taco's & toucan's travels ~ 2019

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DAY 45

Week 7

ANTIGUA GUATEMALA (Sacatepéquez, GTM)

Sunday April 28^th, 2019

TODAYS MILEAGE – 2 miles / 3 kilometres

TRIP MILEAGE – 19,593 miles / 31,532 kilometres

It appears that people have come from miles around to spend some time in Antigua today. The streets are full of parked cars, the main squares a packed full of people dressed on the best clobber. As far as I can tell, it seems to be that people have chosen this day to celebrate their respective family members Quinceañera.

Not that I’d be celebrating with them as I decided to go full on “Slack Attack” today and try and get my Blog up to date, as well as downloading some Kindle books for my iPad to make the road trips a little less boring.

While banging away on the laptop keyboard, I noticed the unmistakeable sound of indiscriminate gunfire from seemingly the same heavy calibre weapon like a shotgun. The thing that was puzzling me was that it was coming from all different directions, making me think that it may be some kind of bird scaring program.

At around 6:30PM I meandered down the G Adventures Meet & Greet for the Volcano Discovery tour where I met our Barcelona born G Adventures CEO – Sonia. Also attending were 3 of the 4 other travellers, with the final member arriving later tomorrow evening.

It looks like I’ll be the only testosterone proponent of the trip as the rest are firmly entrenched in the pheromones field, with Lila hailing from Colombia (now a USA citizen and based in Atlanta), Coralie (Switzerland) as well as Patrica and Weibke (Germany).

The trip briefing went well enough, but for me there were more questions than answers and in all honesty, it was absolutely no fault of our CEO.

First, let me give you a bit of background - I booked and paid for this trip over a year ago and it has changed considerably - i.e. 6 times, over that period with regards to inclusions and deletions, with the last change two weeks ago.

I come to find out that even though this trip is sold as the “Volcano Discovery” product, G Adventures doesn’t actually take you to visit any volcanoes over the 3 week period. They encourage you to use one of their preferred vendors, at an extra cost to yourself. It also raised an eyebrow or two in the group when we were advised we have a 16 hour public bus trip that we could “upgrade” to a private vehicle, again as long as we put our hand in our own pockets. It’s a similar story to included meals, most of the breakfasts look now to be at our own cost.

In the end, it looks to be that G Adventures is supplying transportation, accommodation and a CEO to make sure we get around hassle free.

You may ask why I did not decide to change the trip or get my money back. With the amount of changes, it was hard to keep up with them, as it was more a matter of waiting until something was finalised. G Adventures do not give refunds to the best of my knowledge and simply issue a credit if deemed relevant.

Hopefully at the end of this trip my feelings to the whole deal will have changed from one of feeling fingered and then nickel & dimed - as that’s not what I signed on for.

After the meeting, all 5 of us wandered down to La Casa de las Sopas, a local soup restaurant, for dinner which was a first for me. I had their meatball soup and a couple of cold Gallo cervezas for $15 AUD.