How to…get in to, around and out of Guatemala

Getting in
Guatemalan immigration is so relaxed that we had to ask for an entry stamp at the Cuauhtemoc/La Mesilla border crossing from Mexico. There was no fee and we just strolled right through. Most tourists don’t need a visa to enter Guatemala and will be given a ninety day tourist stamp on arrival.

We were on a shuttle bus from San Cristobal de las Casas, Mexico, that dropped us off at the border and transferred us to another bus on the other side where we continued to Panajachel, Lake Atitlan.

Getting around
Shuttle buses are the tourist speciality in Guatemala. The travel agencies know the places that tourists want to go and provide direct buses between them. All the towns we went to (Panajachel, San Pedro del Atitlan, Antigua, Coban, El Remate) had plenty of tourist agencies where you hand over your quetzals and get collected and delivered door to door. The service isn’t quite as efficient as the price would suggest; we found that adding two extra hours onto the quoted journey time was nearer the truth - mañana is a popular word and attitude in Guatemala. The tourist shuttles are easy, but are nowhere near as cheap nor as atmospheric as Guatemala’s famous chicken buses.

Chicken buses are brightly repainted American school buses - old, rickety and polluting - but cheap as chips. Good for short distances, but notoriously painful over long distances - bucket seats, no suspension and black fumes belching in through the windows. They are also considered unsafe by some (including the British Foreign Office who don’t allow their staff to travel on them) as robberies and murders are a possibility. Indeed, the tabloid papers are full of daily reports of bus drivers shot dead in Guatemala City - often because they drove through the wrong zone or didn’t pay their dues to the gang lords. You can take your chances and many people we met had travelled across the whole country on chicken buses without incidence. Anyway, isn’t a tourist bus richer pickings?

Chicken buses are being phased out and already in some parts of the country the only option is between a public minibus or a tourist minibus. Most travel agencies will fix you up with a shuttle bus (minibus) or you can go to the local bus terminal and talk to the drivers until you find the right minibus to your destination - the timetables seem to change regularly.

Large first class coaches plough selected routes. We travelled with Monja Blanca from Guatemala City to Coban on a bus resembling Dukes Travel in the eighties. Not the swish first class bus of Mexican standards but fit for travel. We were joined by a colourful bunch of Guatemalans, some in indigenous huipiles and stripy skirts, many in cowboy hats and one lady with some chickens and vegetables wrapped up in a bundle. Do chickens on a bus make it a chicken bus?

We were fortunate and travelled across Guatemala safely, as did all the other travellers we met.

Getting out
We took a shuttle bus from El Remate to Belize City passing through the Melchor de Menchos border crossing - the only land crossing between Guatemala and Belize. We were stamped out of Guatemala and asked to pay a twenty quetzals fee (£1.80). This is, apparently, a municipal fee to fix the muddy, potholed road that, apparently, “the tourist chew up”. When I challenged the charge, having been told that there should be no fee entering or leaving Guatemala, we were told that it was “nothing illegal” although, conveniently, the chap in charge of producing receipts was having a day off. The road really did need fixing though.

The entry to Belize was easy and efficient. British citizens get a one-month tourist stamp on arrival. We were then questioned by customs in indecipherable pidgin English as to whether we were carrying any fruit, vegetables or alcohol - negative - and suddenly queen Elizabeth II was looking up at us from the banknotes. Adios Guatemala!

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Guatemala: casa de Del Boy

6.45am. Church bells and firecrackers to wake the faithful, cockerels to stir the heathens.

Bundled up against the cold we boarded a van to our next country, Guatemala.


The only other traffic seemed to be the gas van, dragging heavy chains to behind it to make a loud clanking sound on the tarmac and advertise its presence into the neighbourhood.

The Carretera Interamericana - the Pan-America Highway which runs all the way from Alaska to the far south of Argentina and Chile.

Though a grand name, this was no sweeping expressway, instead another small single road, winding through lonely pine-clad mountains and tinder-dry fields of tall, thin maize, past kennel-sized roadside shrines and bright bougainvilleas.

