I cannot believe it took me so long to visit Guatemala. It started a bit like a box-ticking exercise: last country I hadn’t somewhat visited in Central America. I was on a work call one afternoon in late August, not being overly useful, or engaged for that matter, and I was doodling. At the bottom of the page, I wrote Guatemala / Peru. I can’t even remember my thought process in the moment but those were clearly two options for an upcoming travel adventure that sort of appeared on the page somehow. I wish I’d kept that piece of paper now: an artefact of the inner workings of the mind!
In the evening, I looked at the paper again as I was clearing my desk. Both options made sense: Peru had been on my list for a long time, maybe my last opportunity to travel freestyle like I’m used to so why not use it to go to that long-postponed destination? The food, the nature, the traditions, maybe the medicine, the surf…Or Guatemala, last place I haven’t visited in Central America, neighbouring country from where I am hoping to adopt my future child (I mean, I’m on it, not just randomly hoping), sharing some ancient and less ancient history and traditions. Heard good things, but also not so good ones: adoption from Guatemala is closed in the UK because of the risks of child trafficking, and it is knows as a hot spot for feminicide. And yet at some point, I was clear, Guatemala it is. I got on the BA website, no flights going there so I booked a reward return to Cancún and a one-way flight from there to Guatemala City. Then I sort of forgot about it for a while.
It must have been towards the second half of November, a month or so before my flight, that I started realising the time was coming up. Not that I did much about it for another while. Holiday planning kept featuring in my weekends to do list and not making it to the done items. Until the last weekend (D-3) when I picked up my old Central America Lonely Planet and flicked through the pages while making a mental inventory of the few recommendations I had received. I decided I was too tired from all the work-related travel to start with something particularly physical or adventurous, but didn’t want to crash on a beach either as I wouldn’t trust myself to design a particularly adventurous itinerary from there. So I settled on Antigua, checked out booking.com and AirBnB and booked a place to stay for 3 nights: I was working the first day anyway, so I reckoned another 2 days would be perfect to visit and figure out the next step. Shuttles from Guatemala City to Antigua seemed readily available so nothing to do there – actually, if I knew one thing about Antigua from last year’s trip to Honduras and El Salvador it was that most long distance shuttle services in Central America seem to take you to Antigua at some point. Total planning time: about 30mn. I got this.
November 19th. Eventless flight from Cancún to Guatemala City, and the first thing I see when exiting the baggage area is a man holding a sign for Antigua shuttles. No surprises there: from landing to wheels on road, maybe half an hour. We are 5 tourists / travellers (into the occasionally controversial subtlety between the two I won’t delve here and now…) in the shuttle, including a Danish mum-daughter duo. The mum is feeling chatty. It’s her first time in Latin America, she is usually an Asia traveller but her daughter just finished an exchange programme at Monterrey so they spent a couple weeks in Mexico and flew to Guatemala to explore Antigua and its surroundings. They are raving about the volcano hike that they have booked and share the details – just a couple days before I left, I had lunch with a customer who had just come back from there and shared some pictures, so it was on my mental list but I hadn’t at all considered the logistics OR the necessity to book well in advance. A quick online check tells me it’s not happening this side of New Year so whatever itinerary I concoct will need to return to Antigua at some point – again, not an issue given how well connected it is.
Somehow the conversation lands on my adoption process. The mum (we never exchanged actual names) has worked out my approximate age because I told her I used to be a student in Copenhagen in 2001. She is very curious: isn’t it a problem in my country, to be accepted for adoption at my age? Why did I wait so long? Did I not want to have kids earlier? Way to shame a sister, darling… I trust that she asked out of curiosity rather than judgement but after rather randomly drawing ready-made answers out of my conversational repertoire, I was left with the feeling of having been made to justify myself. I promised myself that the next time someone asks me something like that, I will turn it on them and ask them why they want to know.
Anyway, I digress. The journey from Guatemala City Airport to Antigua centre can be as short as 45mn, but with traffic that day, it took us close to 3 hours, during which I felt all the symptoms of a cold appearing one after the other. The sneeze, the itchy nose, the throbbing sinuses and the sleepy eyes.
It turned out to be a rather aggressive but short 2-3 day cold, fever and all, a way for my body to plead: “ok, time to slow down – and since you’re about to plan your holiday, how about you make it gentle?”. I rested a couple days without doing much else than sleep and read, and on day 3, the itinerary kind of fell in place all by itself – also bearing in mind the other 4 days I would have to be working, which I thought would be best spent on a beach. As I simply drew a calendar on a piece of paper to visualise time, I started seeing it as a flow of restful moments and bursts of energy:
- Rest: add a day to Antigua stay, then head to Lake Atitlan for 2 days (rather than take the day tour), need water for soul to properly rest.
- Burst of energy: fly to Flores to visit the Maya site of Tikal, then head to Rio Dulce for a day adventure on the river and a visit to the Garifuna village of Livingston.
- Rest: Go spend 4 days on the beach, in the surf town of El Paredon
- Burst of energy: Back to Antigua to catch a tour for the 2 days Acatenango volcano hike
- Rest: Catch the shuttle to El Zonte in El Salvador for another 5 days of beach and surf, and some sessions with the incredibly talented and endearingly weird chiropractor I met there last year.
- Fly back to Cancun.
It took me under 2 hours to book all travel and accommodation. Never in a million years would I have been able to do it so quickly and easily from London, or to have that level of clarity. I would not have been in a place to hear what my body and mind needed, all-consumed by acute FOMO and my obsessive pursuit of optimisation, and most of what I would have had to rely on would have been two-dimensional guide books relaying facts and a few highly-subjective opinions from faceless strangers whose opinions I can’t quite interpret.
Each to their own and I certainly wouldn’t assert that it is the best way for everyone. There’s a reason I tend to travel alone! But I guess the moral of the story is “trust yourself” – maybe when you don’t feel like planning, you’re not procrastinating, you’re being wise. Somehow, somewhere, you know you’re not in a place to make the choices that will serve you best.