After working 3 months in RAM Marina on our boat “Island Girl” we needed to leave Guatemala to renew our visa and decided to make it a fun trip. Our plan was to make a round trip through the southern part of Mexico starting in Palenque and return to the Rio Dulce via the Guatemala Highlands. Our album for this trip has 7 sub albums with all our pictures. We hope you like them, like we do.

Flores Guatemala
The easiest route to Palenque is via Flores which is the capital of Petén the most northerly department of Guatemala. The old part of the city is located on an island on Lake Peten Itza, connected to the mainland by a short causeway.

We left the Rio Dulce with an hour delay due to the late arrival of the bus that came from Antigua. We checked into our hotel in Flores at 9:00 PM. It was a very nice and comfortable trip with only 3 official passengers. However, just out of Fronteras the bus stopped for 10 guys who were hitchhiking along the side of the road. They were all from Honduras on there way back to the USA via Mexico after being deported. Their English was very good, and they had years of experience working in the States, but all had been convicted of crimes and were deported.

The next day, July 20, 2018 we spent a wonderful day in Flores. We walked through the town, took a boat ride on the lake, had good food and met a lot of interesting people. We met a Dutch couple and the husband was fluent in Bahasa Indonesia, so Dorothy could practice the language of her birth country.

The following day we had again an hour delay in our departure to Palenque in Mexico due to the late arrival of a very rude couple from Israel. The same couple made our border crossing more difficult due to document problems. All in all, the trip took 9.00 hours. We had an interesting Dutch family on board, the husband who is Dutch works for the UN in Panama City, his spouse was born in Venezuela, the oldest boy in Bogota, Colombia and their little daughter in Mexico and due to that she has a Mexican passport.

Palenque, Mexico
When most people refer to Palenque they mean the Maya Ruin site. But Palenque is a mid-size town about 4 miles away from the ruins, so to distinguish both, the ruin site is called “Palenque Ruinas”. Palenque Ruins, also anciently known as “Lakamha” which means "Big Water", that used to be a Mayan city state in southern Mexico that flourished in the 7th century. The Palenque Ruins date from ca. 226 BC to ca. AD 799 after its decline, it was absorbed into the jungle of cedar, mahogany, and sapodilla trees.

Palenque Ruins is a medium-sized site, smaller than Tikal, Chichen Itza, or Copán, but it contains some of the finest architecture, sculptures, roofs and bas-relief carvings that the Mayas produced. By 2005, the discovered area covered up to 1 sq/mi, but it is estimated that less than 10% of the total area of the city is explored, leaving more than a thousand structures still covered by jungle.

The first day in Palenque we kept it easy, we got some money out of the ATM, did some shopping, booked our tour to the Maya ruins and two waterfalls called “Misol Ha” and “Agua Azul”. In the afternoon we spent some time in the hotel swimming pool.

The next day we took our major sightseeing tour. We had an English-speaking guiding tour through the ruin together with a couple from Switzerland and a beautiful lady from Argentina and this worked out very well. Our tour guide spoke very good English and explained in detail the art and architecture of the temple and palaces. It is an amazing site and I took a lot of pictures (see my album).

After our tour through the ruins we visited two waterfalls. The first one was “Cascada de Misol Ha".
This waterfall is located 12 miles from Palenque close to the road that leads towards San Cristóbal de las Casas. This waterfall consists of one single waterfall of 35 m height that falls into a single almost circular pool amid tropical vegetation. The water is of a clear blue color due to its high mineral content. Behind the waterfall there is a cave of approximately 70ft in length. It was very nice to swim in the pool.

The second waterfall called “Cascada de Aqua Azul" ("Blue-water") is very impressive. This fall is a series of waterfalls located 43 mi from Palenque. I have counted 7 drops of which the highest is at about 25ft. The water is very cold and has a high concentration of calcium and the water covers the fallen trees and the rocks with a thick layer of limestone.

