May 23, 2023 – El Remate
Today we entered Guatemala!!! What a thrill. I have dreamt of making it to Tikal for so long. We are only 33km from Tikal and we will go there on Thursday. We actually paid a young kid at the border to help us with the Spanish at Guatemala customs. They are called helpers and many advise to stay away from them as have been known to scam people. The helpers at the Guatemalan border weren’t too aggressive and the kid seemed to be harmless enough. We didn’t let him take over the process, he just did the Spanish translation for us.
Our driving distance in a single day has definitely slowed down. We are moving along at a leisurely pace now. We are starting to gain confidence in our last round of fixes at Eagle Transmission in Houston, Texas. We have had zero issues since leaving there.
The picture is of a little restaurant where we had lunch today. I couldn’t believe we were sitting in a roadside restaurant in Guatemala eating lunch and we had driven there. Good food.
We continued on to an Airbnb we reserved for 3 nights in Tikal. If you look at the picture you will see the Airbnb had very thick walls because it was a traditional construction of mud over straw. It made for a comfortable room even though we didn’t have air conditioning. The Airbnb had a shared outdoor kitchen which was a very good idea as it kept the heat of cooking outside. We were the only ones there, so we had the kitchen to ourselves. We went out for some great pizza at a restaurant just 50m down the road from our Airbnb on the first night, cooked in the outdoor kitchen on the second, and hit another restaurant on the third.
Cheers, Chris
