Guatemala is supposed to be the poorest of all Central American countries, but they all lay claim to this. On first acquaintance, Guatemala appears not to be the poorest. The amount of vehicles on the road will testify to that. They do have too many beat up old cars and trucks and awful buses that spew out enough stinking black exhaust fumes to pollute two galaxies. There are also major road improvements going on, so GDP, or the World Bank, must be able to support this.

Now, down to the crux of the matter – crime, or to be more accurate, violent crime. In rural areas, most men carry machetes, the length of a sword and with a broad blade. Some are sheathed, most hang from a belt. The machete is a tool; it cuts wood and food crops, clears weed, cuts the tops of coconuts. Policemen are armed with revolvers, batons and usually rifles or semi-automatic weapons. Members of the army are everywhere, all toting guns. There are armed private security officers at every bank, supermarket, anywhere that handles money. Our theory is that you can run away from a machete but you can’t dodge a bullet. Anyone else carrying a gun isn’t going to make it obvious. Someone told us that a lot of handguns are carried in Guatemala, especially in the highlands.

Machetes are a common sight in Central America. Armed police, army and security personnel are de rigeur throughout South and Central America. You just get used to it. Whenever I used an ATM anywhere on this trip, my preferred choice was always one with two armed officers watching over my transaction. They are quite cute in a Frankie Goes to Hollywood sort of way, and sometimes just as camp. Guatemala is notorious, according to web blogs, for private enterprise policemen, so we entered the country expecting problems. We were never stopped by policemen, not once.

Just to clear up the Guatemalan policemen issue, we drove into Guatemala City using our large scale map and managed to get as far as the city centre. Then the signage for Antigua dried up. What do you normally do when lost? Ask a policeman, so we did. He tried to explain the way, must have thought, oh bugger it, and told us to follow him, which we did. His two fellow officers (you never see them in less than threes), one of them carrying a rifle, jumped in the police car too. So, we had our personal police escort through Guatemala City and half way to Antigua, with sirens sounding whenever we passed a bus queue or anyone they knew. They stopped, took lots of photos so we took photos of them. They were three fun guys. How many other people say that about Guatemalan police officers?

Antigua was once the principle city in all of Central America. The centre is entirely Spanish colonial with stupendous churches, monasteries (one now a very ritzy hotel) and civic buildings, many severely damaged by earthquakes. The city sits at the base of three perfect cone volcanoes. Much of the centre, laid out in grid fashion, has been restored. OK, it’s a shrine to tourism but tastefully done. It has some amazing restaurants of every persuasion, some exclusive hotels and fancy tourist shops. The street markets are a photographer’s paradise.

We were trying to find our hotel and in desperation, we pulled up at the roadside at random to ask the way. A retired couple stepped out of their house and nearly fell over; it turns out the gentleman once owned a TC. He is American and has worked many years in Central America, his wife is Guatemalan. We ended up spending the evening with them – they gave us some sound advice about where to go in Guatemala, and put us straight about the safety issues. Basically, Guatemala is like everywhere – there are some rotten apples wherever you go. Guatemala gets a bad press where other places that are far worse never get a mention.

You know those knitted scarecrow dolls made from scraps of knitting wool of every colour that elderly ladies give to rellies for Christmas and sell at church fund raisers? Well, the native Guatemalan women look a bit like that with their multicoloured skirts, blouses and headgear. They sell lengths of multicoloured fabrics that they wear as wraparound skirts; table runners, place mats, tablecloths and many other textiles in a riot of colours. You need sunglasses to go browsing. Even the small children wear this bright and often gaudy local costume.

Antigua is a great place just to walk the streets, or to sit in the main square and people watch. It is also a haven for Guatemala City folk as a weekend retreat. The place was quiet on Friday night but Saturday and Sunday! Chocker block full. There was a religious parade on Sunday, with a statue of some saint on a huge daiz being carried around at sonorous pace by a mass of pallbearers, followed by a brass band that played a monotonous tune that sounded like the Black Dyke Mills Band at one tenth the normal speed. This went on until eleven at night.

A gentleman staying at our hotel got chatting to us, mainly because he used to have a TC. (It’s like waiting for a bus - nothing for months and suddenly two former TC owners turn up in a weekend.) Sadly he moved on to Porsches, but we can forgive him that. It turns out that this American man is an archaeologist whose responsibility was the excavation of the Rosalila temple at Copan and the tunnel viewing system. The hotel owner allowed us to park the TC inside the hotel foyer, so it became something of a tourist attraction.

The following day we saw a 1960s Mercedes pass us with rally plaques on the doors. We caught up with some other rally cars at a service garage. It turns out that nineteen cars are on a Panama to Alaska rally from the UK, heading in the same direction as us but taking a different route. They were all classics from the 60s and 70s. They thought we were potty to have driven so far in the TC and amazed we were still in one piece. They were already having suspension problems with a long way yet to go.

When we planned our route through Guatemala, we could take either the westerly or easterly route. East would have taken us to the north-east of the country to the Mayan ruins of Tikal and then through Belize, and north through the Yucatan peninsular of Mexico. Our Foreign Office warned of car jackings on this route and advised travellers not to go that way. Car jackings have occurred, and violent robberies where people have been shot. We were not travelling in a tour bus, or in a car where we could wind up the windows or keep the doors locked, so we were even more vulnerable than the normal tourist.

Belize is only 174 kilometres long and the road from Guatemala enters half way up so that cuts out 50% straight away. Tourists head for Belize not for the interior but for the coastline and for the cays offshore. You can’t take a TC onto the cays and take it diving for coral and tropical fish. For these reasons, we decided to take the westerly route through Lake Atitlan, reputed to be the most beautiful lake in the world.

