Leaving on a jet plane - and arriving

Houston, we have a problem.  Well really the problem was having to come through Houston, or any US hub frankly.   The USA is the only country we know that doesn’t do Transit which means going all the way through customs and security just to check back in again.   It’s just primitive.    Still Houston airport wasn’t  as bad as we expected on that side but food was not easy especially for vegetarian options.  Here in Texas they think that vegetarian is what food eats.  

As usual, before we left  there were various housekeeping  phone calls to make , credit cards, deliveries that sort of thing and I was asked another one of  those questions that if you think about,  just don’t make sense.  This one was “are you going anywhere nice”.  To which the answer has to be “no, we always try to find somewhere horrible for our holidays so that home seems even nicer when we get back”.   Another one of my favourites is  “it was in the last place I looked”.  Well yes, how many of us keep looking after we’ve found what we’re looking for.

We’re with United Airlines who charge a hefty sum to confirm an extra legroom emergency exit seat so we splashed out.   It included complimentary soft drinks so when H had an orange juice it said it liked her hair.  Only joking, she had water.

Anyway we are going somewhere to start with that is supposed to be horrible and that’s Guatemala City which is allegedly dirty, polluted, fairly dangerous and with uninspiring architecture.   When we read that one of the major attractions is a scale model of the Eiffel Tower we booked a taxi straight from the airport to another town, Antigua, which has better write-ups.   We normally just have the flight and first night’s hotel booked but this time we had a hotel for the first three nights and that taxi sorted so for us it was wildly over organised.

We arrived just before midnight , 25 hours after we got up to get to Heathrow and understandably just fell into bed.   At 7.30 I looked out of our window to find a volcano right in front of me.  Quite a sight especially as it was unexpected.   This is a low, 2 – 3 storey town so views from the roof terrace are exceptional.  It all looked very fresh and as we walked around, it was clear of litter, monstrous new buildings and loose dogs. 

Antigua is set out on a grid like an US city or an old Saxon one for those of you who’ve looked at Wareham properly and it really is a beautiful old Spanish colonial place.  I’d rate it as more attractive than any city we saw in Costa Rica or Argentina .   This is also the time we tend to suck air through our teeth and say we really should have done a bit more Spanish revision before we came.   This time our revision was restricted to turning our sat-nav to Spanish for the last twenty miles of a trip last week so we know how to say “first left at the roundabout on the A27” but we haven’t had to use it yet.   We do remember nouns so recognised Cake de Zanahorias as Carrot Cake, asked for Cake de Zanahorias only to have the woman on the till say “one carrot cake” back to us.  I don’t know why we bother sometimes.

I have the new camera with me and note that most guides warn against waving expensive looking cameras about.  Got that spot on then.   The new one with telephoto, laptop  and other bits is about 8 kilos.  H had suggested when I was worriting about the weight before getting it that if I lost a stone I’d be carrying no more and the cameras would be more use than a stone of fat.  Harsh but  true.   Now I have to decide between ice cream and a close up lens.

The buildings which are tallest are the churches, many of which were seriously damaged and still remain closed after a devastating earthquake in the 1970’s.  The cathedral is in good shape and is unusually on a north/south orientation rather than the usual east/west.   Lots of Christ pictures as you would expect and it struck me that for some reason they all look like the tall thin fella from Peter, Paul and Mary.

Of course the people are the interesting bit as always and they do seem very friendly and not pushy at all.  We get asked if we want a taxi or a necklace or guide and a simple no, gracias is enough to get rid of them.  We even saw one guide later who jokingly called out ‘best English speaking guide in town’ at us and laughed.  The local locals, that is those who appear to have indigenous blood are often tiny, many well under 5 feet tall.   We had a good chat to a local from Guatemala City and got a few tips of where to go.  He was well travelled and had spent some time in Europe but had never been to England. 

This town is well worth a visit, with a thriving café culture and many restaurants and bakeries.   It’s supposed to be touristy and has lots of language schools but it doesn’t seem anything other than a really attractive Guatemalan town, not at all overrun.  For instance I haven’t seen a rash of Lonely Planets being carried about yet, that’s the sign of a tourist hotspot.  

We have a couple more days here but with our mode of travel one of the first things we have to do is plan our exit strategy whenever we get somewhere.   Really don’t want to get stuck somewhere we want to leave only to find that the next bus is three days away.