The Beginning of a New Year

On my last real night in the States I was treated to a healthy surprise. I had contacted my Aunt Sandy to see if I could get a visit in with her, my uncle and cousin for my last night only to find that my cousin Amy, and her wife, Corrin, happened to be in the area and happened to be staying that one night at Sandy's as well before heading back to Massachusetts. These sorts of gifts, as I like to call them, have been quite common, though completely unexpected every time, and its that mystery of how life works that I've been following for the previous 21 months.

I have a whole other website dedicated to talking about those experiences and my thoughts on them, this one, however, exists solely because of this random goodbye family night with kin I see far and few between of. Amy, Corrin, Sandy, and my other cousin Jen (Sandy's daughter) are all teachers. This entire side of my family, my Dad's side, is pretty much composed of teachers. My Dad is a retired teacher, his wife is a teacher, Amy mother, my aunt, is a teacher, as well as my grandmother, Nana, who was a teacher.

That said, during this visit we got to talking about my travels and upcoming excursion into Central and South America. Amy, apparently, had been teaching vocabulary to her class a few months earlier and used me as an example of defining the word "nomad" which then piqued the classes interest in her having a personal tie to one and have since been asking about my whereabouts. While discussing this over dinner Amy asked if I wouldn't mind writing about my experiences down south and so this blog was conceived. I'll warn you now, if this three paragraph opening hasn't done it already, I can be quite long winded.

My actual last night in the States was spent on airplanes and in airports. The ticket I'd bought was dirt cheap, but because of it I had to fly through the night from San Francisco to Phoenix, AZ to Charlotte, NC finally arriving in Cancún, Quintana Roo, Mexico the next morning. I managed to be on the ground in 4 time zones within 12 hours to finally roll to a stop at 10am Central Time.

Cancún is within 2° latitude of Hawaii so when I got off the plane, still wearing my long pants, warm shirt, and winter jacket from San Francisco I started sweating immediately. I hadn't eaten either and couldn't change clothes until after I'd gone through customs, so while waiting in line I worried that my sweaty shaking hands with no return ticket home would send me straight back to the US. On the contrary, the customs man didn't even so much as look at me, much less ask me anything about why I was entering his country, for how long, or what my intentions were there.

Once through, I toted my pack to the restroom, changed into summer clothes for the 90° weather and caught a bus to my hostel. I was surprised to find everyone speaking English. I also hadn't changed out my dollars for pesos, but from the bus to the lady that ran the hostel, no one had any qualms about taking US money.

I got a top bunk in a dorm room of about 12 beds and started to settle in. Having been trying to get to Mexico for the past year and three months it was a bit overwhelming to now actually be there. It was New Years Eve as well, so amid my thoughts of just wanting to settle in and relax, I also wanted to figure out where the best place would be to ring in the New Year.

Almost immediately I ended up chatting with a guy, Sam, who was in from Saudi Arabia. He was talking about heading down to a town an hour south of Cancún called Playa del Carmen. I'd heard something about that place from a girl I knew, but hadn't met face to face yet, through Couchsurfing when checking email in one of my various airports the previous night. She too had said she'd be in Playa for the fiesta. About an hour after talking with Sam about it I met another girl, Jess, from Australia who also said she was thinking about it.

It sounded like the place to be so I asked her if she'd mind if a tagged along. A Dutch guy, Gert, joined us as well and soon the three of us were busing down for the night. Having spent many miles traversing the US and UK by bus I was amazed at how cheap but comfortable it was. $42 pesos ($2.50 US) to go an hour south, and it was a luxury liner.

We three strangers quickly got to know each other on this adventure. None of us knew what we were doing, but easily found ourselves chatting on the beach and wandering through the crowds for the night. This would set a great precedent for the next week. Around 5am we decided it was time to head back to our hostel in Cancún. The next day Jess headed off to another island for a few days and I meandered about town after reserving another night in the hostel.

I had no plans, no idea of what to do or where to go. All I knew was that I had school to go to in a week and a half in San Cristóbal, about 13 hours bus ride away, to learn Spanish, but my first week in Mexico was wide open. I ended up staying four nights in Cancún looking around and meeting people, mostly at the hostel. My camera busted on the beach my third day in, but other than that I was having a great time unwinding and figuring out where to go next.

