Day four was again spent heading North but we had run out of asphalt.
The trail was apparently a good dirt road but when we started along it it had lots of pot-holes and was far slower than we had hoped. It did not however deteriorate further, and we figured we had about 50km to get to a better road. That fifty Km turned out to take about three hours but was heaps of fun :)
We puttered along through the rough road and regularly had to ride into the gutter or lean the bikes up against the side of the mountain to let trucks fully loaded with villagers past. It was Saturday and everyone was going to the local markets. We Rode through a dozen or more tiny little villages and a couple of them had amazing little local markets that we had to ride right through the middle off (these places have only one road and it gets used for everything.) The country was also amazingly “jungle”.
After an hour or two we came to another obstacle – road works. It seems that Guatemala is doing a major infrastructure upgrade and the whole country is getting bigger and better roads. In this case it means they are converting a jungle track to a two lane asphalt road, but we had turned up well before it was ready. So we had to leave our bikes and walk in to get permission to pass from the engineer and then negotiate our way past the big digging and drilling machines and balance the bikes through the rough loose slimy clay covered tracks – very sporting and good fun!
Then the road got better but was still dirt and very dusty. We made it through that and back onto hard top but there was still a river crossing by ferry and a couple of minor wrong turns (Maries GPS was some help but the Garmin world map SUX!) We made it to the planned destination of Flores in enough time and had a well deserved meal and a couple of beers… A good day :)
