mid July through mid September
In 2018 Ratna and Patrick came through Comitan on their trip From Alaska to Patagonia. They stayed awhile with us. Proceeding onward they realized they would hit the expected high point of their trip – Peru – during the rainy season.
So they booked a flight from Cancun to bypass central America and restart in Columbia.
Now a year later having completed South American they decided to return to finish the bit they’d missed. From our house to Columbia.
Marcos Kiti Ratna María Patrick
Patrick, Kiti, Ratna, María, Dan
María to haul us to the Belize border
On the border
Ready Set Go
When communicating with us about the return I suggested I meet them in Chetumal and we ride from there to Comitán. Thereby bagging Belize also. And convenient for us since María’s sister and brother-in-law live there.
Thus began our three stage Guatemalan adventure. Stage one Chetumal through Belize and the jungles of lowland Guatemala in the Peten. Crossing the biggest Mexican river Usumacinta that is the border with Guatemala and up to our house.
And stage two from our house doing the contraband Guatemala road over the volcanos of the continental divide (crossing it twice) and eventually to Antigua Guatemala where we parted ways.
The final stage being my solo road from Antigua through Guatemala City, Coban, Lago Isabal, Livingston on the coast and then traversing Belize from the south. Finally duplicating our route to the Mexican border.
The format for this series of posts is as follows.
Touring days show on the menu as “to” <destination>. When it does not have a “to” it is a non biking day at a destination.
When it is a touring day the second header shows the date and from where the tour started.
The text explanations are in a column to the left. The pictures are to the right. Touching a picture brings it up as a larger image and right, left, or both arrows occur to allow you to scroll through the gallery.
In some places with longer days I do the same format but with subsequent days below the first.
On touring days the actual tour route is posted as a route at the bottom on a map. You can place your mouse on either the route or the altitude profile scale below it and it’ll show you how they coincide. Yet further below that it’ll show ride statistics like distance and climb.
On some of the maps the same picture gallery above shows thumbnails on the map indicating where the pictures were taken on the route. Clicking on the thumbnails zooms and ultimately will pull up the picture. But that is awkward and you’ll have to use the hand to move the map around to display it well. Also they are rarely accurate. Only one is certain to be correct. This is because my camera does not record the EXIF lat/long. So I put in a time adjustment to match the gpx track. However the gpx pauses automatically when the bike is stopped. Starting again when on the road again. So the track times are much shorter than the caluclated times. At a few places I calculated and added the real lat/long to the EXIF record. But not frequently. It’s too much work. Sorry.
After the content has been displayed yet further down on the page are arrows to the right and left with the proceeding and following posts. Using these makes it very easy to simply follow along the trip without going back to the main menu.
I suggest a convenient way to follow along would be to open this page in it’s own browser window. So you can see the entire route displayed below. Then in another browser window you can follow along with each days journey.
Max elevation: 3509 m
Min elevation: 2 m
Total climbing: 43152 m