I love how nobody but us pays any attention to a herd of goats walking right down the sidewalk in Guatemala City. This is outside the main Post Office where we had just been informed they didn’t have any stamps.

It’s all about the wonderful colors splashed around the city.

We visited the Museo Nacional de Historia which was pretty good. Small, but lots of Presidential history stuff so we could try and glean at least a little bit of Guatemala’s history for ourselves. There was a photography exhibit highlighting the life of President Jacobo Árbenz which led to further reading back at home later.

A bag of mango is available on almost every corner. The kids make their way through a couple on every walk. 5Q worth of sweetness.

We had aimed for this restaurant in our wanderings today, but when we found it we were certain that we had made a mistake and continued to circle the block. It had been billed as the town’s oldest pub and restaurant, but there was only one small table inside the gate. We looked in closer the second time around and were summoned in by the lady behind the counter. Once inside we spotted the small doorway in the back of the room that led out into a beautiful courtyard out back filled with plants, flowers, and rustic wooden tables staffed solely by little old ladies. A nice spot for cold drinks and appetizers while the kids colored and played cars.

Coming up on the end of a long day of exploring. Time to summon an Uber driver to get us home. A thirty minute drive across town during rush-hour costs three to four dollars. For us, wandering way off into neighborhoods that likely wouldn’t see a taxi come along by chance, this has been a game changer. Our general plan of attack once we are done for the day is to find the nearest grocery store, grab the few things that we always seem to need, call up Uber, play our fast-food-advertising callout game while finally relaxing our legs, and be dropped off at our door.

I rented a car (eleven bucks a day, and an insurance waiver for Americans who have coverage through their credit cards) to zip back down to the boat. I needed to inspect the varnish and pay the guys for the work they had done, and also go over things for the next job we were hiring them to do and pay for materials. I also needed to close up the boat, give it a wash, put on the handrail covers, hang another tarp over the front, get some fans going inside, and on and on with the little things needed to protect the boat during the rainy season. I say “zip” down to the boat, but unfortunately there is no zipping around here. It’s only a 180 mile drive, but takes seven hours.

To get an early start on the long day of driving I broke all my rules for driving in Central America and left in the dark at 3 a.m. Doing so only confirmed what I’ve said all along—you’re sure to find trouble after dark. I was literally four blocks away on the deserted streets when the flashers lit up my back window. I drove another block to a large intersection and pulled over under the street light. Two cops were quickly at my window and no doubt surprised by the gringo they found staring back at them. They didn’t tell me why I had been stopped, they just told me to get out of the car with my hands above my head. They patted me down, then asked me a few questions. It was pretty obvious to me that at this time of night the only people out driving would be drunk, and they were clearly hoping that I had been.

The Mexican, and now Guatemalan, style of sobriety check isn’t anything like in the States. Here they just have you blow in their face. Obviously, I hadn’t been out drinking, and they figured that out pretty quickly. Next step was to discover what kind of drugs I had on me, so they began searching the car. This is the point I became nervous, not because of drugs, but because in my backpack I had a stack of Q100 bills worth about $800 to pay the varnish guys with. In Guatemala you can only withdraw Q2000 (~$265 a day) from an ATM per day, which makes doing cash business difficult. It had taken me three days to get this much stashed away, and it was all sitting there in my backpack alongside my brand new camera and iPad. They didn’t mind at all that I was standing right next to my door watching them go through the bag. I’ll admit I was expecting serious trouble when the cop opened that zipper on the backpack, pulled out the camera, and then began fingering through the money without actually removing it from the small pocket. He spent a lot of time looking in that pocket with me looking right down at him, while the other cop was going through the trunk. By now I had committed badge numbers to memory.

The bag was left, and the cops reconvened at the back of the car whispering back and forth. The searcher had taken my passport from my bag and as they flipped through it I could hear, “Mexico. Mexico. Mexico. Honduras.” I stood quietly under the light figuring this encounter was only going to end one way. I had a stack of cash, a passport full of drug smuggling country stamps, and not a single car had gone by in twenty minutes.

Then, to my immense relief, they came back over to me fingering my license and tried the oldest trick in the book—they told me that my U.S. license was no good in Guatemala. Haha, I had to stifle a laugh. I’d been through this one at least a hundred times before. Every cop from Mexico, to Panama, to Argentina tries this one. They weren’t going to rob me, or arrest me, or shove a sock in my mouth and close me in the trunk. They were just going to try to convince me to pay a small mordida for not having an International Driver’s License. Oh man, phew, I’m the grand champion of this simple game.

I told them that my license was fine, and they said no, and I said yes, and they said no, and I said yes it’s fine, and they realized after another ten minutes that this wasn’t working out at all, and they better go find something else to do. They handed back my passport and license, gave me a curt wave of the hand, and walked away without another word.

The truth of the matter is that the cops were polite to me the entire time. It was only my own stereotyping that made it feel as if I had dodged a bullet. In fact, I had been innocent of any wrongdoing and was treated that way. Sure, I had been pulled over and held for thirty minutes without just cause, but I don’t even know that their laws require just cause for a traffic stop. And sure, there had probably been an unspoken attempt to squeeze a small bite out of me for an imaginary driver’s license infraction, but nobody threatened or intimidated me over it. In the end I had been sent on my way without anything negative at all happening to me. I was delayed half an hour while driving at 3 a.m. It hardly seems unreasonable for the cops to have figured I was up to no good driving around at that time of night.

It was a relief, though, when the sun finally came out and I was driving through the country.

The varnish looked great, so now we move on to having some teak repairs done and bungs replaced.