Río Petexbatún

It rains heavily all night and is still torrential when we get up. Given the dangers of hidden potholes and slippy roads I decide to take the van to lunch and ride from there if it dries up. Given that John has ridden every mile so far, he decides to brave the weather. As it turns out the weather is better than forecast and I ask if we can get out of the van before the lunch stop so we all do. There are open fields and rainforest with mist as we cycle along through more tiny villages - these are the Guatemalan lowlands so pretty flat today compared with where we have been! Then the rainforest either side of the road becomes much thicker and is like something out of Tarzan! And then the landscape reverts to trees and fields and looks almost English countryside - and then back to rainforest and little villages. There are so many stray dogs - many clearly have puppies. Best thing a dog charity could do would be a sterilisation programme. We see a dead dog many days that has been hit by a car and so many of the live ones are painfully thin. Kate on our tour collects any leftover meat every night for feeding the strays the next day !
It is noticeable again how many churches there are - these are concrete and fancy but many look like they have been abandoned. There are also numerous petrol stations that look like they have never been finished. It makes me wonder whether missionaries were here for a while and then left. Most houses are just wooden - many with some type of thatched roof.
Everyone is friendly and waves / shouts gringo as we pass.
The lunch van gets stopped by the fruit police and gets all the fruit confiscated- not sure why - must be some sort of disease that they are trying to eradicate.
It’s a very straight road today and pretty quiet so it is a baptism of noise as we enter the town where we are staying tonight. Bustling, noisy and chaotic. We arrive relatively early so time to have a coffee at a little place that was very hard to find and looked nothing from the outside. I order an americano with milk on the sauce and I get a black coffee and a large cup of sweetened hot milk !
There is a little puppy that we all pet (see picture)
Dinner is at a local restaurant and is surprisingly good - plenty of leftover meat for the strays tomorrow !Read more