We’ve done a lot of travelling since my last post.
On Wednesday March 29th we left Belize for my first land crossing of an international border. We hired a service to take us to the border between Belize and Mexico, and they arranged a taxi on the Mexican side of the border to take us the rest of the way to Chetumal in Quintana Roo. The ride was interesting… Our driver arrived about 30 minutes after our scheduled pickup, which wasn’t a surprise since everything in Belize ran about 30 to 45 minutes late. Along the way we found out that the service had two additional travelers that were being brought to us by another van, so we waited for them to arrive. Then, we drove on for about 2 miles before being informed that we were going to switch vans, and we stopped to wait for the new van. Once we all changed vans (including our driver) we were on our way to Mexico!
The border crossing was not as seamless as I had hoped. We paid our exit fee from Belize, then entered the Mexican border authorities. No one really bothered to look at our luggage, which was a stark difference from airline travel. A man at the border asked if we had rice, or any other foods. We showed him our bag of snacks and he ignored the rest of our luggage. Then we went to get our passports stamped. I was under the impression that a 90 or 180 day visa was the norm when entering Mexico. I was wrong. Exercising my very limited Spanish I tried to explain to the border authorities that we had planned to spend several months in Mexico visiting Quintana Roo, Yucatan, Campeche, Chiapas, Oaxaca and then departing from Mexico City. They promptly asked to see our reservations in each of these places, which we did not have since we didn’t know how long it would take us to visit all the places we wanted to go. They informed us (I think, my Spanish is not great) that we needed an exit flight in order to give us a visa for the entirety of our trip. It seemed that our only choice would be to buy a flight from Mexico City before they would give us more than a 30 day visa. At this point I began a stressful search for flights. Meanwhile, Farrah went to talk to our taxi driver who told her we should be able to pay an “entrance tax” to allow us to stay longer without specific plans. She talked to the border authorities, who suddenly started speaking English to her. The gist was that they would give us a 90 day visa if we paid the tax and then lectured us about how we would need better travel plans next time we wanted to enter Mexico. 40 minutes later we were on our way to Chetumal.
We spent 3 nights in Chetumal at a pleasant little hostel where we met a number of very friendly travellers from France, Spain, Israel, and the US. The only thing I can really say about it is that Chetumal is an odd city. It is fairly large and located on the coast. There is one major street leading down to a plaza on the water that seemed to have street vendors, but only after 6pm. There were a lot of banks and optometrists around. We initially went to BBVA bank to get some pesos, which worked fine, but when we returned the day we left Chetumal neither of us could get the ATMs to give us money. After calling my bank it turned out that the problem was with BBVA, so I tried another bank, and it worked. Why was this a problem? I have no idea.
While in Chetumal we got our first taste of Mexican food made in Mexico. This may shock you, but Mexicans are far better at making Mexican food than Americans. We found several excellent, and cheap, taquerias, which we visited multiple times. No sense fixing what isn’t broken. I also tried aguachile verde for the first time. This is a dish similar to shrimp ceviche with lots of cucumbers, and loaded with habanero peppers. It was delicious, and my face burned for about an hour after I finished eating. I can’t recommend it enough if you get the opportunity to try it.
On Saturday, I got another first as we took the ADO bus from Chetumal to Xpujil. I’d never travelled by bus from one city to another, and I was pleasantly surprised by how comfortable the ADO bus was, think business class airline seats in comfortable A/C. Nothing like a chicken bus (not that I’ve been brave enough to try one yet).
The purpose of our trip to Xpujil was to visit Calakmul, a famous classical period Mayan city close to the border between Guatemala and Campeche Mexico on the Mexican side of the border. Calakmul is not the easiest site to get to even from Xpujil, which is the closest Mexican town, and also seems to largely serve as a hub for tourists visiting the ruins.
We arrived at 7:30pm in Xpujil and walked the two blocks from the bus station to our hostel, located at the back of a pizzeria. We got checked in without issue and promptly wandered back out to the pizzeria for dinner. The pizzeria was quite busy and didn’t have any open tables, but when they saw us standing around looking like confused tourists they setup a table and chairs for us on the sidewalk and we enjoyed some damn tasty pizza before heading to our room to watch a little TV and get to bed early.
Our tour guide arrived to pick us (and several other tourists who we’d seen on the bus) at 7am. The drive to Calakmul took about an hour and a half, and we stopped before entering the site to do a short nature walk. Our guide, Jimmy, spoke very little English, about as much as I spoke Spanish, so the day was a mental and physical workout as I tried to understand and translate as much as I could (not much) for Farrah. The other tourists in our group were three young men from France, one of whom spoke decent Spanish, the other two spoke none, and a couple from Spain, who spoke about as much English as I speak Spanish. The ruins themselves are a fairly sprawling complex. We were told on entering the site that the grand plaza was closed due to parts of the ruins collapsing. Shortly after that our guide took us under a line of yellow caution tape to visit the grand plaza. I’m still not clear why we were allowed to see it, but I wasn’t about to complain. We then moved on to the smaller plaza and structures 1-4, all of which we were allowed to climb. The steps of these structures were much smaller than the steps of the temples in Tikal, or Altun Ha. I asked our guide about this and he said that the smaller steps were used for religious temples whereas the taller steps were for royal living structures. I have no idea if this is correct, or if I lost something in translation. Jimmy and I tried hard to communicate, but the language barrier made it tough. The entire day was hot and tiring. Once you enter the site it is a two kilometer walk to the first structures, and climbing them was a serious leg workout. Overall, I enjoyed the trip, but I found the ruins to be far less awe inspiring than Tikal, which sparked my interest in seeing many more Mayan ruins. We arrived back at the pizzeria at 5:30pm exhausted and immediately ordered multiple (hard earned) beers, and an even bigger pizza than the night before.
After our long day we crashed pretty hard and slept like the dead, then the next morning we were up at 8am and headed back to the bus station to wait for our bus back to Chetumal. The bus terminal, thankfully, sold coffee, which was better than any I’d had in Belize. They made it with a bit of cinnamon, and I was pleasantly surprised by how good it tasted, but maybe I was just tired.
The bus left promptly at 9:50 despite a listed departure time of 9:15, and we began the next leg of our trip, which will take us back to Chetumal, and then on to Bacalar, a pueblo magico, know for it’s lagoon.