Flores

Our next stop was ‘Isla de Flores’ more commonly just called ‘Flores’. It is actually an island in Lake Peten Itza and is connected to the mainland of Santa Elena de la Cruz by a causeway. Flores itself is a charming, colourful and laidback little island with many shops, restaurants and hotels. It used to have a road circling the outside of the island, however the lake levels have risen in recent years resulting in the road becoming submerged, this had resulted in some interesting access arrangements to restaurants that used to front onto the road! Other than trips on the lake, which is the third largest in Guatemala at 32km long and 5km wide, there isn’t a huge amount to do in and around Flores. It tends to be used as a central point to visit other places, such as Tikal. We needed a couple of days to slow down with the children and also catch up on laundry! We were staying in a lovely little hotel that had a great roof terrace, so we spent a fair amount of time playing board games watching life go by on the lake and homeschooling/road schooling/world schooling. On our first morning we did do a self-guided walking tour of the town, finding the central square where Elana and Bert spent a lot of time entertaining the locals running around on the basketball court. We were also treated to an amazing sunset one evening as we ate out at a local restaurant overlooking the lake.

Admin caught up on and batteries recharged we had an early morning start on our first ‘public’ (basically a bus laid on for tourists!) bus journey of our trip which would take us to Rio Dulce – a trip of about 5 hours!Read more