With the chicken bus mayhem behind us we loaded up early and hit the road, this time planning to bypass Guatemala City and head all the way to the boat, about ten hours away in Rio Dulce. It was a long boring day, but we broke it up with a stop at this great restaurant that doubled as a kids’ imagination heaven. Between these two houses our kids could have easily spent the next month completely unsupervised, living in their own world.

Back in Fronteras, where the roads are narrow and the trucks are wide.

We’ve had a ton of work done while we’ve been here in Rio Dulce. I’ll write a post at some point with a cost breakdown and the work we’ve had done, but for now, suffice to say, that the work is superb and the cost is insanely low.

We had generator problems way back in Roatan. First, the water pump failed. We had a friend of a friend visiting from the States who managed to bring us a new water pump ($500) in about three weeks time. I popped that in and expected things to be right back to normal. Our generator had always worked without issue. I cranked and cranked but it would not fire. It sounded like it wanted to go, but just couldn’t fire up.

I eventually gave up, and when we reached the Rio I called in a diesel mechanic to help me get it sorted. We worked forward from the diesel tank right into the generator. There are really only so many moving parts in an engine that should make the difference between working and not working. We eventually discovered that fuel just wasn’t making it to the injectors. We pulled the fuel pump and found that it was all rusted up. The “governor” that should slide back and forth while it was fired up and turned off, was rusted and not moving at all.

Okay, good, we know the problem. The mechanic sent it off to Guatemala City to be cleaned while we were away. When we return he would pop it back in and we’d fire up the engine again, fully expecting good things.

Unfortunately nothing happened. It still wouldn’t fire up. So further down the line we went. Next stop, the injectors. They seemed to be getting fuel okay, so he did a compression test. These numbers should be around 500, which would mean enough pressure to cause the explosion inside the cylinder to fire up the engine. Instead we got readings of 200, 220, and 100. Basically there was no pressure, and the fuel that was going into the cylinders couldn’t ignite.

More investigation concluded with the likely scenario that after we pulled the water pump the engine sat for a month and during that time some moisture caused the fuel pump to rust up. So when I tried to start the generator there was no fuel getting to the cylinders. The longer I cranked the engines the higher the possibility that raw water was able to get sucked all the way up into the engine. It then sat for three months while we were away and the fuel pump was getting cleaned up. By the time we returned there was rust in the cylinders themselves, and there was no longer any hope of combustion. Without a major overhaul, the 33-year-old generator had just died.

What the hell, go swimming and forget about that giant hunk of dead metal in the engine compartment.

I really hate hurricane season. I hate leaving the boat for long periods of time. I hate draping tarps over it. I hate all of it. But when it’s a gazillion degrees and humid, and hurricanes are swirling around the Caribbean, there isn’t much to be done about it. We were happy at least to get back and find that our friend Oscar had taken good care of things and the inside of the boat looked every bit as good as the day we left it.

Fronteras is not all that fun a place to hang out, though. We had kept our rental car (~$8/day) and decided to make the trip up to Tikal, about five hours away. The mayor, and later three marines, had been assassinated by drug traffickers while out on the lake recently, and a “State of Siege” had been ordered by the President, which made travel a little trickier than usual, but still not much concern for us gringo tourists.

Here were some of the army guys huffing it to set up a roadblock. We got flagged down a couple times, asked to see our passports, and waved on through.

We arrived on the tiny island of Flores on Lake Peten Itza. Flores is about an hour away from the ruins at Tikal, so makes a pretty good spot to spend a couple days.

We spent the afternoon just wandering around the island, having some dinner, and eating some ice cream. There isn’t a whole lot else to do. At dusk the sky began to fill up with birds by the thousands. Back at our hotel it was fun just to sit out on the balcony and watch them all for a while before calling it a night.