1

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2

Looks good to me.

4 Antigua and then night bus to Flores with ADN or Linea dorada

Check on-line for flights, also. It's cheaper to fly to Flores in the evening, and you might find that it's in your budget!

5 Flores-tikal check in at tikal inn sunrise, ruins and sunset tour

You'll have time for a morning wander, lunch break, and sunset tour. You won't be on time for the sunrise tour, but I don't think that's an issue. We actually liked having the morning on our own.

7 Yaxha

There is a standard tour leaves for Yaxha at 8am, and gets back around lunch or early afternoon. So I think you'd have time.

8 GC to Panajachel-Santa Cruz La Laguna

This, after an overnight bus ride, sounds like hell. We never found a convenient connection from Tikal - GC - Atitlan that wouldn't leave us hanging out at a GC bus station half a day, and ended up taking a shuttle to Antigua (easy and frequent), then a shuttle to Pana (easy, not so frequent), and still didn't get into Pana until late afternoon. I'd break this up with a night in GC, Antigua, or Panajachel. ...

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Hi guys thanks for tips.
Kanewai 1 i was loking at flights but only in the mornings so i`d have to check evenings ones.
although my girlfriend and i are not really tours kind of people and we would rather do Yaxha on our own but if it`s not that easy then we would go with that 8am tour which you mentioned.
do you know where this tour is leaving from, who is organizing it?
Yes i know that journey from Flores to Santa Cruz is very long one but i was hoping that we could take direct shuttle from GC to Pana. I realize that is not good to take lanchas in late afternoon due to strong winds on the lake. So maybe we would have to stay overnight in Pana.

4

The "tour" to Yaxha is pretty much a shuttle bus, so I think you could join in for the ride, but wander on your own. We found public transportation, but you'd have to spend the night - which would be pretty cool if you have the time!

There were direct GC-Pana buses, but I don't have my notes. I remember that we couldn't quite work out the timing on them.

5

Hi
Thanks again kanewai 1. i`ll try to find something more about Yaxha and GC- Pana transport. i`m sure it will pan out ok
thanks

6

I haven't been to Tikal and Flores, can't comment there, I went to Coban via Chichicastenango-Quiche-Sacapulas-Uspantan after visiting Iximche which is just a bit over 90 minutes away from Solola which is close to Atitlan Lake, stayed the night in Uspantan in a nice and modest hotel and then the following day went to Coban in a minibus in a then awful dirt road that took almost 4 hours even though the distance is only 60 km. They say they have improved the road and it's now much easier to transit. I did this route on purpose because I wanted to go to Sacapulas and if I had the time would have went to the waterfalls of Cunén as well.

I did Pacaya volcano in the afternoon during the 2 pm tour; I'm sorry but I'm too lazy to walk up a volcano at 9 am in the morning, need some coffee at least! The 3 volcanoes look damn awesome in the late afternoon at sunset.

I didn't stay much in Atitlán Lake, but if you are serious about seeing several of the villages during the day, plan to arrive around 8 am at the Panajachel dock is you plan to stay at a hotel in Pana as an easier base and buy the 1 day ticket to see 3 or 4 villages in one haul with 1 hour to visit each village. If you love top notch art bring some 200 USD with you during this tour (the smaller villages don't really have ATMs as far as I saw), Atitlan Lake has some great artists. I love the works of Koche, would love to go back and buy a painting of his. My sister has her personal favorite painter and urged me to locate him but was out of luck, the guy seems to only show up when he feels like it and locals didn't recognize the name either.

If you do the several villages in one Atitlan haul, your trip will end around 4 pm which sucks a little bit because there's still up to 2 more hours of daylight but it's too late to visit some other place like Iximche pyramids. I just went back to my hotel and watched tv the rest of the day (stayed at Mario's Room, great place, it even has a few US tv stations). Near Panajachel just a 7 minute chicken bus ride on the way up to Solola village there is a small detour where you can visit a small monkey natural reserve and a butterfly conservatory. Few tourists seem to know about the place and the lonely planet guide only mentions it very briefly; I didn't know about it either but was pleasantly surprised when I booked a private guide tour around some walkable sites near Panajachel. There's some small cabins along the way if you'd like to rent one to stay away from touristy Pana but want easy access to Solola.

If you decide to visit Iximche on your own and save a heck of a lot of money (if you don't mind switching buses a lot), from Panajachel get on a chicken bus to Solola, and then change to any bus that says "Los Encuentros", get off at the bridge, cross the overpass bridge and get on any Atitlan-Xela chicken bus, tell the driver you'd like to get off in "Tecpan" which is about 20-30 minutes. From there get on a tuk tuk to the village (you will be glad you forked those 6 quetzales, it's a Looong walk). From the village you can either ask the tuk tuk driver to drive you all the way to the entrance to the ruins for a bit more cash or do what I did and ride the mini bus to the entrance which is about 15 minutes away from downtown Tecpan. Iximche cost me 80Q to enter and I was pleasantly surprised to see the amount of minibuses at the entrance ready to ship people back to Tecpan on short notice when I was ready to leave! I liked Iximche because it had no tourists and nobody cared if you took photos of the little museum inside or anything.

I thought going to Tikal would just take away too much time from my trip so I ruled it out from the beginning and was pleased to see many more parts of Guatemala instead, including the entire Rio Dulce area, Livingston which I had a lot of fun visiting, a lot of Alta Verapaz and some parts of the south including Chiquimula, I got only a few km from the Honduras border when I ran out of time. :( I really wanted to visit Zacapa to see the train museum and drink their fine rum where the rum comes from), but I did see the miraculous Christ of Esquipulas which is a place few non mexican tourists ever bother to visit. I did get to see Quirigua pyramids on the way which are also top notch and again had almost no tourists. I wanted to see the paleontology museum near Chiquimula but I arrived after 5 pm which was too late, too bad. I got bad weather when I visited Coban and they canceled the Semuc Champey tour but I did see the Biotopo del Quetzal which I highly recommend, they even have a few nice hotels right outside the park if you like rustic places.

You are staying quite a lot of time at Antigua, I personally got tired of the place real fast but most visitors can't get enough of it. Consider that a there is a chicken bus from Antigua to Pana for something ridiculously cheap like 34Q at around 7 or 8 am I can't remember which hour but I sure couldn't resist the deal and the trip takes about 2 1/2 hours, you arrive at Panajachel around 11 am. Shuttles cost around 80Q, have more flexible hours and take 2 hours. You could do the Lake Atitlan village tour, leave before 6 pm and have a lot of time to return to Antigua your last night.

12 days is still a lot of time, have a lot of fun, avoid walking in the foresty mountains in Atitlan alone with lots of cash, there have been reports of people being mugged. I also avoided travel in buses after 7 pm, had a great time, highly tempted to go back there again with the dirt cheap air fares in January.

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Poko -

Doing some research on an upcoming trip to Tikal and ran across a couple of shout outs to Roxie Ortiz via Trip advisor and lonely planet - a tour guide that does a couple of tours of the Mayan Ruins. She does do tours of Yaxha, perhaps contact her for more information...http://tikalroxy.blogspot.com

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I spent a few days ruins hopping with Roxy Ortiz again last summer and highly recommend her. We made sunset and sunrise visits to Tikal and visited Uaxactun and Yaxhá, a new favorite. I'm not usually a guided tour sort of person but being with Roxy is like hanging out with a close friend and her understanding of the natural environment as well as the history and architecture is monumental. If you're seriously interested in Maya history, especially Preclassic Maya history, I don't think you could find a better teacher.