On our last day of our stay in Palenque we visited the third waterfall in the area called “Roberto Barrios". This waterfall has again many levels and has many deep pools which have a beautiful turquoise color. To reach all the levels you must follow a narrow path through the jungle. We enjoyed this waterfall the most because of the absence of street vendors and foreign tourists.

The next day we left Palenque to travel to the historic city of San Cristobal de Las Casas. We arrived after a 9 hours bus tour in this beautiful city. We could have taken a shuttle bus which could have brought us in 3.5 hours to this city over a very rugged road through the mountains with a total distance of 160 miles. But we had already been on the road during our trips to the waterfalls. So, we took a very luxurious bus which gave us a tour of over 450 miles through south west Mexico. It was unbelievably beautiful, we crossed mountains, rolling terrain and flat farm land. Large and high bridges brought us over a very large man-made lake.

San Cristobal de Las Casas
San Cristobal de Las Casas is founded in 1528 and is in a valley at an altitude of 7,200 ft. So, when the sun goes down it gets cold. But we had great weather and we could explore this city and the surroundings for a couple of days. We spent 2 days in San Cristobal de Las Casas and we had a great time. The historic city is great to walk around in to see all the narrow streets, buildings and of course the many churches.

The city has many good museums, but the one that most impressed us was the textile museum. Not only what is displayed in the display windows but the hundreds of drawers underneath the windows.

It was very crowded in the city with tourists due to the “Santiago Apostol Festival". It is a Mayan Religious Festival that starts early in the morning with lots of fireworks to invite people to go to church. These churches seem Catholic with the many sculptures and paintings of saints, but they are not. Chicken get sacrificed and the church is full of candles even on the floor. The church floor is covered with pine needles but are cleaned away from the candles. It is not allowed to take pictures.

As a real tourist town there are street vendors, restaurants and souvenir shops everywhere. The streets are full of people with a lot of musicians and street artists. The market is full of Mayan textile and art. Maybe not a town for everyone, but we enjoyed it very much.

We also took a tour to the traditional Maya towns of San Juan Chamula and Zinacantan where we learned a lot about Mayan culture.

During our last evening in San Cristobal de las Casas it started to rain and since the sun disappeared behind the clouds the temperature dropped like a rock. We had a great time, but we needed to move on. The next day we took a very nice OCC us to go to Comitan.

Comitan
OCC is using very luxurious busses and we had a great 2-hour trip. We booked into a brand-new hotel which is located on the same parking area as Walmart. We took the opportunity to do some shopping for items we cannot find in the Rio Dulce.

Since we wanted to visit different sites we rented a car. With the car we visited two Mayan ruin sites “Tenam Puente" and “Chinkultic". Although other sites we have visited in Palenque, Tikal and Copan have more impressive temples these sites have a much better environment. No large crowds and no street vendors and only small family groups of visitors. The sites are beautifully maintained and there is no admission fee.

We also visited the “Lagunas de Montebello" which is a national park with many mountain lakes. The entire area in Chiapas is beautiful and we had a great time. Before we returned to Guatemala, we first had to return our car and the rental agent is in downtown historic Comitan. We had some problems to navigate through the narrow one-way streets, but the advantage was we were close to the town center where a marimba band was playing in front of the church. Downtown is nice, and we could have stayed a little longer.

Our bus ride from Comitan in Mexico to Huehuetenango in Guatemala was a ride full of extremes. We started in a luxurious OCC bus on a very nice 4-line highway, and it ended with a chicken bus over a small winding road. Close to the border the change came, since the last 3 miles in the OCC bus was over a dirt road under construction. The bus stopped 3 miles from the border in a town called “Ciudad Cuauhtemoc". We had to check out with the Mexican immigration and take a taxi to the border. No form needed to pass the Guatemala immigration. Then we took a tuk-tuk to the bus station where we boarded the chicken bus to Huehuetenango or as the locals call it “Way way”.

