Our new digs for hurricane season. It’s a small eco-resort with maybe twenty-five slips and a bunch of small bungalows. There isn’t much of a breeze here, so the cleaning ladies just drape their daily laundry all over the docks. We went right to work washing and drying everything out before storing it down below. About the only problem with the Rio Dulce for a hurricane hole is the possibility of mold on anything that gets damp. We’ll be coming and going from the boat a bit while traveling inland around the country for a couple months.

The marina has a couple hundred acres with a nice path to an observation tower. The mosquitos literally chased us the entire time. For a day we thought maybe the bugs were going to make life unbearable, but after this excursion we didn’t use bug spray again the rest of the week—the mosquitos disappeared.

Everybody—except the locals—is absolutely dripping with sweat all day long. A hike makes our clothes feel like we just crawled out of the lake.

There seems to be a dock for every budget here in the Rio. Ours is about $250/mo, which seems dirt cheap to us, but I imagine there are locals’ docks available for $100 or less.

Fronteras (Rio Dulce). A fairly typical middle-of-nowhere type Guatemalan town. One-road main-highway kind of place, where shops have encroached so far that walking requires waiting for trucks to pass. We quickly found the one taco place, and some good “barbecue” across the street. Dinners cost 15-20 Quetzales ($2-3). Cattle trucks come through town fully loaded in each direction all day long, and the grocery store here resulted in us walking out with nothing more than a loaf of bread—there is just nothing available—but all-in-all it’s a pretty nice place. The hardware store had everything I needed, and more. And there are a couple more gringo-ized restaurants behind the road on the water that have terrible food, but cold beer, and a nice dock where the marina’s free launcha can drop us off so we don’t have to walk miles to get here. Oh, and a trip to the fruiteria to get a huge bag of plums, a watermelon, some strawberries, bananas, and a few mangos, runs about three bucks.

I love that our kids have grown up accustomed every bit as much to towns like this as they have to Portland, or St. Paul. While this town appears to have come as quite a shock to a lot of cruisers, it’s a perfectly natural place for our kids to walk down the street, eat, and get groceries.

Waiting for the launcha on the dock at SunDog, where I’d later learn there is a pretty decent pizza to be had. Our marina is right there behind me.

We jumped in a boat with another family and headed over to San Felipe, a fort just a mile or so away. The ticket guy informed us immediately that the fort is 20% original and 80% rebuilt, almost as if he didn’t want to mislead us in any way. Regardless, it was a fun place to climb around. The kids enjoyed the prison, and shooting down pirate ships with their canons.

Had a lot of fun with this family for the few days before they took off. Rio Dulce is definitely a transient place.

Always nice when Lowe finds something he is willing to spend his own money on like this ceramic ship. We’ve certainly seen a lot of these in the waters we’ve been in this season. The kids went in and shopped, and ask how much the ship was, but couldn’t bring themselves to do the haggling themselves. They’re going to have to learn that skill at some point, though I’m a pretty terrible bargainer myself, as most of the stuff we’re haggling over is so inexpensive to begin with. We got this down from sixty-five Q to forty, basically by hemming and hawing.