Guatemala - blown away (travel made difficult, part 2)

To be honest, Guatemala didn't make us happy. We were both really looking forward to Tikal - and then somehow there was no good mood there. Everything felt strange and oppressive, which also affected my mood over time.

And then, of all places, a travel issue arose there. I have to explain a bit. As I mentioned in the last post about #Copán, our short trip to Honduras was only possible with some effort. The plan was: 1. take a shared taxi from Tikal to Flores, 2. take a flight to Guatemala City, 3. take a taxi to Antigua (a pretty and safe colonial town 45 minutes away from the capital), 4. check into the hotel and then take a bus to Copán at 3 a.m. on the same night (arrival there around 10 a.m.). All buses and shuttles leave at this ungodly hour, which is clearly a concerted torture of innocent tourists.

We hadn't booked the express bus from Antigua to Copán in advance - a mistake, as it turned out. Although we could have easily bought the tickets online, if only our credit cards had allowed it. However, Paylife has developed a completely nonsensical security tool for online payments, which has already cost us a lot of money and nerves: You can only pay online with a TAN code that is sent by SMS to an Austrian mobile phone number. Now there are a bunch of countries where our mobile operator has no contract, so we can't receive SMS messages. This applies, for example, to the Seychelles (where I had to pay infinitely more for the flight ticket home because I couldn't buy it online) and to Guatemala.

So we couldn't buy the bus tickets to Copán online. So we tried to do it by email at the headquarters of the bus line in Honduras - no response; then in Antigua, where we wanted to depart from, by phone. But the internet in our wonderful hotel in Tikal was unfortunately nonexistent, so we couldn't find out the phone number. We asked the lady at the reception if she had internet access and could help us - her reaction: internet yes, help no. Well, that was her mistake now. I, already irritated, had one of my famous fits of rage, which made her meek. The phone calls to Antigua were long and outrageously expensive (satellite phone), but completely useless: the promised email response never came. Next attempt: an email to our hotel in Antigua, requesting that they book two seats in a minivan shuttle - and off we went to Flores. When we wanted to board the shared taxi for which we had already purchased tickets, everyone was surprised: apparently we had fallen for a scammer who issued fake tickets right in front of everyone's eyes, just before the entrance to the ruins. Since I was already irritated, my outrage - I would say - was intense and loud, and the driver was so impressed that he took us and probably also collected the fare from the scammer, because he didn't ask for any money.

Things seemed to be going well with the bus tickets now. The hotel in Antigua reported that there were still seats available. We transferred the amount for the tickets via PayPal during our short stay in Flores (see photo). But when we arrived in Antigua, it turned out that only one seat had been reserved, as we had only paid the price for one ticket in our haste - and the hotel didn't want to advance us the second ticket: 'so many bad experiences'. Nobody had noticed that we had already paid for our overnight stay, so there would have been security anyway. The fact that we were upset about it was met with incomprehension: 'We are not to blame, we just did you a favor.'

A lot of excitement, but in the end, everything turned out well: we didn't have to leave at 3 a.m., but the next day we took a taxi to Copán and immediately booked the minivan shuttle back, and at such a reasonable price that we didn't end up paying more than the big express bus would have cost for both trips.

Only in Honduras did I really realize, in view of the natural and uncomplicated friendliness of the people there, how peculiarly the Guatemalans we encountered mostly behaved: uninterested and careless, not at all service-oriented or at least helpful, suspicious, bordering on rudeness and unfriendliness (with regular boundary crossings). We didn't stay in the country long enough and don't speak enough Spanish to really get a complete picture. But it is obvious that the decades-long bloody civil war, the deeply corrupt and power-abusing political system that is still in place today, and the deep misery in which a large part of the population lives (especially the 22 different indigenous peoples who make up the majority of the population) play a role. The memories of the future (1992) Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchú, recorded in 1985, are enlightening: on the one hand, she describes the racism of the wealthy whites, who dehumanize, oppress, and exploit the indigenous people without restraint, and on the other hand, the stubborn backwardness of the Indios, who reject and despise everything that the whites do and achieve. It is somehow understandable that the atmosphere is bad.

Okay, what was good about Guatemala? We don't agree on the ruins of Tikal: Roby was positively surprised and very impressed, but I was a bit disappointed. The pyramids are not as magnificent as expected; I can't picture the other buildings. Perhaps this is because many things (including the pyramids) are not excavated or only partially excavated (meaning they are covered with earth and jungle). There are still many Maya sites to compare Tikal to. I'm curious. What we do agree on: the best thing about Guatemala is its rum. We highly recommend the Botran 18 (unusual and interesting), the Zacapa 23 (excellent), and especially the Zacapa XO (sensational).