The first foreign stop of the trip, in Santo Tomás de Castilla in Guatemala. I have never been in Guatemala before. Not sure if a visit by a cruise ship counts as “being” in a country, though.
We are not doing any of the organized excursions on this trip. We looked through the list and they all seem to be extremely expensive compared to what they are offering. So we figured we’d just walk off the ship and look around a little bit.
I spent a little bit of time taking some photos of the ship, now that I can actually see it in full (and photos were not allowed in Key West, due to the Coast Guard station). Then we go through the warehouse with local people selling souvenirs.
There is not really a town when we leave the harbor, just a navy base and a mostly residential area. We walk around the navy base, where it looks like they use old anchor ropes as speed bumps. They do have a nice road, though, with nice street lights.
There are signs to a “public beach” (playa publica) which actually looks pretty dirty. There is a group of people cleaning it up, but even after they clean it up it is still not very enticing. We do see a Great Egret who seems to be hunting.
We continue walking, seeing some local wildlife, and arrive at a café called Anchorage where we sit down for a drink: a coke for me, a beer for Nicoline. Refreshing after walking around in the heat!
We continue back to the ship, along a nice looking bus stop (with very practical concrete seats, although I wonder how comfortable they are), through the hall with a large map on the floor and the various souvenir shops (where Nicoline buys a colorful purse that is much more practical than the mpney belt she has) and back onto the ship. There is an emergency drill for the crew going on so we get to see the emergency lights in the corridor turned on.
We watch the goings-on in the harbor and I loosen my muscles in the hot tub. At two we catch the afternoon showing of the movie Bohemian Rhapsody at the “Main Stage” theater, where we make a little seat out of hankerchiefs for Marching Monkey so he can watch as well.
The rest of the day we spend reading and working on projects on the computer, and just generally relaxing.