The roads in Guatemala are Awesome!

Road through enormous landslide on Guat. 7W.

Here are some pictures from the last week's riding, from Rio Dulce to Coban (rained all day, mud!!!) and then Coban to Panajachel on Lago de Atitlan (no rain, nice dirt).  The picture above is of the huge landslide they suffered along route 7W a couple years ago.  Dozens of people were killed as a village below this road was completely destroyed.  Here is a link to some live video of the landslide:  http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ed9_1231542598   The approach to this detour road through the slide was our most challenging riding yet.  Wet, loose dirt, very steep with tight switchbacks and oncoming dump trucks sharing the one lane.  Nobody can stop - the truck doesn't want to and we literally can't.

We completed a major service on my bike (Davis) yesterday and are headed tomorrow morning around the lake to San Pedro la Laguna for two days.  Then on to Antigua for Christmas.

Visor is down because it is still raining.  Doesn't capture how wet and muddy we were!

Marion's riding pants at the end of the day.

Bikes tucked safely in our hostel.  Shared bathrooms, but attached gourmet restaurant and cake store!  Room was 100 Quetzales for a night, but our nightly restaurant bill was closer to 900 Quetzales...  Fantastic restaurant at Casa d'Acuna in Coban.

View from the temporary landslide road.  Clouds kinda close there.

More landslide area pictures.

We got excited when "pavement" started, but it was worse than the dirt.  Here is the start of the pavement.

Later on the road improved greatly and was great fun.

Views like this all day.  Guatemala is beautiful!

Palenque, Mexico to El Remate, Guatemala - Davis

We got an early start out of Palenque town and headed through Tenosique to get to the new El Ceibo border crossing with Guatemala.  We had read that there wasn’t much in the way of gas stations for a long time on this route so we filled up our bikes at the last station in Tenosique and hoped for the best.  We carry 3 liters of extra emergency fuel between the two of us and we haven’t needed to use any of it so far.  We were quite pleased with ourselves with the time we were making and the fast roads and then... brake lights and flashers.

We reach a long line of traffic that is completely stopped.  Naturally, we ride all the way to the front of the line - as all motorcyclists do in every situation (including traffic lights) in every country except the United States of America.  A kilometer or so of stopped traffic, including several police vehicles, and we get to the front to see a Latin American style road block.  It’s sort of like a strike or a demonstration, but the main characteristic is lots of people protesting for better conditions (usually working conditions, stop robbing our pensions, etc...) and completely blocking all traffic with logs and large rocks in the road.  In this case, there were three roadblocks - all at the intersection of the 3 main roads in the area.  The only roads for our purposes.  It looked like it had been set up fairly recently by the length of the line of traffic, and everyone is out of their cars as these usually last 6-8 hours.  Bummer... we were hoping to cross a border today!

I hop off the bike and walk to the front of the roadblock where the large signs saying stuff in Spanish about their companeros and the logs and rocks are.  In my finest Spanish I ask what’s up and they point to the sings and the road block.  OK, stupid question but I was just trying to break the ice.  I ask in Spanish if it’s possible for two hapless motorcyclists to pass and point to a narrow section of dirt between two large stumps on the side of the road.  They look skeptical and ask where we are headed.  “Guatemala.”  OK - we can pass.  I walk back to M, who hasn’t even dismounted her bike yet to take a photo of this craziness and triumphantly inform her that I have negotiated for us to pass through the road block.  She can’t believe it.  1 minute.  I am a hero.

We drive through the roadblock in front of everyone who has been waiting for who-knows-how-long and quickly realize that the guy I talked to was only one guy and nobody else in the huge protest was expecting two gringo motorcyclists to come riding through their iron-clad road block.  We get some looks, but wave and voice our support for their cause and wish them luck.  Then we have to pass the other side of the three way block.  These guys have no idea what’s going in with us and we point and pass through a small gap before they can talk it over.  The cars backed up on this road give us the same kind of looks...  What?!

We are ecstatic and gab a mile a minute over the intercom about what rock stars of international moto-travel we are.

