In Xela we wake to a frost. Rime crystallising the plastic detritus along the roadside. Proof positive that we’ve reach the top of the hill, that from here on the countryside will roll along and has by the laws of physical geography to eventually go downhill and tumble through a ladder of ‘lapse rates’. Three days ago we were down on the lowland planes, down in the heat, only to climb up through a clima of ecological zones, through a falling temperature gradient that equates perfectly to the accepted norm of 2°C loss for every 1000ft ascended, just as that tweed jacketed, leather-elbow patched geography teacher taught.

It’s also in Xela (I so like the name, it rhymes with the classic Scout song: “haila, oh haila shaila”) that we’re given a wide cycling shoulder, one that we’ll keep for the next five hundred kilometres, all the way to the far border of the next visited country. A dual carriageway, an autopista that seems over-engineered for the minimal traffic it carries, that will on occasions be reduced to near invisibility as it encounters the next town’s Sunday market. The pavement covered by street food stands, the nearside lane carpeted by shoe sales, the outside lane clad in fruit stalls. Leaving the central reservation, a rough scrub of broken rock and soft sand, there for the weaving double-trailer semi-articulated lorries and buzzing moto-taxis, wayward pedestrians and amused cycle tourers acting as makeshift ploughs. You just have to smile at the absurdity, the normalcy the otherwaysness of what no local would question. Build a motorway: convert it into the Sabbath’s market hall.

Then we hit the fall line, our road runs out of ascendable mountain, it’s pay-back for all that climbing, now it’s back down into the hotscapes. On the way we have a target. A colonial town. After a near surfeit of such places through Mexico, where there was a time when I might have been tempted to comment that tonight’s stop was “just another colonial town with the inevitable gold gilded basilica and tree sculpted plaza, secluded secretive courtyards and dark caverns of tortilla production: in Guatemala we’ve been starved of such architectural culture.

Our target: Antigua Guatemala.

Riding through a low morning light infused with wood smoke from the newly kindled wood fired street food stalls, a soft smog that’s weighted in place by cold air and the surrounding caldera of volcanoes. Finding a ‘mirador’, a scenic view point that’s totally shrouded in plastic wrapped trader stands, all selling the exact and the same range of squashes, flowers and pottery urns. Down through fast flowing bends, swinging through hairpins, sweeping under deep-shade trees and rattling over bridges spanning the novelty of water running rivers.

If climbs are long on sweat and time but short on breath , then descents are punctuated by cerebral debates, whether to apply the brakes, will this hurt if I come off, is this fun. Threefold yes. Trouble is, it can take a few moments to get to those answers, by which time I’m into a race with a Chicken Bus.

Then suddenly we’re surrounded by coffee haciendas and frozen yogurt shops, cobbled streets and Spanish language students. Equally suddenly we’ve acquired a room in a small posada, tucked under a pan-tiled roof, upon which grow giant sedums, a place that exudes genuine reverence and an aged veneer.

Pure serendipity; or is it?