Rio Dulce

Day 1 – Travel Day

Back on the road again, today we would be traveling from the top of Guatemala to the east. Our destination, Rio Dulce. Nothing of real note in Rio Dulce but it’s the jumping off point for the boat cruise that takes you to Livingston, our intended destination. We would be arriving too late to catch a boat so had booked a night’s stop-over in a hostel.

A 10 minute tuk-tuk ride took us to the bus station in Flores. No more mini buses though, this time we would be getting a Pullman, with air conditioning, leg room and hopefully a head rest. To date, none of the buses in Guatemala have had head rests, meaning that in the unlikely event of falling asleep, you soon wake yourself up by doing that annoying nodding dog thing!

 

 

The bus turned up and was a delight, all mod cons and we were soon sitting back and enjoying the scenery once again for the 5-6hr journey.

You can imagine our surprise when some 3hrs later, with Glenn taking advantage of the headrest and snoozing next to me, we entered a town and the Bus driver announced we had arrived, it was only around 1pm.

Pushing off the usual advances of agencies trying to sell you trips, hostels, and onward travel as soon as you step off the bus, I consulted my sat nav to find our hostel, a 5 minute drive away so we hailed another tuk-tuk.

Again, there wasn’t a great deal of choice hostelwise so we had booked a backpackers with average reviews as we thought it would just be a bed for the night. The Tuk-Tuk took us over a bridge and the driver pointed out various places of interest.

It was pleasantly and surprisingly nice. Rio Dulce is a safe harbour for hurricanes and full of yachts and yachtty types, with the odd down trodden traveller roaming around trying to get a job as crew on one of the many boats.

Our next nice surprise was that our hostel was directly on the water with lovely views of the Rio. If you ignore the huge bridge overhead with juggernauts flying passed, it was really quite nice.

 

 

 We checked into our room which was a little ram-shackled with a lopsided floor, but DID have a shower and loo, liking these little surprises.

 

 

 At a loss for what to do, we headed downstairs to have a ‘welcome to Rio Dulce’ beer. Here we noticed that you could book the boat trip to Livingston.  Glenn made the arrangements and the boat would be picking us up directly from the hostels dock the following morning, perfect.

 We then decided what we should do for the rest of the afternoon, choices being: wander back over the bridge and explore the town, or, chill out on the deck with a cold beer and watch the boats go by, we opted for the latter and spent a lazy afternoon blogging, reading and chilling.

 

 

 We had dinner in the hostels restaurant, I can’t exactly remember what we ordered but it did  involve corn tortillas (again).