Borders are always stressful. So far, no bribes paid. I can't say it is always easy but patience and a dumb smile work pretty well. If I don't like the answer I just keep smiling until they come up with something better. If I really don't like the answer I pretend I don't understand it, I have selective spanish comprehension! I only understand what I want to hear.
We skipped Guatemala City to avoid the traffic and everything that goes with a big city. We had an interesting trip skipping it though. We'd been up in the mountains at a Quetzal sanctuary, the Quetzal is the national bird of Guatemala and extremely beautiful and pretty rare. We didn't see one but did hear them
From there, on the map, it looked like a highway called CA5, Central America 5, went to the north side of Guatemala City which would let us skip the city and go right on to Antigua. So, we look for this "highway" and eventually find it as a small 2 lane road. Another 20 miles and the pavement gives out but the road continues... We kept going and in the end we crossed an entire range of mountains, 3 times up to about 6000' and down again, on a dirt road that was about one and a half lanes wide. It took us 8 hours over 2 days to go less than 50 miles. Hey, we had a blast though! We went through small villages and passed farms and homes so far out there that they would run across the valley to the road to watch us pass. They could see us coming for a long time because the road just wound around the hills and we were going really slow. We had gifts for the kids, small cars and dolls, and we would hand those to the parents and watch the kids eyes light up when they got them. We felt like Santa Claus coming through with his reindeer we were so odd looking to most of them. It was our 27' Class C motorhome towing a jeep wrangler and our friends 27' 5th wheel towed by a pickup. We spent one night along the way in a small town and the whole town came out to meet us. The old grandmothers were in the back of big bicycle trikes being ridden by their grandkids, looking very grand and dignified like QEII in the back of a carriage. They were very, very nice and offered us whatever they had. At the end we came out just where the map said we would and skirted the north edge of Guatemala City and on to Antigua. Wonderful trip, we've had coffee mugs and t-shirts made from pictures of our rigs going around those mountain corners. It ended up one of the best stories from the trip. So, we have a saying "no bad roads" and it means that there are some that are very difficult and some that are very slow but there is a story and an experience to be had on all of them.