Our little van plunged through endless chicanes, our progress slowed by crawling lorries, many of them heaving Coke, Pepsi and other American-derived sugary pop - an endless conveyor belt of sugared water to slate the thirst of the masses, enslave their taste buds and expand their waistlines.

More soldiers and check points, ‘military zones’ to encircle the Zapatistas and guard Mexico’s borders against her unpredictable neighbours to the south.

Beyond Comitan, the Guatemalan flag appeared alongside the Mexican tricolore, a resplendent Quetzal jammed between two slices of light blue. A nation which puts a bird on its flag - I was beginning to get a good feeling about what lay ahead.

Huge purple mountains loomed up head, their peaks in the clouds. In front of them turkey vultures circled, airborne dustmen. Others congregated in roadside trees and chewed at the roadkill.

Further up the road, we checked out of Mexico, a gaggle of gringo vans crowded round a small office, where a miserable little bloke processed Israeli hippies and a sensibly-clad older German couple, a party of young blonde Americans in Converse and leggings and a Spanish motorbiker all equipped for the drive to Cape Horn.

The van soon entered a small settlement, clinging onto the side of a steep mountain. and parked up on a muddy slope, the driver wedging it between overloaded vans and gaggles of equally overburdened men, stooping under the weight of the sacks they were heaving uphill.

Quickly decanted, the gringos were shepherded after them.

Scruffy souvenir stalls closed in our us either side as we puffed up the hill; from the shadows I could feel many pairs of beady little eyes sizing us up.

We pushed on, squeezing between muddy vans and scrawny men wheeling teetering sack trucks, and crossed under a rusting hoarding - the border itself.

The Guatemalan flag hung limply outside a small office. We entered, ready for the notorious officials with their fondness for charging an ‘entrance fee’. On the other side of the counter a young lad in an old t-shirt ignored us, his head buried in the paper.

An older man lounged behind him at a desk, methodically chomping through a bag of sweets. No-one seemed in the slightest hurry to process the long queue at their doorway; no-one seemed in the slightest bit official.

Finally a small woman in a dirty old coat shuffled up and took my passport, wandering into a back room where, through a crack in the door, I saw an equally sanguine fellow lazily stamp it.

He hardly need bother with this stamp of official entry; it lay half-imprinted on the page of my passport, its words unintelligible. I made better stamps with rubbers and inkpots as a ten-year old.

While the officials didn’t seem interested in who was entering their country, the unofficials certainly did.

Latino Arthur Daleys cruised amongst the hubbub, seeking out the tourist dollar - the money changers.

These fine fellows stood around fingering large wads like Guatemalan Frank Butchers, lovingly flicking three inches of Quetzales and Pesos between their fingers, stroking their dollars and their other day’s takings.

They struck relaxed, rather louche poses, reclined against pillars in the shade, drawing on cigarettes which dangled from loose lips buried deep beneath bushy moustaches.

Their tight shirts bulged over their jeans, the shirt buttons undone to allow forests of chest hair to spill out like cress on a paper towel, the thick dark hairs intertwined with innumerable gold chains.

Other Terry Tibbs took a more proactive approach, sauntering in cowboy boots amongst the backpacks, touting for business from under cream plastic cowboy hats or hawking fake gold watches hanging from a board like notices in a school staff room.

As we stood in the sun, waiting for our ride, our senses were assaulted by the tumult of the border, where music blasted out from rickety shacks and skinny kids hawked fruit and sweets, a straggly tide of humanity constantly drifted past and trucks and cars, carts and tuk tuks vied for space on the pitted tarmac.


Tuk tuks in Guatemala; they seemed out of place at first, but soon blended in to the scene, coated in Jesus bling and American football stickers.

An hour and a half of confused chaos later and our transport finally arrived, another gleaming modern minibus to transport the tourist from A to B, safely cosseted against the vagaries of independent travel in a developing nation and the hazards of mixing with locals.

The chicken buses - old US school buses which have been plucked from the scrap yard and repainted in the most incredibly gaudy livery - will have to wait for another day.

Echoes of tourist soap again.

Incessant noise and frenzy, Del Boys and the entrepreneurial spirit, tuk tuks and tourist buses. It was like being back in Vietnam again…


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