Today was a transit day. Transit days can be brutal, especially when you only get three hours of sleep due to late night packing and early morning flights. This happens to us a lot. Sometimes it’s our own fault for going with the cheapest fare; sometimes we’re limited by the flights available.
Anyway, we’re in Guatemala City. Yay! We’re supposed to be on our way to Flores, where we had a reservation tonight at the Hotel Villa del Lago. Yeah, that’s not happening at the moment. It turns out that once we got off the plane in GC, there was an email that our evening flight to Flores had been canceled and we’d been re-booked for a flight the following evening. That wasn’t quite going to work for us, but the kind folks at Avianca were able to book us on the first flight out tomorrow morning.
But, that means we get to spend some time in Guatemala City, which we didn’t think we’d do. We found a room at the Hostal Guatefriends and had some great sandwiches at Comedor Antojitos (which wasn’t actually open when we showed up hungry on their doorstep, but they let us in and fed us anyway.) We went to the National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, which has absolutely fantastic Mayan artifacts, and went window-shopping at the Mercado de Artesanias. We’re going to crash early tonight so we can get that early, early flight in the morning to Flores and book our trip to Tikal. No way are we missing Tikal.
Nuts & Bolts
Tips for the Guatemala City Airport
- Hang on to your baggage claim ticket. They won’t let you take your baggage unless you can show the claim ticket on your way out. I’ve honestly never seen this before, and we held up the line for a moment while we dug ours out of our carry-ons.
- The ATM in the arrivals corridor is the most visible, which is probably why it was out of money today. There is another one on the Departures level, hidden behind the money changing kiosk.
Getting Around
Not that we’re experts or anything based on half a day of being here, but I’d say that even though Uber is available in Guatemala City, you’re just as well off flagging down a cab. Unlike in the States, where Uber sets your trip price before you agree to it, Uber in Guatemala is metered by distance and time – which means our driver took the longest route possible to get us back to our hotel and drove the price up higher than it would have been if he’d gone the straight way, or if we’d just negotiated a fare with a cabbie.
Update: Apparently we just had a bad experience with one Uber driver. We used two more and everything was fine. We reported the first on Uber’s site and got refunded most of the cost of the trip, so all is well.
Lesson learned.
