We crossed the border from Belize into our 5th country of our trip: Guatemala! We’re back to communicating in Spanish and driving on crazy roads. Guatemala’s landscape is mostly jungle, and this small country is home to 37 volcanoes! We’re really excited to explore!
Flores
We crossed the border and drove to Flores, a colourful town located on an island in the middle of a lake. The island isn’t van friendly, since the access bridge doesn’t support the weight and the tight cobblestone streets would be a nightmare to navigate. So we parked on the other side of the bridge and spent an afternoon strolling around the pretty streets before taking off and heading closer to Tikal to prepare for an early start at the ruins.
Tikal
Tikal National Park is home to what our guidebook describes as “the mother of all Maya sites” and after visiting the site, it definitely lives up to its name. We’ve been able to visit quite a few sites on our road trip, and Tikal was by far our absolute favourite!
We spent a full day roaming around the archeological site, climbing pyramids and taking close to one million photos.
We also tracked down a few local residents, including howler monkeys, spider monkeys, pizotes, parrots, and toucans!
While we were pretending to be Indiana Jones, Finnley was staying with a lovely Guatemalan family who have a small farm just outside of the national park.
Antigua
We then set off to cross the country towards Antigua; the old capital of both Guatemala and the Spanish Latin-American empire. It took us three days to make the drive, but now that we’ve arrived we plan to spend quite a bit of time here.
What’s Next
Antigua is surrounded by three volcanoes (Agua, Acatenango, and Fuego). Fuego is highly active, and erupts every 20 ish minutes, so while we’re here we’ll be hiking Acatenango to get a closer look at Fuego!
What’s New
We’ve uploaded two new videos. The first is from our time in Guadalajara! We really enjoyed this beautiful city. We visit huge markets, nearby pueblo magicos and do a bike tour of Guadalajara!
The second video is a short one from our time camping on Lake Chapala. We hope you enjoy them!
That’s all from us this week!
Hayley, Jake and Finnley 🐾
P.S. If you know of anyone who would like to receive our updates as we head south, please forward this email on to them so they can use this link to sign up to receive our email 😁👍
