Day 13 Sunday 7th October: On the road (PanAmerican Highway) again

Chris writes:

After a somewhat frustrating night not being able to get a TV channel or Radio commentary on the Japanese F1 GP, (well done Lewis), we woke to a brighter morning but Volcanoes around the lake were still playing Peek a Boo with us.

Our plan for the day was to return to Frankie’s house in Antigua where we eagerly anticipate the return of the washing we left there a few days ago. Having experienced 48 hours of Mayan culture and met with some very friendly [if short] people we decided to go via an ancient Mayan ruin located close to Tecpan at Iximche which was conveniently about halfway.

The trusty Range Rover fired up without problems and aided by John on the maps and Mike on rear camera Chris took the ancient and narrow Pan American Highway up from Panajachel beside Lake Atitlan to over 8,000 feet as we joined the main highway.

John aided by Kate our secondary back up navigator ( Thanks Waze – great job) ably lead us to the Mayan historic site which was in Chris’s view a lot of old ruins.

It’s amazing how in the space of 100 kms or so you can experience every road trip scenario. As it is Sunday, there were fewer trucks on the road but that motivated the bus drivers to show off the skill often barreling past us on tight mountain bends at over 100 kms / hour fully laden with what must be petrified passengers and the occasional lunatic roof surfing or hanging off rear ladders.

Then there are vehicles that quite honestly couldn’t  pull my vest off but they are fully laden with humans of all sizes , shapes and colour and their various pieces of luggage. We actually decided that an MOT test wasn’t needed as most would fail but they should at least have a minimum Brake Horse Power [BHP] not to slow us down.

We also got mixed up in a long distance cycle race which had a ‘follow car’ holding back traffic from overtaking with only resulted in more bikes coming past us!

Having cracked the half distance we elected to stop for a coffee right beside the road, the owners were amazed as we were the first tourist or tall people who had ever stopped there. It wasn’t full, we easily found a vacant table and all others were occupied by flies.

We witnessed many interesting events from our roadside cafe.

Firstly in an effort to out drag another bus, away from a stop, the inevitable happened and one bus broke his prop shaft but the ever hopeful conductor dived underneath and tried to fix it by kicking it.

This didn’t work so passengers off loaded and very quickly another bus stopped to assist and the result was that as he was already overloaded many people found alternative seating and hanging spots to continue their journey.

The next entertainment was watching traffic being stopped on the infamous Pan American Highway in both directions for what must be some incredibly fit athletes on their bikes who negotiated a turn around from one one side of the road to the other via a traffic cone and headed off back up the hills in a significant climb.

We carried on to our next planned location which was Volcano Fuego, which erupted as recently as June 2018 killing over 350 local villagers. The devastation is clear to see but sadly the volcano wasn’t due to low cloud and steaming.

We all felt so sorry for the loss of life as the mountain was carved up by the 60 mph Pyroclastic flow which was indiscriminate in who it took the life of, or even whose house was saved when the adjacent neighbours was totally demolished.

We replenished the Range Rover’s tank and calculated that we avereged 11.5litres / 100 which was slightly worse than the Mitsubishi but we had more long climbs on this section of our route.

Interestingly, a man with a pump action shotgun, that are quite popular, was either guarding us and the Range Rover while refuelling or was there to make sure that Mike paid.

Having reflected very on what we had seen in the past hour we realised how lucky we are in life and we headed back to Antigua where we plan to take Frankie and Tutti out for dinner before Frankie join us and we head off to Rio Dulce on the Caribbean coast squeezed in between Belize and Honduras.

We haven’ planned to visit either but, could we squeeze two more countries in? Join us tomorrow on Day 14.