Get on the bus… again

As I mentioned in this post before I left, due to some oddities in our itinerary for Central American Honeymoon Challenge ‘07, we had just four days to get from Cancun to our Honeymoon suite in Antigua, Guatemala, where we’ll be spending a week. In between Cancun and Antigua lie far more amazing sights than we could ever dream of making it to in four days. We’ve kinda gotta a thing for Mayan ruins, and there’s literally hundreds in between the two tourist meccas. We decided to settle on the serene beach temples at Tulum in Mexico, and the grandaddy, Tikal.

To get from Cancun to Antigua and hit Tulum and Tikal on the way, we had to give the great beaches of Belize a miss, but we plan to circle around and hit them on the way home. To make it all the way, we’re getting on a flight in an hour from Flores (near Tikal) to Antigua. But to get this far, we spent almost two days on buses, and there was no way we were going to jump back on one of Guatemala’s notorious ‘chicken buses’ for a 9-hour overnight trip through some windy, ill-maintained territory to Guatemala City. Been there done that. Oh, and did I mention that the bus terminal in Guate City is in one of the seediest parts of town, known for backpack-slashing and late-night robberies? Sounds like a perfect meeting of ideal reasons to splurge on the plane ticket. That’s something that a little experience on the road will teach you: You can stretch a dollar almost forever in some countries, but sometimes it’s well worth it to spend a little more on your own personal comfort and safety. And did you really want to sleep with chickens, anyway?