A bit of a short cut...

We planned to leave Pana around 9am on Wednesday morning.  It was incredibly difficult to even get the Montero to the front door of the place we were staying, let alone find a place to park, unpack and repack everything.  The little girls who lived next door were pretty interested in what was inside the Montero.  After a while I offered them each a Fruity Mentos and they walked away happy.  

Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised when we started to pull out of town around 11:00.  From what we understood from talking to lots of people, it would be about an 8 hour drive to our next destination, Semuc Champey.  We ended up making great time until we reached Guatemala City.  Our GPS is worthless here, so Brett became my navigator using a combination of Google maps on my laptop, and real maps on paper.  We determined from talking to lots of people that the most direct route was not at all the fastest route.  The problem we ran into was that Brett was asleep when Kaytie and I were discussing our planned route and after the confusion of Guatemala City we ended up about 45 minutes away from where we actually wanted to be.  When I realized that all our city crossing was not getting us anywhere near a main highway, we looked at the map and determined that all was not lost.  We would take a short cut.  We pulled over and talked to the first dude that looked like he knew a thing or two about the road system in Guatemala.  We showed him our map and asked him what he thought about our revised route.  He said the highway was in good condition all the way to a washed out bridge about 3 hours away.  But he also said we shouldn’t have any problem crossing the river in our vehicle.  I wanted to believe him for a few reasons: First of all, we had already crossed a couple rivers and I hadn’t seen any really big rivers that would be impassable.  Also, it would avoid us having to backtrack, which I loath in all circumstances.  But most importantly, crossing rivers is cool and looks good on Overlanding blogs.  

A small river we crossed earlier in the day.

The big river that we decided not to cross... Cause we'd die.

When we finally saw our river, I realized our Guatemalan Road Authority must have assumed the Montero could fly.  The river was deep, wide and fast.  There was exactly a 0% chance of surviving a river crossing.  So now we had two options.  We could go back 2 hours to Guatemala City or we could go back an hour and then take another more direct route.  I will always trade one hour of backtracking for a completely unknown route that could take a little while longer always ends up taking much, much longer.  So off on our mystery route we went.  Right about as the sun went down it turned into a windy, treacherous, one lane dirt path which was strung along the edge of a mountain with shear drop offs and rock walls on either side.  Luckily, it was a rainy, pitch-black night so we couldn’t see the danger we were in at every turn.  At times we could hear waterfalls beneath us as we slowly climbed the mountainside.  That was our only indication of the extraordinarily steep cliffs that dropped below us.  Occasionally the dirt path, or “Highway” as the map called it, would widen in a valley and we would pass through a town.  After a couple hours of traveling, we pulled over at a gas station in one of the wide spots in the road to take a break and ask around about how much longer until the next city.  Brett bought a beverage and it sounded refreshing so I started to head into the store to get my own.  I walked around the back of the car and heard a hissing coming from the passenger tire.  It was a tender mercy from God that we discovered a small hole here in a well lit parking lot and not 10 miles down the road.  We were feeling so grateful we didn’t even care we had punctured a tire.  We just busted out the jack, and got to work.  The jack didn’t quite reach due to the lift and bigger tires, so while we looked around for blocks, one of the guys hanging around the gas station crawled underneath and found a suitable spot.  Then the other guys all crowded around and we had a little tire changing party in the rain.  They just jumped in and started helping.  This seems to be very common down here.  In all reality it probably would have been easier without so many people trying to do their part but I was blown away at the willingness to lend a hand to some lost gringos.   The whole process probably took 5 minutes and we were back on the road, after I gave the lady in the gas station some Quetzales to buy the guys a round of whatever they were drinking.

Many harrowing hours later we happened across a nice little grassy spot on the side of the road that overlooked a small town.  We didn't quite make it to our destination but we couldn't pass up such a nice place to camp.  We pulled over, ate some Nutella and peanut butter sandwiches for dinner, then fell fast asleep.  

Brett looking refreshed after a good nights sleep in his tent.

It was a muddy night.

We didn't realize when we pulled in, but we camped directly above a cemetery.