Tuesday night we packed, and after running out to breakfast on Wednesday morning, we were ready to go. We got to the bus station in Antigua shortly after 9AM, and jumped on a bus to Guatemala City. After doing the route from Panajachel to Antigua the day before, with three changes, this was EASY...just get on the bus and go. Because we got on at the station, we got good seats, and although this bus did what they all do and filled up on the way out of town, it wasn't a bad ride. It was a bit like an amusement park ride as we headed up the hill out of Antigua with the bus going at warp speed and everybody swaying back and forth like they were on a roller coaster, but it wasn't uncomfortable. Tom and I were laughing because the day before we had been on a bus where a preacher got on and the bus driver turned the music off; on this ride, a preacher got on, and the bus driver made the music louder. It didn't stop the preacher, who then went through another strange-to-us ritual where after preaching, he went down the bus aisle handing the passengers something in a small package - maybe candy, maybe cookies, we don't know because we didn't take it - and after he got to the back of the bus, he went back to the front and either collected money or took the package back. A woman was sitting next to me with her two young children, and when I gave her a puzzled look, she just rolled her eyes, so apparently this is a common occurrence on these buses. She returned the small package to the preacher.
We got into Guatemala City, and weren't sure where to get off the bus, which was stopping at almost every corner. Tom had pinned the location of the shop where we had to go to pick up Land Rover parts on his iPad (have I mentioned how much we love our iPads?), so as the bus was going through Guatemala City, Tom was watching to make sure we were still heading towards where we wanted to go. When it looked like we might be heading past where we wanted to get off, Tom talked to the conductor (easy because the bus was getting empty at this point), and gave him the paper that had the address of the Land Rover parts shop. The conductor gave him the signal to wait just a few minutes, and after another turn, he gave us the eye, stopped the bus, jumped off, and hailed a taxi for us. The conductor had a quick conversation with the taxi driver (have I mentioned how much we love Guatemalan bus conductors?), gave him our bags and the slip of paper with the address where we wanted to go, and we were on our way to the Land Rover place.
The taxi driver was very nice, giving us a brief history of Guatemala City, Guatemala in general, and talking about relative population rates in Guatemala, Central America, and the USA. Before we knew it, we were pulling up in front of the Reyca, S.A., the Land Rover parts dealer.
We had told Raymond, the British owner of the company, that we would be there in the mid to late morning. We got there at 10:45, which we think qualifies as mid to late morning. Raymond, and his entire staff, were great from start to finish. From the time we got there until shortly after 1:00, he and Tom went through the list of what we need for the farm Land Rovers, and refined what was already in the box with what we actually wanted to take back with us. By the end of the official lunch hour, we had our boxes packed. Raymond took us to his lovely home for lunch, which was delicious, and we chatted about this and that and made plans for Raymond to visit the farm. Prior to becoming a Land Rover parts dealer, he had worked on tea plantations throughout the world, so he has an interest in forestry and is very interested in, and knowledgeable of, what we are doing here. We didn't set a date, but we are pretty sure that he will visit us in the future, just to see what we are doing and probably to offer good advice on tree farming. We left his house and went back to the shop, where he wrote up the receipts for what we were buying, and collected payment. When everything was done and all the parts were packaged, he took us to the bus station in Guatemala City so we could get a bus back to Peten and Belize.
As we pulled into the Fuente del Norte parking lot, a big bus pulled in behind us. This ended up being the bus we would take to Melchor. Raymond had had his office manager call about bus schedules, and we had found that there were a number of buses we could get between late afternoon and Wednesday evening. When we got to the station, we had the choice of the 5PM bus, which was the one pulling in behind us, or a 9PM bus. The 5PM bus was not as nice of a bus as the 9PM bus, which was the same as the one we had traveled on from Santa Elena to Guatemala City the week before, BUT it went all the way to the Belize border at Melchor. So, we had to make the decision if we wanted to take the less-nice bus all the way to Melchor and not have to transfer the six heavy boxes of car parts, or if we wanted to wait until 9PM and take the nicer bus to Santa Elena, and then have to transfer the boxes to a Santa Elena to Melchor "local" bus. We elected to put the parts on the bus and not worry about it until we got to the border.
