Rio Dulce & Quirigua

Continuation from < Page 1 < !

But after 5 days R&R we packed up and headed further south. Our destination was Rio Dulce at the confluence of Lake Izabal and the River Dulce. A marina had been recommended to us by a number of people so we found Bruno's and settled in. Unfortunately it is almost directly under a huge bridge, purported to be the longest in Central America, which crosses the river at that point and the truck traffic only stopped for a few hours overnight. If it weren't for that it would be a relatively nice place to sit back and watch the world go by. We were surprised at the number of boats, many of them large and expensive, in this area. It seems that it is a good, and fairly cheap, place to shelter them during the hurricane season and then head on out to the Caribbean when it's over.
We took a boat trip down to Livingston on the Caribbean coast the next day. The trip took over 2½ hours down and 45 minutes back - upstream! The boat arrived half an hour late, and when we were loaded we were surprised that it headed upstream - not in the direction of the coast! It stopped to pick up some passengers from a hotel, then took us on a little trip past the Castillo de San Felipe, then back to the same hotel to pick up two more passengers and then finally we headed downstream. We were only a few hundred metres past the bridge when the driver slowed right down and took out his mobile phone - he spoke to someone and then started driving in slow circles. Eventually we learned that the motor was not functioning properly and we were waiting for another boat to transfer to. By the time we off-loaded everyone and everything, including spare fuel and driver, it was already over an hour since we had left the dock a few hundred metres away.
By then we were looking for something to eat and a toilet - but neither was available. The boat slowed down again to pass an island that I think the driver called Parrot Island - this was to check out the bird life. Later he slowed to drive through a water lily patch next to an indigenous village of houses built over the water. He stopped completely at a place called Agua Caliente [Hot Springs], so everyone could get off and look at some caves that work like a sauna, or so they told me. I didn't walk up high enough to see them and nobody seemed overly impressed when they returned. After leaving that stop we finally came into the Rio Dulce gorge, which was the real reason for us taking this boat trip. It is a nice gorge, with steep sides and vegetation clinging to it. There were also lots of locals in their dugout canoes on the water and I suppose they were fishing.
We had set out from our camper at 8.45, left Rio Dulce at 10.00 and eventually arrived at Livingston at 12.40. We could think of nothing but finding a toilet and then a restaurant. Once these basic human needs were satisfied, we started to wander a bit around the town. However, we were not overly impressed by it. It is populated mostly by Garifuna people and the town has that Caribbean feel about it that we experienced in Belize, but it appeared to be a lot more run-down and uncared for than in Belize. We were not sorry that we had only 2 hours to look around, because we didn't find much to interest us there. We returned to Bruno's and decided to leave the next day. Our stopover in Rio Dulce was not really a Guatemalan highlight, but the gorge is nice. We were also told about some really nice hotels to stay at which are right on the lake or river edge. Unfortunately, most of them were inaccessible to us because you can only get there by boat. Bruno's did have a good WiFi connection which I utilised to talk to family and friends in Australia, so that was certainly a good point.
The next day we drove over the bridge and eventually joined the main highway between Guatemala City and the port of Puerto Barrios. Unlike other paved roads we had driven before and have driven since, this one was quite rough. I think it is mostly because of the vast amount of truck traffic between Guatemala's capital and its only port on the Atlantic. We drove the highway only as far as Quirigua, which is a very small ruin site with very large stelae. Included is the tallest stele in the Mayan world. We arrived later in the day and wandered around the site. We were surprised at the detail of the well-preserved carvings, which mostly date from around 770-790AD, and were impressed by the way they are presented and the site is cared for.
They happily allowed us to camp overnight. The road ends at the Quirigua ruins but it runs into the entrance of what must be a huge banana plantation. In the late afternoon and early evening there was an almost constant stream of semi trailers driving out of the property. We began to wonder if they would keep it up all night, but they eventually stopped and we spent a relatively peaceful night, ready for our onward journey towards Cobán the next day...

Back to Top!  Design, text and photos © 2006-9 "Yasha" Sharon Langford & Juergen Klein Do not copy or quote parts of this website without our written permission! All reports reflect our personal experience and shouldn't be used as a definite guide without further research. E.g.: "We couldn't find any..." means just that - it does not imply that there aren't any!