Estamos en Flores

December 29, 2020 C C 0 Comments

We celebrated our arrival in Flores with a beer – we felt like we deserved it after our delightful (yep, there is definitely a note of sarcasm in my voice) journey from Antigua to Flores, for which I hold the agency we used to book everything in Antigua fully responsible!

So to cut a long story short, we booked a shuttle from our hostel in Antigua to the bus terminal in Guatemala City – apparently there are heaps of bus terminals in Guatemala City and the bus from Antigua obviously doesn’t arrive at the same one as the bus to Flores leaves from, and having heard about the state of the traffic in Guatemala City we didn’t want to risk missing the bus to Flores because we were stuck in traffic!

Figuring the agency had done this heaps of times before – we went for it – bonus, not only did they say that they would get us to the correct bus terminal on time, but that they would get our bus tickets for for the 10am bus to Flores as well… too easy we thought! How wrong were we… they might have done it before BUT why would they have the interest of the tourist at heart… So after battling through the traffic of Guatemala City with a detour to the airport to drop off two other gringos that were on our shuttle it looked ominous – we arrived at the bus terminal with no minutes to spare – it was gone 10am… but hey the bus hadn’t left! Yay, for the first time we were excited by a bus running late in Latin America!!! The guy from the shuttle went to buy our tickets – suddenly things became clear – of course – if he hadn’t already gotten the tickets then there was no urgency to get us to the terminal as the agency wouldn’t have lost any money… and hey, what’s one bad review on trip advisor?!? He came back from the window – tickets in hand for the 2pm bus – WTF – needless to say an argument and tears ensued – I was beside myself… and suddenly pretty fluent in Spanish!!!! Apparently the 10am cost more that the money the agency had given the shuttle driver to allocate to the bus tickets – the b******s – so, to get ourselves on the late running 10am bus to Flores… we ended up paying the difference… BUT at least we were off!

Not bad enough to NEED beer??? Well as we pulled into the edge of Flores the bus broke down! We had no idea where we were and followed two friendly girls towards the main drag… with no tuk tuks in sight – they apparently stop running at 7pm! We managed to get a ride to our hostal in a run down taxi with a crazy drunk driver…

After a terrible day only a beer at the hostal on the lovely roof terrance can put a smile on CC’s face!

Our time in Flores was to be short and sweet – this time round anyway – as we were heading to Tikal.

After a good nights sleep and a coffee in our hostal, we had the morning to kill so went for a stroll along shore of Lake Petén Itzá – where we bumped into someone I had worked with in Aus – yep, the phrase it’s a small world, suddenly took on a whole new meaning! Our stroll then saw us on the causeway heading off the island of Flores to go in search of a supermarket for supplies!

Flores seemed like a pretty nice place and we enjoyed our stroll…