With everyone speaking English it was easy to get by in the resort town, but I did get chances to practice my terrible high school Spanish. One day, on the beach, I talked for an hour with a girl from Guadalajara who spoke no English. Later that night I ended up spending another hour or so talking with a journalist from Buenos Aires coming back from Monterrey, Mexico where he was doing a story for six months on the cartel violence up there. He too spoke little to no English, but was extremely patient with my Spanish.

My amazement over those first four five days in Cancún was the people I met from every corner of the world. The journalist from Argentina, to playing cards with guys from Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Finland. I had a few beers with a doctor from Nepal, and met a British girl, Bo, who had just gotten back from a week in Cuba who decided to join me on a trip to Belize.

Bo and I clicked fairly quickly. She would be my travel companion for this first full week down south. She was doing a semester abroad in Guadalajara and was traveling around with a friend for the six week vacation they got for winter break. Her friend returned to England for the last three weeks so Bo had just been left to herself when I met her. We both showed an interest in Belize, so I invited her along.

The next day we caught a bus to Chetumal, the border town on the Mexican side between Mexico and Belize. Having lived in Guadalajara for the past five months she was fairly fluent in the language which was both good and bad for me. It allowed me to cheat and simply have her be my translator when buying tickets, ordering meals, or generally getting anything done while still in Mexico.

When we arrived in Chetumal it was around 7pm and the next bus to Belize City didn't leave until 7am the next morning. We were sort of prepared for this, and had looked into traveler reviews on the internet about how safe it was to sleep in the bus station. Everyone said it was fine, so we paid 5 pesos each to a lady at one of the shops in the station to watch our bags while we went out to get some road food at a grocery store down the way.

When we got back we set up our sleeping bags on the floor and I introduced Bo to a game I got back in Texas, Before the Wind (aka The Pirate Game) which is perfect for traveling for both portability and there are no words on the cards that could create language barriers. She loved it. We played three times before going to sleep.

Bright and early we got our tickets and were on the little chicken bus heading to the border. We'd lost our luxury liners and were now riding in a van that sat about 30 with all the bags crammed in the last seats. I loved it despite having some baggage poking me in the back the whole way, but Bo was less than impressed.

At the border we had learned there was a departure fee to leave the country. One thing to learn while traveling around in these parts is that you have to know what's going on, no one will tell you like they will in the States or Europe. When I'd gotten off my plane five days earlier I was given a Tourist Card which I had no idea what to do with. Thankfully I'm a bit of a hoarder, ironically, and just stuck it in my passport. Had I not done that and just thrown it away I would have been facing a $50 US fine plus the $200 peso fee to leave the country.

Most of us on the bus crossed through just fine, however, a girl from Spain who was traveling with two others didn't make it. As we drove over the bridge into Belize we watched as she walked back to Chetumal alone while her other two friends continued on with us.

Then there was entering Belize, on the other side of the river. Again, most of us got through, but not all. The little Guatemalan lady ahead of me for customs apparently had an expired passport. It turned out she was the bus drivers aunt, and although he tried to pull some sway with the customs agent she could not get through. It was a bit strange pulling away from the border knowing that it was quite possible to be turned away and have to figure out what to do next if that happened.

Belize City was a bustling little town straight out of the old Popeye movie in the '80s. The history of the town was that it was literally a safe haven for the real pirates of the Caribbean two or three hundred years earlier. By the looks of it not much had changed. When looking at hostels to stay at everything I'd read was to get off the mainland and go to the islands, so that was precisely what we did.

There was a Dutch couple on our bus who had as much of an idea of what they were doing as Bo and I did, which is to say we had vague notions but no real clue. We two pairs ended up following each other, as if not really ready to commit to teaming up, but following the same track and consulting each other on what the other had found. This helped in the way of finding a water taxi to the islands, where to convert our pesos to Belize dollars, once on the island where to find a cheap place to stay, and finally, around night time, we ran into each other at the bar on the beach.

We never did end up hanging out together, but we did eventually concede that we were each others spies for gathering information on what to do. They led us to a nice place to eat for cheap and we lead them to a good cheap hotel on the beach.