We picked up the Pan American highway north of Antigua and discovered that Guatemala also has its maniac bus drivers as well as Ecuador. There is not a lot going on between the ears of bus drivers, but why just Ecuador and Guatemala? Is it something in the water? The buses also have their macho, raging testosterone-driven nutters who hang out of the passenger door waving frantically to tell you that they are going to carve you up if you like it or not.

No siree, not this TC, and not the Toyota in front or the Ford in front of that either. If you put your collective minds to it you can hang them out to dry. All the buses do anyway is pull in straight in front of you to drop someone off or pick someone up, but only if they feel like it. There is nothing they like better than to joust with each other in town centres causing total traffic deadlock. It’s generally accepted motoring psychology that an E Type Jaguar is a man’s best friend, but a beat up, toxic exhaust expelling, underpowered, big, square chicken bus painted in lurid colours?

If it wasn’t for the traffic and scruffy towns, this part of the Pan America would be very scenic. We picked up our turning left for Panajachel, the tourist town that sits on the edge of Lake Atitlan. Sadly, the lake didn’t come into view, it was misty. Oh well, maybe tomorrow it will clear up. Panajachel reminds us very much of Bali. It has the same chronic oversupply of factory made "local specialities" that masquerade under the guise of artisania, chasing a short supply of tourist Yankee dollars.

The persistence of these "artisans" makes weary work out of going for a stroll. Children barely out of the cradle have the sales patter – "I do you good price". We had a good hotel with pool, palm trees, pleasant grounds, restaurant and great rooms. That saved us the daily chore of mortally wounding the feelings of all these disappointed salespersons.

The only way to see "the most beautiful lake in the world" is to get out on a boat and tour it. We had a Guatemalan guide and a Dutch couple for company. The tour entailed a boat trip, a one hour walk between two lakeside villages, another boat ride, a visit to the village of Santa Cruz for a coffee tasting, another boat ride to Santiago Atitlan for lunch, a couple of churches, a market, and a Mayan shaman.

The walk was good with great views of the lake, but not entirely clear of mist. Santa Cruz was a small village where coffee bushes grew everywhere, even in people’s gardens. The local coffee is genuinely organic, crafted in a non-technological way using basic equipment and little expertise and it shows in the taste. We bought a pack of beans just to help support the local economy. Anyone fancy a ferocious cuppa coffee?

Santiago Atitlan is a lakeside town where pouring concrete is the main source of income. The streets are lined with stalls selling woven goods. Our guide, like many guides in third world countries, took us to people he knows to get them to give a bit of a demonstration so that we feel obliged to buy something. We explained that we are travelling in a small car with no room left whatsoever, and the Dutch couple were backpackers with the same space problem. The women kept on bringing stuff out until something took my fancy, it was cheap, it was genuinely hand made, so I bought it, mainly to circumvent an impasse we found ourselves in.

Our guide took us to a restaurant that cooked fish fresh from the lake. We didn’t know that you can deep fat fry piranhas, but that’s what they looked like with two rows of fangs. As you may guess, the fish were entire, and overcooked and laid there staring up at us. I couldn’t face the veggies after seeing what was on sale in the market in unsanitary conditions. Not a great meal.

The visit to the Mayan Shaman was a farce. In this part of Guatemala, most of the people speak the Mayan language, very few speak Spanish at all. They are ambiguous about religion – many go to the Catholic churches but also carry on the old Mayan ways. Our guide took us through streets and alleys we would never have gone down, past groups of men leglessly drunk and into a private dwelling, a small single-storey one-room shed with concrete floor. The room was dark, lit by incense candles that could never disguise the background smell of dirt.

The Shaman was propped up on the floor - a dummy (made from a stuffed sack and a ball for the head) wearing two hats and with a couple of dozen women’s headscarves of the Grace Kelly era hanging from around its neck. A wooden face mask representing the face sported an unlit cigar. There was an ashtray with cigarette butts, probably to imply that the Shaman would appreciate it if you left him some smokes. Several men were lounging around on chairs, quite obviously struggling to sit upright from the effects of drink. The one in charge, with a misty, communicating with the gods via the Shaman look about him, also sported a neck scarf. The admittance price was two quetzals per person, about 15 pence, and twelve to take a photograph. We were supposed to take this seriously.

Apparently the Shaman will stay here for a year and then move on to another house to support the drinking habits of another group of blokes. What’s wrong with saving up all these money offerings to their Mayan gods and use it to patch some holes in the roof? Some people have absolutely no sense. We always wondered where the men were while the women were manning the market stalls, working in the fields, doing the washing in the lake. Now we know.

We headed west for the Mexican border, travelling through heavily populated, mountainous country dedicated to market gardening vegetables. These people are poor, garbage is everywhere, towns are scruffier, hotter. At this time of year clouds are low over the higher mountains so we spent the day climbing through cloud and descending through heavy rain before popping out into sunshine and intense heat at sea level.

Our exit from Guatemala was difficult with touts, hawkers, drunks, money changers and voyeurs all peering into the car and never taking "no" for an answer. They couldn’t keep their hands off the car despite many requests and then commands not to touch. It was so hot and humid, something these people work on just waiting for you to loose your guard. I stayed with the car while Roberto did the usual exit procedures. I totally lost the plot and lost my temper. This is the last troublesome border crossings in Central America. All we have to do now is get into Mexico.

©Lynne Douglas 2008

Back to Chapter 13 - Nicaragua and Mayan Temples Forward to Chapter 15 - Through Mexico to the USA