Antigua to Cuilapa

We decided to go downhill towards the humid coast then back up to avoid most of the swamp and into El Salvador. The downhill was fantastic but we did not quite end up where we wanted as we left Antigua a little late and in the late afternoon Rigel got his second flat! I wondered why he was pedalling so slowly... Luckily we had made it to a small hacienda (ranch), we asked to camp in the yard there, the family agreed so we set out making supper and patching the tube before the sun completely set. Rigel had bought a new tire in Antigua while scoping out possible shoes for the volcano hike and while I got my brakes worked on so we changed it out thinking it was time and probably related to the flat. After supper we took a bucket shower and had to dodge the many toads that came out in the evening to eat bugs and such. There were also huge hunter spiders out, one was next to the shower and must've been 3 inches long including the legs. Yuck! It was a long day, and we eagerly went to sleep. The shower only helped momentarily as it was still 28 degrees out and our tent does not have much ventilation.

It rained during the night and luckily we were under a porch roof, but it only dropped the temperature 3 degrees by the time we woke up at 5 am. We packed up and set out with plans to make it past Chiquimulilla and up the moutains to Cuilapa. The ride was hot but without too many hills. We stopped for supplies in Chiquimulilla before setting out on the hills. I used mapmyride.com and profilderuta.es, both road elevation diagram simulators, to show me the grades of the road and it looked awful. Some parts, although short, were over 20% grade. Seemed completely impossible to do and in the heat of the day. The other option we thought about, because we wanted to avoid Guatemala City, was to take secondary roads over to the CA2 but it was a lot of hills... A few kilometers up the hill we stuck out our thumbs as I was exhausted by the heat, and got a truck to stop for us. The people were very nice and even helped us get the bikes into the truck. We shared the bed with a ladder and many random electronics all probably designed to pop our bike tires and put holes in our bags. But we managed to fit just fine, Rigel even fell asleep, and made it to Cuilapa by early afternoon.

We decided to end the day in Cuilapa as we were both so tired from the heat. We rode up the super steep road into town as the whole town is built on the side of a hill and started searching for a hotel, a task that turned out quite difficult. The people seemed not to understand that we were looking for a hotel so everyone was difficult to talk to. In a town 20 minutes across we spent over an hour and a half riding back and forth and up useless hills and around the block more than once searching for a reasonably priced hotel. We found two, one being quite expensive and the other being slightly less expensive. We took the latter but the people working there were not the friendliest, initially offering a price higher even than the price posted on a sign on the door from the Guatemala tourism board. After showrs and a rest, we went out and found the town had mostly shut down at 8pm.  We did find some delicious tacos though, and then found some internet and went to bed.