Donate NowI finally got to see more of Guatemala by land yesterday. I left Flores, Petén, with Kara and Nadia at 6 a.m. Hector, our friend and driver, was behind the wheel and we headed south for hours on straight roads passing more treeless land than I had seen my entire time in Guatemala. The vast rain forest that remains to the north has long ago been transformed into great open tracts of multi-use land. Houses line the roads, roofs are tiled or metal covered rather than thatched. The livestock grazing in the fields are larger and meatier, the car traffic is denser.
Soon after leaving Petén the road joins with the main east-west corridor, an overland connection between Guatemala's coasts. The roads wind between the growing hills from the plains in the east to the mountains in the west. Traffic moves slowly as we leapfrog ahead of large trucks filled with cargo from the Atlantic ships and others with cows packed like chickens in to large beds towering over our red minivan. But we speed on ...