Guatemala Dispatch
Considering traveling here, by plane or armchair? We've got tips and suggestions, and a google map with the best places pinned.
A question we get a lot: Is it safe? The US State Dept. has long advised not traveling here. And while we’ve heard Guatemala City itself is a little sketchy, many of the travelers we spoke with on arrival had plans to stay there.
We found the country to be completely safe—and more, the people couldn’t have been more friendly and welcoming.
A 70th birthday celebration brought us to this Central American country, which has beaches on both the Carribean and Pacific sides. Ann’s dear friend, the writer Joyce Maynard, lives part of her year in a complex of buildings on Lake Atitlán which she has turned into an inn where she hosts regular writers’ retreats. It’s extraordinary.
We flew American from NYC to Miami, Miami to Guatemala City where Ann had arranged for a taxi to Antigua Guatemala, a city in the highlands of the country with a population of about 40,000. It’s a lovely city known for its Spanish colonial architecture, with a bustling central square and cobblestone streets.
We arrived at our lovely boutique hotel Posada del Angel (10 rooms or so) after dark (candlelit, sweetly). The hotel is in a quiet part of town but it was a 10 to 15 minute walk to Frida’s, a Mexican restaurant with terrific tacos. Ann had a good margarita and I opted for a tequila-based sour that used tamarind for the sour—so good I want to experiment with tamarind now.
The following day we did what we often do in a new city—find a food tour (Antigua Foodie Tours). There’s no better, faster way to get know a place (see my NYTimes travel piece on just this.) It was billed as a street food tour but was in fact a visit to various restaurants accessible from the street but not selling what we’d call street food. Our guide was a lovely woman who was born in Oakland and had been living in the city for the past seven years, and it was just me and Ann on the tour.
Highlights included a visit to the restaurant Aqua for its view, Cactus for fantastic tacos, and Glacy for an ice cream cone that got the lovely and novel treatment of a coating of marshmallow, torched till golden brown.
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