Thatched huts along the Rio Dulce

Sunday 12th September - Tuesday 14th September

From Flores, we caught an early morning bus to Rio Dulce. This was a fairly long and uncomfortable journey, although the road was not as bad as we'd been told - in places, there was even tarmac. We had planned to spend the night in Rio Dulce, but when we arrived we found a group of other travellers who were negotiating for a boat trip up the river to Livingston, which was what we had planned to do. Eventually we caught the boat in the mid-afternoon. This boat trip was our main reason for stopping off in Rio Dulce, apart from to break up our journey a bit. The trip took about two hours, and the scenery was beautiful. The route started off by crossing a wide river that looked more like a lake, with thatched huts lining the shores. After a while, we came to a small mangrove where there were many cormorants nesting. Then the trip continued through the gorge of the Rio Dulce, which was lovely - high steep walls covered in vegetation with the rock of the cliffs only showing through in a few places. At one point a hot spring pours out water smelling of sulphur into the river, and the temperature of the water can vary considerably even a few centimetres apart. Eventually the Rio Dulce flows into the Caribbean at Livingston.

Livingston is a small (5,000) but very pleasant town, with a number of decent restaurants catering mainly to the traveller crowd. The beaches around the town are mostly silty and dirty, but a large group of us went for a walk up to a place called Las Siete Altares (The Seven Altars). About 5 kilometres along the shoreline from Livingston, this is a series of small freshwater pools where a stream flows into the sea. The water is clean, the setting is superb, and it was very refreshing to jump into the water after walking in the sticky heat for a couple of hours. We had read that the walk along the beach was dangerous, so we didn't take our cameras, much to our regret, as the only people we met were smiling friendly Guatemalans, mostly Garifuna and Maya. I must confess that it came as a bit of a surprise to me to find black Guatemalans speaking English, but then that's Livingston. It has a strong Caribbean feel to the place, laid back and relaxed, and we could have stayed for more than a couple of nights, but we wanted to move on towards Antigua and Atitlan.

The Rio Dulce gorge

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