nice nature reserve out of town to relax and think about what we can do in the next three weeks. We didn’t want to drive to the other side of the country and mountains to skip the heat since the roads are not fun to drive in Guatemala and it wasn’t much to explore on the eastern side of the country for us.
Then we remembered that Nathan, our Canadian friend that we met in El Cuyo, kindly offered us to stay at his place when we visit Honduras and said so much about the beauty of the island that he was living in. The port that we were about to ship our car from was located only few hundreds of kilometers from the border with Honduras and it wasn’t a long drive to where he offered us to stay.
At the time that he kindly invited us to his place, we didn’t have a plan to go to Honduras but now we had the time and since we didn’t explored Belize, we thought that would be a great break from overlanding and gives us a chance to do snorkelling in some of the most pristine waters on the east coast.
That gives us some hope and a plan to work on. We contacted Nathan and he said that it is all good to go for us so we headed toward the south and the border.
By then, we have done a handful of border crossings and we were actually becoming comfortable with border crossings. We drove through an endless banana plantation and got to the border. A narrow road that was leading to the actual border line was blocked by trucks on both sides and we found ourselves in the most chaotic border that we’ve ever seen in our lives. It took us almost two hours to get to the point that we could do the paper work and there were long lines for everything.
We managed to stamp ourselves out of Guatemala and into Honduras and went to do the paperwork for the car. We were about to cancel our Guatemalan TIP and get the new one from Honduras that the Guatemalan immigration agent noticed that our car is RHD and then he went and mentioned that to the immigration officer from Honduras next door and then we realized that apparently it is illegal to bring the RHD car in Honduras too. We knew a lot of other overlanders with RHD rigs went through Honduras with no problem and to be honest, we didn’t have any if the young officer from the Guatemalan side didn’t mention it to the Honduras authorities as well. They asked us to wait so they can go and check but at that stage we knew that they wanted money in order to give us TIP. We waited for some time, without offering anything and at the end, they said, No, we can not enter so we had to go through the chaos again and stamp out of Honduras and back in Guatemala.
That was a day that we won’t forget. So now, we still had three weeks to spend in Southern Guatemala with no plans, perfect!
There are two things that both of us can not deal with very well. First thing is heat and the second is staying somewhere with nothing to do. And we had to deal with these two at the same time for three weeks!
We drove back a bit north toward lake Isabel which is a massive lake on the eastern south part of Guatemala and hoped that we can spend some time on the hills overlooking the lake and have a bit of a breeze there. On the way we had our first ever stay in a petrol station for a night too. Petrol station night stays are common between overlanders but we never had to do it in the last nine months of travelling so we had our first one in Guatemala.
From there we finally managed to get to the Lake Isabel and found a decent spot on the hills with great views to spend few nights and plan for the rest of our time in Guatemala.
After few days, the weather was improving, so we moved to another spot next to the lake Isabel to have the change of scenery and visit some local spots next to the lake.
Lake isabel was beautiful and we had some peaceful nights there.We also found an interesting waterfall close to our camping spot where a hot water spring was mixing with the ice cold water at a waterfall. We had a surprisingly great fun day there as well.
After few more days we had to move again. This time we decided to make an off road loop around the Lake Isabel which took us almost two days and took us through massive palm oil and rubber plantations and gave us a chance to meet many local communities and markets.
The heat and humidity was getting too much and we still had more than a week to kill. In the area we were, it wasn’t much infrastructure like hotels with AC or decent restaurant so we decided to head west toward Rio Hondo and Zacapa to find somewhere to stay with the AC.
We found a decent clean place with the car park to stay for few days with a really nice cafe and restaurant next door which we had almost all our meals there.
We almost emptied our fridge and freezer in Mexico to be ready for the shipping and we really didn’t want to fill it up before the shipping again so it made sense to eat out.
And finally it was almost time to get ready for the shipping. We drove to Puerto Barrios where we had to load the car into the container. We prepared the car inside and out ready for the shipment.
We loaded the car into the container on time and spent a day running around the port with our agent to have everything done for the shipping.
And once we got assured that it is ready to go, we got on a bus and went to Guatemala City.
There, we got a nice AirBnB in the heart of the city and waited for the car to leave the port before buying any ticket for our next destination.
Once the ship was on the move, we got our flights for Colombia/
Guatemala city was great. Since the shipping was done, we had time to relax and enjoy all the comfort of a big city, good coffee, good bakery and an awesome selection of foods to try. We really enjoyed our time in Guatemala city.
We had an easy flight to Panama and then Cartagena, where we start our next leg of the journey.
We are both excited for South America!
And finally after forty posts, we finished with the adventures in the North and Central America. Can not wait to start the next post in Colombia. Till then enjoy life and have fun.