With only 3 passengers we left “La Mesilla” climbing into the mountains. However, the bus filled up fast with even no standing place left and passengers hanging outside in the rain. The road was through a narrow gorge next to a small river with towering mountains. It was scary but also very impressive and beautiful.

Huehuetenango
We spent our day by walking through Huehuetenango. Our first location was the Maya ruins called “Zaculeu". This site was restored in 1940 by the “United Fruit Company" and in the process the ruins were covered with gray plaster. The site is surrounded on three sites by ravines which gave it a strategic advantage for the Mayans. We liked the site and the views over the surrounding mountains are great.

Besides its town square the city does not offer a lot of interesting sites but its location in a large valley with the surrounding mountains makes it a great place to visit. Our hotel has a Bingo hall which is more like a Casino and probably to attract people with a good budget, the lobby on the first and second floors as well as the restaurant look very flamboyant. The stairs connecting the first and second floor are majestic. Even breakfast is served with class. However, the room we had was very small but clean.

Quetzaltenango
Our next stop was Quetzaltenango better known by the name “Xela". We have not heard anyone calling the city with its original name. We took again the “Chicken bus" which costs only US$ 2.80 for a close to 3-hour trip. At the end of the trip the bus was overloaded since the school day was over, and many students needed to go home. We had a reservation in a boutique hotel in the center of the old city. Every road is very narrow with very high but even more narrow sidewalks. The pavement has cobblestones which is very rough on cars and difficult to walk on.

The city is high in the western highlands of Guatemala with volcanoes around like the towering Santa Maria and its active lava dome “Santiaquito". We spent a couple of weeks last year during the month of November in the highlands and it was cold. We assumed that since it is now summer that it would not be as cold, but that was a wrong assumption. It was cloudy, we had a lot of rain and during these kind of conditions at an altitude of 7,600 ft the temperature drops when the sun goes down or is behind the clouds.

Although the city was founded in 1524 by the Spanish it is said that the city already existed in 1200 as a major Mayan city. In the 19th century coffee was introduced as a major crop and a large group of Germans moved in and added a more Gothic architecture to the city. Now the city is the second largest city in Guatemala. In 1902 the volcano Santa Maria erupted, and large rocks landed in the city. Shortly thereafter an earthquake added to the destruction. The original cathedral built in 1532 was destroyed and only the façade remains. When the new cathedral was built the façade was not attached to this building and stands about 50ft behind it. The space in between is used as a parking lot (see my pictures).

In between the rain showers we had a private walking tour and did a lot of walking to interesting places in the city including the Museo del Ferrocarrill de Los Altos". The interesting part was that in 1930 a railroad was partly built to connect “Xela" with the Pacific coast.

We could have taken again the chicken bus to go to Guatemala City, but we opted for a more convenient but a lot more expensive type of transportation; a shuttle bus to Chimaltenango and the remainder with an Uber car. We made the trip in 4 hours through one of the most beautiful areas of Guatemala.

Driving through Chimaltenango was a very special experience. On both sides of the main road through this town used cars ‘fresh’ from the USA are sold. Cars, pickup trucks and large tractor trailers from 2005 up to 1994 are displayed and we were told that this was the major used cars sale location in the western part of Guatemala. I believe it since we have seen over 1000 vehicles.

Guatemala City
The hotel we normally use in Guatemala City was completely booked so we chose a different hotel a little more expensive but very nice. After we went to the Litegua bus terminal to purchase tickets to Rio Dulce we asked the cab driver to drop us off on the Central Market which is also close to the “Parque Central”. The market is large and so fun to visit. Although “Parque Central” is not that interesting but a few of the most fun ‘pedestrians only’ shopping streets are connected to the park. Along these streets you find very nice small restaurants with outside seating which we enjoy so much.

Our bus ride back the Rio Dulce was pleasant and fast. We arrived at 3 PM and were happy to see “Island Girl” again. Next to the boat we found our new generator shipped from Doral in Florida and cleared through customs by RAM Marina in just 2 ½ weeks. So now we will be busy with the installation of this generator.