For the last part of our Guatemala trip we were hiring a car and driving to the Pacific West coast. The road from Guatemala City to the Port of San Jose on the coast is excellent but there is very heavy truck traffic.It took us around 3 hours to get out of Guatemala city and get to the coast.
Turning south from Port San Jose one goes on a local road that connects little beach villages almost all the way to El Salvador border. We stayed in an airbnb in one of the beach houses along the shore near Monterrico. We had an ocean front place, with a pool and all the conveniences one needed. At first we were surprised that there was no fence as one gets used to seeing every property fenced in in Central America and the Caribbean. But here we were in Guatemala, on the coast and no fences and no grills on the windows. The area is popular with Guatemalas for beach holidays. Quite a few property developments – these ones fenced in – start to show up. But for now it is still a very laid back authentic place.
Guatemala’s Pacific coast is an important nesting site for variety of turtles. Community Biological station at El Banco monitors nesting beaches, collects eggs to incubate them and then release to imrpove chances of survivals for baby turtles. One can visit every day around 5pm and for a small donation participate in releasing the baby turtles.
Guatemala has a reputation for great sports fishing. In fact some say Guatemala is the world capital of deep sea sports fishing. Not sure about world capital and how one would measure that, but we had to try the fishing. We went on a local charter boat from Iztapa. Iztapa is located closer to Port of San Jose and is the center for deep sea fishing. There are quite a few charters and hotels specializing in accommodation and fishing packages. We went for a day with Mad Marlin Sport Fishing. The boat was great, the crew was excellent. Sail fish showed up. We caught (and released) 5 sailfish! We also caught a couple of nice mahi mahi and they were very delicious on barbeque and as a sashimi. While at sea we saw dolphines, turtles and tuna jumping. It was also very cool to see coastline with all the volcanoes, though covered in haze and smoke.
Monterrico Nature reserve protects a 20km stretch of mangroves along the Pacific coast. We went on a boat tour through mangroves early in the morning to look for birds. To book our tour, we drove up to Monterrico’s main street near the beach and found a booth there advertising mangrove tours. The next day we drove up to the boat launching area on mangroves side and met our guide with the boat. We paddled in the dark and reached a large lagoon for sunrise. It was cloudy and we could not see volcanoes, but we did see beautiful sunrise and many birds. We then meandered along the channels looking for birds. It was a very enjoyable morning and we did see many birds and beautiful views.
One of the days we decided to drive up along the coast to El Paredon. El Paredon was another contender for our base on the west coast of Guatemala and we wanted to check what we were missing. El Paredon is known as a great place for surfing. And if surfing is what you want to do then probably El Paredon is the place. It felt much more touristy in a backpacker kind of way than Monterrico. It also seemed to be going through a major construction boom with many new guest houses being built. it was very sandy with not too many trees. All in all we decided that we made a good call staying where we did.
We had great few days in Monterrico to relax as we were wrapping up our glorious Guatemala trip. And then on the last day we just drove to Guatemala city, dropped off the car and caught our flight out.