Day 16 Wednesday 10th October: 1.5mpg blows the fuel budget!

Chris writes:

We woke to bright sunshine from our river side location at Rio Dolce Puente for our last day in Guatemala before heading to El Salvador tomorrow.

We spent a couple of hours on admin which involved an exchange of e mails with the hotel which we have reserved in Esquel mid-way down the spine of Argentina & Chile for the night of 30th November [yes, we are organised aren’t we!].

More importantly we concluded negotiations with a local rental company based in Mendoza for two vehicles [we are a team of six by this time] to take us the final 3,000 miles to our end destination Ushuaia, Tierra Del Fuego or ‘The end of the World’. Mind you, we did have to pay for a lockable load deck cover to be fitted to one of the VW Amarok’s we have elected to use for the final leg and we have an amazingly expensive one-way hire charge for the vehicles to get back to Mendoza.

That over, Frankie offered to fire up the twin 300 BHP Diesel engines on his Sea Ray and show us another part of the Rio Dulce River which is lake Izabal located 15 miles inland from where we are staying.

We thought it would be churlish not to accept such a kind offer especially as the temperature forecast for today was expected to be around 35 degrees for most of the day. So, we set off and fuelled up and hoped that the 1.5 miles to the gallon we are experiencing in Frankie’s Sea Ray is the worst consumption we have across the whole trip which we think is a safe bet!

Our journey took us past more amazing waterside private residences including one that had 11 boats and no it wasn’t a Marina.

We passed under Rio Dulce Bridge which connects Paten with the main Guatemala landmass.  This is an area of dispute between Belize and Guatemala which is why there is never a fixed border shown on any map between Belize and Guatemala – it is always shown by a straight dotted line [for anyone interested].

We also past the Old Spanish Fort which guarded the Rio Dulce river entrance to inland Guatemala. This ‘Castle of San Felipe de Lara’ we thought was a token defence gesture as it really is a pretty minimal as far as our Spanish fort knowledge goes.

We motored across Lake Izabal at an average of 23 mph [SOG knots converted] which is only marginally slower than our road trip from Antigua base some days ago to Rio Dulce.

We decided to have a snack lunch and found an extremely busy place [Denny’s Beach] which we can recommend to anyone and yes, they have rooms – a very pleasant place to chill for a few days.

We headed back in 35-degree heat to the river house aboard ‘Me Cala’ at a good speed and watched the fuel tanks empty in real time.

Back at our temporary base, we started to face reality again and plan the final details of our route tomorrow to Boca Olas hotel in El Tunco on the Pacific coast of El Salvador. This equates to only 243 miles of which the first 120 is in Guatemala before we face our first major road country border.

We will again be in the Porsche, and no doubt will be mistaken for Guatemalan drug barons running a cross border operation so we anticipate delays but have a wad of ‘green-backs’ on hand just in case.

In reality, this journey could take between 8-9 hours on a good day so it’s an early start and we are hoping for the best run possible.

We will report on our actual experience in our Day 17 blog tomorrow.