We've arrived in Guatemala!

Quite an eventful journey to Guatemala: All was going well on the flight to the USA (well – there had actually been 1 call for a doctor on board) until we hit some headwinds and encountered a lot of turbulence. Slowly on the flight monitors we saw our arrival time getting later… However, we were not worried as we had almost 3 hours to do the transfer in Houston. Then, on waking up from a little snooze I saw that our destination had changed to DFW – Dallas Fort Worth – on the monitors – it pays to keep an eye on those things!

After about 15 minutes the captain announced that because of poor weather in Houston we would need to circle around as our landing was uncertain. However, due to the strong winds we had encountered en route, we did not have enough fuel left to do that, so we needed to go to DFW to get some more fuel on board. This we duly did, and then headed off to Houston, into strong winds and poor weather. This gave a lot of turbulence on our flight, I began to feel quite queasy, and then we had an aborted landing. When we finally landed, it was very bumpy with an extremely sharp brake (and prayer too, I might add). This all meant that we were very late landing in Houston, and missed our connecting flight to Guatemala.

Never mind, I hear you saying, you’ll get put up by the airline overnight, well we didn’t, apparently it’s not their fault if you get delayed due to weather. We did sort out a room for the night, which turned out to be lovely, but we were too tired to really appreciate it. Back to the airport at 7am the next day to catch our flight to Guatemala.

My first impressions on coming into land were of a hilly country, with lots of vegetation and dried up rivers. It reminded me of Tuscany in some ways.

There were some other very interesting impressions on our first day too as we drove through Guatemala City to our hotel in Antigua:

-         the 2 young men on the pavement having a serious punch up after their cars had bumped (1 was a taxi)

-         the contrast between the old and the new, the rickety old red bus which passed us, you could see the through the panels which were falling off through rust, and on its rear there was the Facebook logo

-         the contrast between the rich and the poor – the brand new smart hotels right across the street from poorer neighbourhoods

In Antigua itself we have begun to get a feel for the vibrancy of the culture, the bright colours in the traditional clothing, the exhuberancy of the people, their friendliness. Inevitably we’ve been accosted by persistent jewellery sellers and surprised to see auto rickshaws here. We’ve also seen a wedding and a funeral and horses dancing in what seemed to be a political campaign parade.

And this is all in the first day!