I was in Guatemala with our family in late November, and it occurred to me that if I had read the following before we left I might have planned things differently:
We had spent a couple days in Santa Elena and Tikal. We were just an hour into the six-hour drive to Semuc Champey when we hit a series of wildcat roadblocks near and in the village of Las Pozas. I hadn’t heard of the tactic being used in Guatemala; I had always associated it with Bolivia and Peru, but Guatemala apparently uses it too. We were stuck there for eight hours.
The people doing the blockading weren’t violent and the situation wasn’t particularly scary, but there were a lot of people crammed together in this small town, and as the afternoon wore on, we had a couple instances where things got hotter. Probably just as dangerous, but in a different way, was that with so many trapped vehicles, and their drivers, by the middle of the afternoon the village closely resembled an unflushed toilet bowl.
I don’t have a solution for getting out of a Guatemalan roadblock (I don’t think there is one based on the number of Guatemalans who were stuck with us, resigned to their fate). But if I could go back in time and give myself some advice, it would be to know where the way-stations are ahead of time, so that I might have alternatives when, not if, something goes awry during a long drive through Guatemala.
For a play-by-play recap of the experience, you can read this: http://traveldiaryofamadman.com/guatemalarocks/