We think that was a good choice, although we don't really know. The straight-through bus definitely wasn't as comfortable as the bus we had taken from Santa Elena to Guatemala City and we didn't really get any sleep, which hadn't been an issue on the way down when we had actually slept okay, if not great. However, we didn't have to move six heavy boxes in the middle of the night, which was a good thing. We got into Melchor a little after 4AM, and fortunately met a nice taxi man who not only took us, our bags, and the boxes to the border, but waited for us until 5AM when the border opened, and then helped us move everything from the Guatemala border to the Belize border. As it was, we think we did good; if we hadn't been met by the nice taxi man and had had to figure out a way to get all of our crap to the border on our own, we might not have thought we made such a good decision.
With the taxi man's help, we checked out of Guatemala and into Belize, and dumped all of our stuff on the customs counter in the Belize immigration hall. The customs officer there was nice, but she said that she would charge us about 50% duty, which put us over the limit of what they would take in cash, so she said we had to wait until 8AM until the customs brokers opened their shops. We left the six boxes of vehicle parts at the customs counter, and found a comfortable bench outside on the Belize side of the border. There, we killed about 2.5 hours, reading, playing Mancala on the iPad (have I mentioned how much we love our iPads?), talking, dozing, and checking our watches about every 10 minutes. At 8AM, I stayed with our stuff on the bench, and Tom went to the broker's office, which is down the road towards Benque from the border. He found a broker who was willing to deal with us, but it involved a lot of talk, and multiple trips back and forth to the customs officials in an office closer to the border between 8AM and about 9:30AM. I sat on the bench and watched him walk back and forth, with both of us rolling our eyes. The situation became even more ludicrous when we realized that because of accusations of customs officials at the border pocketing money, all customs payments now had to be made through a bank in Benque Viejo, the border town...and the bank isn't our bank. That meant that they wouldn't take our company checks. Somewhere in all this running back and forth, Hanna and Matt had showed up with the vehicle to pick us up, so they started running us back and forth between Benque and the border to try and get the the customs bill paid...even though it was now much less than the original 50% estimate.
This whole process was very frustrating. For one thing, we were tired. We had basically been up since 5AM the previous morning, and it was now approaching noon the next day. For another thing, we had not contested any of the payments anyone had demanded. We knew when we bought the car parts that we would have to pay duty on them coming into Belize, and we just wanted to do it and get it done. However, Belize doesn't make it easy for you to just pay for what you're bringing. You run from office to office to customs desk to office, and back and forth to the bank in Benque, which is about a 10 minute drive. After a lot of backing and forthing, we finally got a bill from the broker, took it to the bank in Benque, got money out of our personal account, paid the bill, and got a receipt to take back to the border. The broker told us to pull up to the door outside of the customs/immigration hall, where we were immediately hassled by officials who told us we couldn't park there because it was an illegal parking spot.
At this point, we had had enough and weren't taking any of it. For starters, we think the taxi drivers in Belize have got such a scam going that it's a wonder they haven't demanded that all other drivers have their licenses rescinded so nobody can drive on the roads or park in the towns other than taxi drivers. It's bullshit. Taxi drivers keep getting killed, and while the dead taxi drivers probably aren't bad people and don't deserve to get killed, we have difficulty summoning up any feelings of sorrow for them since our experience is that the local taxi drivers are, by and large, a colossal pain in the ass. So, when the "official" told us we had to move, Hanna and I both professed our inability to drive a vehicle with a standard transmission (out and out lies for both of us), and told the official that we had been told to park there by the broker (true), and we weren't even going to find the driver (Tom, who had wisely taken the keys so we couldn't move it anyway) to ask him to move. The official wandered away two or three times, and came back to us, telling us to move, a number of times before we finally had the six boxes released from customs. It got to the point where Hanna and I were just glaring at him and shrugging, basically daring him to call a tow truck. In the meantime, the customs officials were taking their time going through the boxes, and at this point we didn't care. We weren't trying to do anything wrong, we were willing to pay whatever they wanted, and as far as we were concerned, they could just stuff it.
Finally, customs cleared the boxes, the boxes were put in the truck, we went back to pay the customs broker, and we were on the way. We had to make a couple of stops on the way home, but we were finally in Belize and heading home...to our own bed and a nap!
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