We arrive at the border that didn’t exist in this location a couple of years ago. (you used to have to load your motorcycle into a boat and float down a river a few kilometers to El Naranjo, where they could process you but not the bike.  You need to import the bike officially in order to cross into Belize, Honduras or El Salvador, so this crossing was useless to most motorcyclists until recently.)

We successfully check our bikes out of Mexico - which is muy importante because this is the only way they will refund the $800 US Dollars they have of ours on deposit.  Then we drive into Guatemala and try to figure out the temporary stations - both Migracion and Aduana are in Trucks - they haven’t built any buildings yet.  The trucks are actually quite a bit nicer than the buildings they would build, so nobody is complaining.  We realize we have not obtained an exit stamp for ourselves from Mexican Migracion, so we walk back across the border to Mexico to get it.  Marion calls it the “walk of shame,” but I don’t think it’s so bad.  It’s just 50 feet or so.

At Migracion we realize that we have completely blank passports.  (we got new ones for this trip as ours were full and expiring soon)  Migracion at the Mexico-Texas border gave us all the documents, tourist card, etc...  but neglected to stamp our passports.  The guys are joking with us that we won’t be allowed to leave Mexico to which M and I both blurt out - “Good.”  This pleases the proud migracion worker and he stamps us out of Mexico and cancels our tourist cards and we’re on our way back to Guat.

The staff of Guatemalan Migracion and Aduana are the nicest people at probably any border in the world.  These people are amazingly kind and happy, helpful and fast.  It helps that there are few other people crossing.  I have to take a quick tuk-tuk ride into a nearby village to make a copy of our drivers licenses.  (they never have copy machines at the actual border - why?  because that’s just how it is at Latin American borders)  I’m going to open a chain of mobile copy machine stands at stick them 3 feet from every border in Central and South America and make a killing.  Anyway...

We get checked in, get our new windshield stickers, and we’re set loose in Guatemala on a deserted road.

We ride quite a while and start to get nervous about gas.  We almost run out (in reality still had probably half a gallon reserve left) but reach La Libertad and roll into our first non-Pemex gasolinera in two months.  (Mexico has only government franchised Pemex gas stations, no others unless you’re buying it out of a coke bottle)

We were on a roll and making good time so we arrived at our hotel in El Remate a day earlier than I had emailed them.  Business is way down due to narco-violence and the recession so they didn’t mind one bit and we were done for the day.  This was the first time we had had to ride in the rain for the whole trip - but it would certainly not be our last!

A couple days later we rode up to Tikal and saw the wonderful Mayan structures, most of them remarkably well preserved and all in the middle of a thick jungle.  Good stuff, but I don’t have anything to say about it.  Maybe Marion will.  I like wandering through huge Myan structures in the jungle, but the place was full of embarrassing Americans on day trips in from Belize talking loudly about completely inappropriate and racist stuff.  It was the first time I wished I had a maple leaf patch or something to let people know I wasn’t with them.

So far it has rained on us every day we’ve been in Guatemala - an amazing change considering it didn’t rain on us a single time for two months in Mexico.  Turns out riding in the rain is just fine although my riding jacket is not waterproof.  Marion’s seems to be and our luggage is all dry bags, so we just wipe the visor and motor on.

Here are some pictures of Tikal, the most amazing intact Mayan city we've seen - trying to catch up on posing stuff on here.  Enjoy -

These guys were in the middle of filming something.

It involved lots of smoke and the camera traveling down a rope.  Documentary or new low budget Indiana Jones?

Guatemala has one major beer company - Their best selling beer seems to be Gallo - with picture of a rooster on it.  But this one, Moza, is excellent.  Better than Negra Modelo and with no annoying foil cap.  Me gusta Moza!

San Cristobal to Palenque - Marion

What's up with the runners for Jesus or whatever?  There are people who are doing some kind of marathon group pilgrimage except one out of the group is always running with a torch while a bunch of other people wait in the back of the slow truck that's pacing the runner for their turn.  When someone gets tired another person jumps out of the truck and takes over.  We saw barefooted people booking it, ladies with children bouncing in their slings and all kinds of amazing sights. Huge pictures of Mary or Jesus, of course, and the trucks all decorated.  Sometimes there's more than one support vehicle with an alarm of some sort...  We saw them beginning with our trip from Oaxaca but the numbers multiplied greatly as we made our way to Palenque.  In fact, our whole trip was inundated with them.  It causes some serious traffic jams on curvy two lane mountain roads.

