After the jungle experience in Tikal, we treat ourselves to another stop not far from the Mayan ruins in Flores on Lake Peten Itza. Flores is often chosen as the starting point for Tikal, but we do the trip in reverse order and stay in this town for two nights after Tikal. The old town center of Flores is located on a small, densely built-up island in the lake. Because of the narrow streets, it is not advisable to drive onto the island with a camper, so we park close to the lake on the southern shore of the lake.

Small alleyways and cozy cafés

Flores is a wonderful place to explore on foot. The island is not flat, but a little hill in the lake. Accordingly, the many small alleyways lead up and down the island. On our exploration tour of Flores, we see many colorful houses and inviting stores and cafés. We are happy to be persuaded to stop at a café with a view of the lake. We don’t have any other big plans for this place. The only thing: we need to do a bit of chores in the camper van again: Shopping, filling up our water tank and we are looking for a drip tray for under our auxiliary diesel tanks. The infrastructure for this is well developed in Flores and on the lakeshore in Santa Elena.

Inquiring in building supply stores

We are gradually arriving in countries where we have to worry about the availability of good quality diesel. Accordingly, we have bought 2 x 20-liter diesel canisters, which we can fill with low-sulphur diesel of European quality in Guatemala. This should give us enough range to at least get around Guatemala without running out of diesel. However, the aforementioned drip tray turns out to be difficult to get hold of. We don’t have much space either, so several building supply stores finally advise us to have it custom-made by a welder, who can also make the appropriate dimensions of the drip tray to fit us exactly. After many visits to the stores, we finally decided on a more pragmatic solution: a cloth under the canisters would have to do for the time being. The extremely friendly support of the Guatemalans in our search really stands out. Everyone we have met in Guatemala so far has been very friendly and extremely helpful. We feel very welcome in Guatemala.

We now have quite a bit of distance ahead of us, so over the next few days we will be gaining a lot of experience of the tightness of the canisters on the sometimes bumpy and very steep roads in Guatemala.
We’ll be back soon from a completely different part of Guatemala with the next travel report!