Jared – Page 9 – The Escape Hatch

Guatemala, Day 1: Plans Are Nice, Just Don’t Get Attached To Them

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.

National Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology

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.

Exquisite Mayan pottery from the museum collection.

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.

The Travel Kit (or, What Are We Forgetting to Take?)

Here we go:

A-PAP in carry case, camera tripod, two Deuter hiking backpacks, one day-trip backpack, toiletry bag, two hats, sunglasses, chargers chargers chargers, one Sony tablet, two mosquito nets, one Dell two-in-one for blogging, one handy pocket-size Olympus waterproof camera, two inflatable travel pillows, headlamps, mosquito repellent, padlocks, pill box, ponchos (in a selection of four bright “Hey, we’re Americans!” colors), one Canon Rebel T3 DSLR camera, one telephoto lens and one ultrawide fisheye for said camera, dry bags, and toilet paper.

What’s missing? Clothes, I guess. I suppose we can squeeze them in somewhere.

The good news: the place we’re going uses U.S. standard 110 power outlets. No adapters necessary. *whew*

T minus 3 days to Guatemala!

Welcome to The Escape Hatch! (Or, Does the World Really Need Another Travel Blog?)

Why not ask, does the world need one more bowl of pho? One more piece of duty-free chocolate? One more plate of jerk chicken over peas and rice? Does the world really need any more scenic photos of pristine beaches, soaring mountains, and crystal clear lakes? Does the world need any more adventure stories of driving through a giant crater in the Negev Desert, crunching across Icelandic snow at midnight under the Aurora Borealis, or snorkeling over coral reefs off the shores of Zanzibar?

Well, yeah.

My name is Jared Millet. My wife Lea and I are habitual world travelers. We do our best to leave the United States at least twice a year, and we never go on one trip without already starting to plan the next. We’ve done our share of in-country travel too, straying away from the usual tourist attractions whenever possible and looking for holes-in-the-wall that many people have never heard of. Which doesn’t mean we’d turn our noses up at a chance to raft down the Grand Canyon. We’re definitely going to raft down the Grand Canyon. One of these days.

You learn a lot when you travel (and not just in the “self discovery” sense, though there is that too). You learn little things about how the world works, and how the world can work differently than it does in your home town. You learn that Israel has an unnatural number of roundabouts and not nearly enough gas stations. You learn that, seen from a distance, a black rhino moving at speed can easily be mistaken for an SUV. You learn that the Moroccans didn’t learn anything from the French when it comes to variety of food. And you learn that a person can go for weeks (or months) on three changes of clothes, as long as you have enough socks and underwear and don’t pack any more shoes than you absolutely have to.

Honestly, given everywhere that Lea and I have been, all the thousands of photos we’ve taken, and the sheer number of miles we’ve logged, I feel bad that I haven’t been blogging our adventures for years. It’s never too late to start, and Guatemala is right around the corner. Here goes…