So, not to broadcast just how clueless I am or how little work I put into looking up interesting sights to visit (I'm terribly chagrined Aunt Susan) but I had no idea how awesome the ruins at Palenque would be...  I knew it was a bit of a tourist destination but when we finally got through the gate I was floored.  I mean, holy cow.  It was kind of the same feeling that I got when we visited Monte Alban right on the outskirts of Oaxaca.  These are not just some crumbling stone places, they are intact and impressive!  I was so impressed, in fact, that I was expecting much more when we got to Tikal because everybody's heard of Tikal, right?  Must be awesome (and it is but Monte Alban and Palenque were pretty close seconds)...  Anyway, more on Tikal later.

Hotty D showing off the interior of one of the monuments

If you look closely you can see the guy working on restoring some of the stones

Davis was particularly enamored with this arch

Some of the motifs were actually still intact-- this is from late BC, early AD (sorry don't have a narrower range)

This is me just realizing that the flower motifs weren't graffiti - happy.

View of the ruin that we were walking around in.  Most of the others are blocked off to the public.

You can see where one slope has collapsed- there are tons of ruins that are still covered with grass etc.

A water canal right beside the monument where D is in the tunnel

San Cristobal- M

We left Jose's relatively early for D and my's clocks after a pretty wild night hanging out with Jose and the rest of the patrons. Our first task was to clear the mountain range (the same range that helped contribute to all that pesky wind earlier). We had asked both Jose (Joe) and his Mexican wife separately whether the free road was good or not. Jose's wife was a firm proponent of the toll road. Jose pulled D aside later, however, and told him that he had people who would come time amd again to stay with him JUST to ride the free road. Well, we were convinced. I have to say, it was an amazing experience. The scenery was lovely and the road was intense. Maybe it was just that I was still a little out of it from the night before or that we hadn't waited for coffee or breakfast that morning just opted for packaged bars instead in the interest of time (it always takes at least an hour for breakfast to be prepared and consumed)but it was difficult riding that first little bit over the mountains. The switchbacks were STEEP and tight. The edges of the road just disapeared into nothingness.. There was no baracade of any type (this is not terribly unusual) but the drop was immediate and in some cases hundreds of meters down. As we neared the top, having only passed about three cars and one motorcycle in the whole climb, we hit the wind and I got a bit nervous. The moment that we passed the peak though, everything was totally different. Suddenly the foliage was lush and green (the mountains blocked the weather and a totally different climate greated us on the other side. I was expecting to have just as many switchbacks to contend with on the way down but is was not to be the case. We just stayed high for the most part, climbing even higher to reach the town of San Cristobal. We were driving through pine and cloud forest with nearly zero visability when we reached a beautiful village clustered around a lovely lake at something like 7,000 ft. We tried to take photos but couldn't really capture the reality. It was about an hour later, frozen and damp from riding through the clouds that we arrived at San Cristobal. It was pretty incredible to pull into the beautiful colonial town so far in the mountains, away from everything else. I thought that San Cristobal was interesting, though the poverty there was more pronounced than it had been in most of the other areas of Mexico that we visited. People from the small mountain villages would come to town to try to make money in the tourist trade. It was certainly a tourist spot and that turned D off to the whole thing. We spent a few really cold days there, enjoying the amazing coffe and some of the great restaurants that had popped up to cater to the weathy extranjeros. Overall, an interesting place but not my favorite destination even though the trip to get there was incredible. M

La Ventosa-M

Ok, ok, I know that D has already regaled you all with most of the story.  La Ventosa was windy, yes.  I just wanted to add a few bits.

This is from a published paper that I found in an internet search (awesome siting I know):


Two main phenomena are present in the windy region of La Ventosa. One of them is mountain-gap wind. Exceptional wind speeds can be observed due to effect of the strong cross-mountain pressure gradient. The high winds come from the Gulf of Mexico as a northerly wind, then constricted and speeding through the narrow Tehuantepec gap (Chivela Pass) and rushing violently down to the Pacific Ocean (Fig. 2). Other effect is sea breeze wind. A coastal local wind that blows from the Gulf of Tehuantepec to land caused by the temperature difference when the sea surface is colder than the adjacent land. 


