I was so excited for the Guatemala stop of my Panama Canal cruise. Most of the excursions were sold out by the time I booked the cruise, so I settled on one that included a 1 hour walking tour of Antigua, a brewery visit, a visit to a jade museum / shop, and about 2 hours of free time to explore the town. It didn’t look like too much walking and I figured if I couldn’t handle it, I’d just meet the tour in the brewery.
That was what it was supposed to be. Reality was far, far different.
After disembarking from the ship, we walked thru an outdoor market to our tour bus to start our day.
Antigua is about a 90 minute drive from our port. But we were quickly told that there was a lot of construction on the road near our port so it’d probably take closer to 2 hours. Not too big a deal. And once we got thru the worst of it, volcanoes started to appear thru the mist.
Eventually we started seeing Volcán de Fuego, which is one of the most active volcanoes in the world. It lets out a puff or ash about every 15-20 minutes. Super cool.
As we got closer to Antigua, the excursion started to go off the rails. It turns out there was construction on the usual road to get into town and they detoured everyone around the city to come in from the other side. Unfortunately this road wasn’t wide enough in many spots for a car and a giant tour bus, so sometimes we’d be stopped for 5-10 minutes waiting for the line of cars coming towards us so stop and let us get past. Plus traffic was backed up for miles in both directions. So our “90 minutes” turned into 3 hours. Just to arrive to start our day.
Once we finally made it, our first stop, of course, was the Jade Museum so we could buy jade. Yay. At least they had bathrooms. At this point, the 3.5 – 4 hours we had scheduled in Antigua was reduced to under 2 hours if wanted to get back in time in normal traffic, and more like 30 minutes if we had the same traffic situation. So it was a bit frustrating that the first 30 minutes were at a jade store.
From there, we skipped the walking tour and headed for the brewery. Here we heard about beer making and were served a tiny appetizer with each beer sample. The food was odd, but I ate some of it anyway because I was so hungry at this point.
The brewery did have fantastic views from the rooftop though! I mean look at this setting!
At this point, the guide said he wanted to at least take us to the arch so we wandered over there.
Then our guide said some people wanted to shop, so he took us to a shop for 20-30 minutes. After standing around waiting for everyone to be done shopping, he then told us he wanted to show us Parque Central. I was happy we were getting to see some of the town – I mean this is why I came – but I was stressing about getting back in time as I didn’t remember what the ship’s all aboard time was. I did ask the guide about it, but he assured me the construction around town was over and it’d be closer to 90 minutes back.
The park was cool though.
From there, we headed back near the jade museum and this part was pure chaos. There were a ton of other tour buses all trying to leave at the same time and there were hundreds and hundreds of us all packed into a couple of blocks. He told us to wait a block away and he’d get our bus so we could head back. Confused I asked him if we’d get a chance to use the bathroom before the bus trip back and he looked at me like I had 3 heads. I’m one of these people that will usually not ask a single question and just stay quiet, but this was absolute chaos and he was not doing a good job of explaining things. I am so glad I did. He then said once the bus arrived, he’d take a group of us to bathroom, but then he changed his mind and had us walk into the throngs of others to our bus. Pretty quickly I lost my group. So I said F it, and went to the bathroom, then back into the chaos to try to find my bus. Luckily I found it pretty quickly and somehow I was actually one the first on board.
Welp, turns out the construction was not over so we had to do the same detour we’d done earlier. It took even longer to get out this time and was so stressful watching us squeeze by other traffic. I don’t know how the bus driver did it. Dude was a rock star.
It was about 2:30pm when we got out of the city which is when our excursion was supposed to be done. And we were still 90 minutes away. At least I knew hundreds of others from our ship were in the same boat.
We did get some cool scenery along the route before getting back to more construction.
And then we stopped. And sat. Then maybe moved a car length. Then sat. And the time just keep ticking by. Eventually we got to the cause – another tour bus had gotten into a head on collision with a car. Luckily it sounded like everyone was OK, but they did have the driver of the car in an ambulance. Not good.
All in all, it took us 3 and 1/2 hours to get back to our ship. 3 hours later than we were scheduled to get back. And at all aboard time. Oops. I snapped a couple of quick pics as I headed back on board then headed for food as I’d had a few bites of food all day (we weren’t allowed to take ANY food off the boat, so we weren’t allowed to take snacks or anything and of course our free time when I was going to get lunch got derailed).
30 minutes later people were still arriving back and the Captain had to delay our departure from Guatemala. Phew. What a long stressful day. And unfortunately the 6.5 hours in the bus messed up my back and legs and they were a problem for the rest of my cruise.
All the complaining aside, Antigua was great! I really wish I’d had more time to take in the town and wander around on my own. But I still got there! And the countryside was awesome too. I loved seeing so many volcanoes dotted all over and the buildings were really cool. If it wasn’t for the 2 sets of construction and the accident, this would’ve been a dream day.
