Day 9 -- Puerto Quetzal Sunny, mid-80s
We got up early for breakfast because we had to be in the theater to meet our excursion group at 7:45. We got there on time, instead of early, this time. Even so, we sat in the theater for an hour and 40 minutes before being called to our excursion. It was honestly awful. Again.
We did a cultural tour in Antigua, which was about a 90 minute bus ride in each direction. Antigua is a 500-year-old colonial Spanish town, with many surviving historic buildings (and ruins), and is a UNESCO World Heritage site. We walked through the Antigua Cathedral ruins. A lot of the building is still standing, but because of Antigua's frequent earthquakes, it's never been fully rebuilt. I intentionally used the phrase "walked through" because that's all we did. We were there for no more than 15 minutes, which was very disappointing. It seemed like a very interesting site and I would have liked to have learned a lot more about it.
We walked to the Iglesia de la Mersed (the "Yellow Church"). This was really interesting and had a nun's cloister attached to it. We were able to spend some time in the church and walk through the nuns' chambers. From there we walked to a museum that featured Mayan works placed next to contemporary works that they inspired. This was a great exhibit. I really liked it, and I felt the concept was simple but kind of brilliant. And the grounds around the art museum were gorgeous.
The Yellow Church:
The grounds of the Mayan art museum:
After the museum, we walked to a local restaurant where we had a somewhat disappointing lunch. It was dry chicken, dry rice, and refried beans that were more like a bean paste. It was not good. And the dessert was a sweet dumpling or something like that, but it was served in a disgusting liquid. It was worse than the bean paste.
Our last stop on the excursion was a visit to a jade museum (jademaya.com/pages/jade-museum), which featured a presentation from an archeologist who re-discovered the jade mines in Guatemala. Once again, I found this to be very interesting.
The archeologist who spoke to us:
Unfortunately, our particular tour group ran into a few logistical problems that took a lot of time to resolve and took away from time that we could've spent at the historical sites. We had one person get lost when she was separated from the group, and we had two elderly guests who simply could not do the walking that was required (even though the tour description was clear about walking and uneven street surfaces, etc.). So our tour guide was often distracted and at one point, we just stood on the side of the road for a half hour while she tried to get a taxi to take the old couple back to our bus. As a result of this, we spent some time on our ride back to the ship searching the internet for information on the sites that we visited. So my honest impression is that I loved Antigua and the historical sites that we saw, but I wasn't crazy about our excursion. If I were to do this again, I would want 4 or 5 hours in the town, and we only had about 3.
When we got back to the ship, we learned part of the reason for our ridiculously long wait-time in the theater earlier in the morning may have been because there were two cruise ships in port that day. This is apparently very unusual; and because there's only one slip at the cruise ship pier, our ship had to dock at the commercial pier. That seems to have triggered increased security measures, which is why nobody could leave the ship when we originally planned. So it may not have been Royal Caribbean's fault, but nobody communicated this to us while we were sitting there for over an hour and a half. They should've done better.
On the drive back to the ship, I started to not feel well. I think it was just due to the physical exertion in the hot sun all day. Thankfully, it wasn't anything serious, but just to be safe, I decided to skip dinner. So I don't have food pictures for this night. But Kathryn had a great Greek salad and a disappointing chicken picata.
The evening show was supposed to be a magician, but he couldn't get through Customs to board the ship in time to rehearse before his show time; so the performance was postponed until the next night. I can't be sure, but we guessed that his delay was also caused by being on the commercial side of the port.
Just to be sure that I didn't push myself too hard, I spent a quiet evening in the stateroom and was in bed by about 10. I'm so boring!