Ok, so really, it was WINDY.  Like getting blown over doing 60 KM/H windy.  The most intense and crazy thing I have ever experience WINDY.  Davis and I were both riding at nearly 45 degree angles-- I kid you not.  My travel when a particularly strong gust would arrive was often times 4 feet in the lane.  It is my belief that it was a particularly bad day as it was misting and raining on us, apparently a sign of a more northernly wind than usual if Jose, our host in Puerta Arista was to be believed.  Also, when we swapped stories with the other travelers at Jose's (Davis mentioned this in his post) the Australian family told us that they had seen a tractor trailer blown over by the side of the road.  Pretty intense.   It was with great relief that we stopped at Jose's at the beach and got a beer.  We decided to stay for an extra night just for fun before heading up to San Cristobal.  More on that a tad later.  I'm getting eaten by little flying critters...

Oaxaca and Tehuantepec- M

Oaxaca and Tehuantepec- M

OK, I know that this was weeks ago and I am so behind (ever the procrastinator) but I just feel that I can not skip ahead to where we are now (just visited Tikal today) without purging myself of everything (or nearly everything) before.  So, you all will just have to suffer through or skip ahead.  Oaxaca was a lovely and interesting place, perfect for settling in for a little while and taking the spanish course that D and I had been planning on.  It boasts a wonderful bohemian/arty subculture even while most of the city is quite traditional.  It's a nice juxtaposition.

Dealing with D's shock problems and waiting around for the new shock to arrive meant that we didn't really have as much time as we would have liked to spend on spanish courses (also, for our budget they are expensive!)  So we settled on a week in Oaxaca.  It just turned out that that week had some very unusually cold weather that had me sleeping in my long underwear (our hotel for the duration didn't boast any heat).  Add to that suddenly having a schedule and 5 grueling hours a day of Spanish classes and I wasn't at my most cheerful (such a difficult life I know).  So, between Spanish class, homework and naps (I was ridiculously exhausted, much more than was warranted) we did much less in Oaxaca (other than eat) than I was anticipating.  We did spend a great day at the local ruins after nearly getting attacked by a manic chihuahua.  It is so humbling to see what amazing feats other people managed in BC times.  Our western culture focuses so much on the middle east but in reality, there was so much else going on...

Anyway, Oaxaca was a great stop for us because it really did help with our communication capabilities, more in understanding others than speaking for me but Davis has improved so much it's amazing.  He really does have a gift with languages.  It's lovely to see.

As Davis also mentioned in his much earlier post, we were able to do some long awaited bike maintenance on my bike which was wonderful.  In the proceeding weeks I had gone through ALL of my rear brake which was a bit of a disaster on those windy curvy mountain roads.  If you have no motorcycle experience the explanation is this: 70 to 80 percent of a bike's stopping power lies in the front brake because when stopping or slowing down weight is transferred to the front, obviously.  However, when in the process of riding and not stopping, the rear brake is very important (especially if you are a bit of a newby as I am).  The rear brake allows you to slow down without transferring weight forward and thus destabilizing the bike (very important when going down mountains and around curves).  So, while I was still able to slow by downshifting (I'm a bit shift happy sometimes) I was without the back brake for a bit and was very happy to get it back.

Overall Oaxaca was wonderful and we met some great people in our classes there.  Rebeca and Andrew were a lovely couple that we met from New York state.  They were in Oaxaca for several months with their eight and four year old daughters.  It's so wonderful to see young families traveling together and they were so warm and nice that it was a delight to spend time with them. Davis and I were able to attend a lovely seminar of sorts with Andrew at a very nice Oaxacan lady's hundred year old house on the correct preparation of Amarillo mole.  It was delicious and I have the recipe.  Hopefully, I'll be able to piece back together how to make it...

It was with sadness but also relief that we started our journey over again.  With my bike singing again from it's recent maintenance, we headed to Tehuantepec.

