A traumatic trip North

We were picked up at 9am in a shuttle and taken to GC. It didn't take long to reach the outskirts but took another hour to drop people off at the airport and then the bus stop. We got to see quite a bit of GC - there were some lovely statues and colourful houses but mostly it just looks like a huge, sprawling mess with tons of traffic.

We then got the 11am Linea Dorada bus to Flores ($45 for shuttle and bus) - unexpectedly spacious and comfy though no TVs to entertain us. The roads were single lane and windy at times, with green mountains either side. We were supposed to arrive about 7pm. At around half 5, just as the sun was setting we came to a halt behind a queue of traffic...and there we stayed! We've no idea if it was an accident or landslide or something else. We were fully expecting to be stuck all night and with a young boy running around and playing his pan pipes in our ears really loudly, I expected I might have to murder someone.

Thankfully, after 3 hours we slowly got going. The rest of the journey was painfully slow as we crawled along behind the other vehicles but we slept most of the way. Finally we got to Santa Elena sometime after midnight. We collected our bags and found that they were dripping wet :(

An aggressive taxi driver tried to charge us 100Q for the 2km ride to Flores. We couldn't see another taxi so asked the bus driver and he said it should be 40Q and the taxi driver begrudgingly agreed, then drove like a bat out of hell to our hotel within about 1 minute!

Strangely there were still a fair few people sat in plastic chairs in the middle of the street, not doing much. We rang the doorbell of Green World Hotel (183Q) and thankfully a sleepy lady in her pajamas let us in. She didn't have a record of our reservation but showed us to a murky room with a cockroach munching on the soap on the bed. Once she’d gone we realised it didn't have the terrace and lake view I'd booked but we didn't want to disturb her again and were just happy to have a roof over our head.

After a hot shower and spreading out all our wet stuff, we finally got to sleep at about 2am.もっと詳しく