ATM Adventures

Where to start? Cristie and I have been in Guatemala for only 3 days, and it feels like we´ve been here a month. Today is a mellow day, because we´ve been doing a lot of running around the last several days. The two main goals we set for ourselves today were to get cash and to make our way 100 km south to La Finca Ixobel, our next stop.

Getting cash has proven to be a much more arduous task than either of us expected. We figured we´d be landing in an international airport in a large Central American city, so we´d have no problem finding an ATM. Well, the one ATM in the airport was broken. Fortunately, the taxi drivers accepted US dollars (the person from our hostel who was supposed to pick us up never showed up), and our hostel also accepted dollars, so we didn´t have to go in search of quetzales (the Guatemalan currency) until the morning. That first morning (Friday), we walked around the neighborhood trying various ATMS -- we broke one, which completely shut down and rebooted on Windows XP, which cracked us up -- until we finally found one that both functioned and accepted MasterCard debit cards. (We realized that we use the same bank and have the same debit and credit cards, so we´re kind of in a fix if they don´t work...)

That first ATM escapade lasted about 45 minutes. This morning we set off on another, since we´re not likely to be able to get cash anywhere in the next several days. We stayed last night in Flores, a small island in the middle of a small lake, connected to the town of Santa Elena by a 2-lane causeway. There is one ATM on the island, and it was not functioning this morning, so we walked across the causeway to Santa Elena in search of another. The first one we found didn´t work either, but a nice gentleman (who also needed cash) led the way to La Despensa Familiar, an all-purpose grocery store that had an ATM. He tried it first and said it didn´t work, but we saw somebody else extracting cash from it a few minutes later, so we tried and succeeded in securing enough cash to last us a while. I think we were lucky that it only took three tries! We´re beginning to realize that we´re going to have to plan our ATM trips in advance, and allow plenty of time for them! :)