Tehuantepec had a bit of a ghost town feel to it.  It started with our arrival to the very closed hotel that we had planned to stay at.  We found another quickly just down the street that had a ceiling fan like a helicopter rotor though and it was good enough.  We only stayed for a few hours really and the think that most stands out in my mind was the wind on our third story balcony and the pack of more than ten dogs that could be viewed roaming down the street.  The wind was the important part though... Davis had read earlier that there was a patch of very windy land that we would be riding through the next day.  In our Mexican Camping book the authors had gone so far as to admonish RV drivers to batten everything down or risk loosing awnings and such in the blink of an eye.  It was a little trepidation but also excitement that we set off the next day.

Oaxaca - Tehuantepec - Puerto Arista - San Cristobal

We made it to San Cristobal de las Casas in the mountains of Chiapas and finally have an internet connection.  We got to ride some of the best mountain roads of our lives.  We also passed through one of the most intensely windy sections of highway in the world.  Between Tehuantepec and the Chiapas state line is a section called La Ventosa.  Filled with wind farms, this is the narrowest section of Mexico, ocean to ocean, and the only section without a Sierra Madre mountain pass.  Huge sections of the world's weather are funneled through this narrow section and it is a very intense section of highway to drive through in any vehicle.  We spent a couple of nights on the beach in the deserted beach town of Puerto Arista at "Jose's Camping Cabanas," where we met some great people.  Clay, from Canada, is a 22 year old geologist riding form Vancouver to Argentina on a KLR 650 motorcycle.  The wind in La Ventosa caused him to crash his bike, scattering his gear everywhere and continually blowing his bike over as he tried to get it all together.  Some torch-relay-for-Jesus people happened along and drove him and his bike 40 km until the wind was less intense and he could get his luggage sorted.  The other people we met at the campground were an amazing Australian family celebrating their son Frankie's first birthday.  They are driving from Canada to Rio Dulce Guatemala in an '89 Toyota camper with their two daughters, 6 and 8, and Frankie - the birthday boy turning 1.   In Rio Dulce is the 40-something foot Catamaran that they bought and live on, which they will sail through the Panama Canal and back to Sydney.  Their trip will be 2 1/2 years in total and is one of many they have taken around the world with their children.  Truly inspiring.  They lost several home-made sailboat parts and some mattresses in the wind of La Ventosa, never to be seen again.  Marion and I felt fortunate to have made it through unscathed and upright.  We have no desire to experience that particular section of road again.

We had a great couple of days at Jose's place and then set off through the Sierra Madre Chiapas range towards San Cristobal de las Casas.  Amazing motorcycling and a steady climb from sea level to 8000 feet, including a long section where we drove straight through a thick cloud with almost zero visibility.  Beautiful indigenous villages on the tops of the mountains really reminded us of the Thai-Myanmar border area and all the Chinese KMT hill tribe villages.  Only these people grow mountainside corn instead of black tea.  Near vertical rocky crag of a mountainside?  They'll plant a corn field on it.  It was freezing by the end and we were happy to pull in to the high valley of San Cristobal, a beautiful colonial town that is surprisingly popular with global tourists.  We are planning of heading up to the ruins of Palenque in a couple days, then cross into Guatemala and see the ruins of Tikal before heading south toward Guatemala City and Antigua, Guatemala.

Here are some pictures starting in Oaxaca and continuing into Chiapas.  Marion's bike is super happy with it's fancy new synthetic oil and new rear brake pads (check out how used up her old rear pads are).  The ruins are at Monte Alban in Oaxaca, a great archeological site at the top of a mountain overlooking Oaxaca de Juarez.  The pictures don't do it justice.  Hopefully more soon - Davis

Oil Change

Old, dirty oil

M's completely used-up rear brake pads - down to the metal

Monte Alban, Oaxaca

Puerto Arista is deserted, you can see the Pacific down this road

The climb from the Pacific up the Sierra Madre.  Ocean in the distance.  We climbed all day, zero to 8000 feet.

We came across this village and lake at 7700 feet after driving through the cloud for 30 minutes with almost no visibility