Welcome to Guatemala!

We changed our remaining Mexican pesos to Guatemalan quetzals on the shore of the river and had to pack our bikes up a daunting set of stairs to gain access to the town of Tecnica, so were sweating profusely within 20 minutes of entering Guatemala. We bought a few vegetables at a sparsely stocked vegetable stand and found our way out of town onto a small gravel road. We quickly started to wonder if we should have paid for the longer boat ride up river to the town of Bethel as this "road" was the roughest, steepest track we had ridden so far on the trip. We had to push our bikes a few times in the 2 hours it took to travel 15 km to the official customs office where we got our passports stamped. We rode on 5 km further down a slightly better gravel road to the town of Betania, where we were welcomed with open arms at a church, and spent the night socializing with the friendly locals. After so long in Mexico we were a little worried about how our life on the road would change when we crossed into a new country, but the border crossing was easy and we found the people as generous, if not more so, than in Mexico on our first day in Guatemala.Read more