Travel

I have made it to Guatemala safely.  I started the trip by trying to sleep in the Miami airport overnight while waiting for my flight to Guatemala the next morning.  It was good to save the money a hotel would have cost and know from experience that I can sleep in the airport if I have to but I probably won´t do it again.  The lights are on in the airport all night and there are announcements every few minutes.  That combined with a hard floor made sleeping very difficult.  I probably slept an hour at most.  There were lots of other people there attempting to sleep but I don´t think most of them had any better luck than me.

When I arrived in Guatemala on Wednesday I was extremely tired.  I didn´t think to negotiate with the taxi driver before I took it to the bus station.  I probably overpaid a couple of bucks but not enough to worry about.  The bus was a little better than I remembered.  The bus used to stop everywhere and pick up more passengers.  Now they don´t do that because of bandits.  This made for a 3 1/2 hour bus ride rather than a 4 hour bus ride.  There were only 6 passengers on the bus and it was a Greyhound style bus.  The bus ticket was roughly $8 and the taxi to the bus station was $12.  I´m not sure how the bus company is making a profit but I´m guessing there are usually more passengers.

Once I arrived in Xela I got a hotel room for the night.  The hotel I remembered was only $4 a night back in 1996.  In 2009 it is still $4 a night.  This is a great bargain.  The rooms are small and you have a common bathroom but for the price it is a great deal.  The cleanliness was better than some hotels I´ve stayed at  in the States.

The next day I went to get my room for the month.  The place I wanted to stay at didn´t have any rooms available though.  I spent most of the day walking around the city looking for a place to live for the next month.  I decided on a hostel that charges about $100 a month.  I have a private room and share bathroom and kitchen facilities with the other guests.  This is the same setup as the place I wanted to stay at although the first place only charges $85 a month.  It is still a pretty good price though.  I spent one more night in the hotel and moved into the hostel this morning.

Now I need to go shopping and get some food.  I´ve been eating at fast food places like McDonalds and Pollo Campero so far.  Fast food costs about as much here as in the U.S.    It is strange that I could pay as much for a fast food meal as a hotel room.

I haven´t found internet service that I´m happy with yet.  The first place I went to had extremely slow computeres.  The next two places (including this one) I´ve gone to have had pop-ups on the computer all the time.  This makes me think the computers probably have viruses so I don´t want to do too much on them.  Hopefully, I can find a better internet place tomorrow and I will have another post then.

I wasn’t enjoying the hike as much as I thought I would so I decided to cut it short and return home. There are a few things I’ve learned from this hike that will allow me to make changes for the future.

It is best to get in shape before starting a hike. Hiking will eventually get you in shape but being out of shape will make the first few weeks hiking unnecessarily uncomfortable.

August isn’t the best time for hiking. It is too hot and too buggy. Maybe if I had been hiking before that I would have gradually acclimated to the conditions like a boiling frog but just going from the couch in my air-conditioned house to the warm and muggy outdoors wasn’t a pleasant transformation.

Sometimes you have to spend more on gear. I bought a cheap tent and it would probably work well in the winter or early spring. In the summer thought it is just too hot because it doesn’t have a separate rain fly. There might be a cheap tent that would fit my needs but it is hard to find. For any future hikes I’m going to splurge and buy a tarptent. My rationalization for this is that if it keeps me out of staying in a hotel a couple to times it will pay for itself.

Sometimes cheaper gear works just as well or better than more expensive gear. I bought a Camelbak type bladder to use while hiking. I couldn’t stand the plastic taste of water from the bladder though. It also leaked when I didn’t tighten the tube connection to the bladder tight enough. A $1 Gatorade bottle worked as an adequate replacement to the bladder and didn’t have any leaks.
Another bonus to using the Gatorade bottle is that replacements can be bought in just about any town.

Referring to both the bladder and the tent you should test your equipment in the conditions that you are going to be using them. Doing that would have let me know the tent wouldn’t work and that I wouldn’t like the bladder.

I spent way too much on this trip. My budget for the entire hike was eclipsed in just the first few days and my trip total is about double what I had planned on spending for the entire hike. My budget probably wasn’t realistic for someone who hasn’t been hiking recently. I still think it is a feasible budget but I wasn’t able to resist staying in hotels on this trip. Maybe with a better tent and more time getting acclimated to being outdoors I could change that.

I did have success in getting home relatively cheap despite deciding to come home at the last minute. Airfares were too high since I would have only been booking a day or two before traveling. The train wasn’t a good option since I would have had to take a bus to a town with a train and then take a train to Chicago and then a different train to KC. That made taking a train almost as expensive as flying. Going home on the bus would have been the cheapest option at about $150. The trip would have taken a day and a half though. I’ve had unpleasant experiences on Greyhound in the past and will avoid taking any long trips on their buses if at all possible.

Renting a car one-way from Reading, PA to KC ended up being the cheapest option. Their rate was $87.99 a day but they wouldn’t let me reserve it for less than one day since the distance between Reading and KC is almost 1100 miles. I made the trip in about 20 hours though and they didn’t charge me for a second day. With insurance, taxes, fees, and gas my total cost was about $200. I think that was a decent deal for traveling on the spur of the moment.

I also learned that my readership quickly declines when I am not updating this blog. My daily visitors has fallen by about half. That does make sense thought that people would stop visiting if there is nothing new to read. I’m now going to work on getting that readership back up.