Belize, however, was expensive, for us broke backpackers, no matter how you put it. The Belize dollar is worth half the US dollar, but all the prices are doubled so the value is exactly the same. Back in Mexico, the peso is 12 times the dollar, but the value of what you actually pay is relatively less than what it would be in the States. The island we went to, Caye Caulker, was beautiful, but not beautiful enough to drain our money there. After one night we caught a water taxi back to the mainland and decided to bus to Flores in Guatemala.

This bus ride would prove to be another example of having to know what you're doing when crossing a border. While at Caye Caulker we looked up if there were departure fees for Belize, which there are. It was $30BZ plus another $7.50BZ for some environmental thing. Thankfully I had a bunch of pesos on me as well, because when we got to the Guatemalan border we found out it was 40 Quetzales (or 40Q) to get in.

Swarming the bus when we hit the border were all kinds of folks with fancy badges and dangling name cards to look official who were toting wads of cash. Bo and I had no idea what was going on as they told us about needing Quetzales to pay the fee to get in, and they were more than willing to change out our cash for us. The bus driver was a bit annoyed at me because I had to get up on the roof where our bags were stored this time to get at my money. Feeling rushed I pulled out $300 pesos and just changed it right there with this random border guy. I had no idea what the real exchange rate was and just figured I'd go for it.

The fee to enter turned out to only be 20Q and the rate I got from the change guy turned out to be half what he gave me. Lesson learned. As soon as we got on the internet again I made a point of writing down all the exchange rates to every currency in the area against the dollar. We also looked up which countries had entrance and exit fees, of which it turned out only Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala did. Way to hit the good ones while unprepared.

Flores, however, was gorgeous. With our brief run in with getting scammed behind us we set ourselves up in a gorgeous hostel called Mis Amigos. For the rough equivalent of $3 US each we got ourselves a spot on the floor in the common area or a hammock if we wanted it. Inside it was an open topped place with trees and fauna flourishing everywhere. There was tin roofing over where we slept, but otherwise you could look up at the stars.

It was bustling with backpackers from all over and we even ran into the Spanish girl who had been turned away in Chetumal with her friends again. The place reminded me of Rick's Cafe from Casablanca, one of my favorite movies. Bo and I decided to spend two nights there, and spent the day in between walking around the town.

Flores is actually an island in a lake that has been connected by a road to the mainland through the city of Santa Elena. The island, however, is a quaint little town that has retained its colonial look. Cobbled streets winding up and down a hill in the center and in between old buildings. We wandered around in the beginning of the day then nestled into a coffee shop by the water to play The Pirate Game some more for the afternoon.

By now Bo and I had been traveling together for about four days and I was needing to head back to Mexico for my classes. Part of the reason we went to Flores was because it was on the way to San Cristóbal in Chiapas, the southernmost state in Mexico, and the poorest. Bo still had several weeks before her school started back up again, but she also had a boyfriend she was missing back in Guadalajara. Up until this second night in Flores she was debating traveling around more to Antigua, Guatemala City, and possibly Honduras, or going home and spending her last few vacation weeks with her boif (as she called him).

That night, I booked my ticket to Palenque which would connect me to San Cristóbal, and an hour later she booked one to go with me. It left at 5am the next morning, so we both did our best to retire early for the night. When morning did come we stumbled onto the bus, threw our bags on the roof and tried to sleep through the rest of the morning.

Despite having not gotten much sleep the night before I couldn't pass out. The first hour was in the dark, but after the sun rose I couldn't keep my eyes off the landscape. In the early hours mist hung about ten feet off the ground through the jungle surrounding us. Later as it burned off by the sun these sharp hills emerged like those you'd see in National Geographic.

Around noon we got to a strange customs building to cross the border. It was strange because it was off the road a little which seemed like if we were driving our own car we could have sped right passed it. The money changers were there in force again, but this time we had come prepared with the Quetzales to pay the customs man with. As it turned out we were no where near the Mexican border.

Instead of crossing a border after paying our departure fee we were driven to a river. We all unloaded from the bus, gathered our packs, and headed down to the shore. A kid of about five or six pulled a long boat with a thatched roof around to where we were standing and on we went. Bo and I were fortunate enough to get on last so we had front row seats as we went down the river to where the Mexican border actually was.

It was a beautiful ride that was maybe a little under an hour. All along the shores were women and children doing laundry in the river. Bo had her camera so we swapped turns taking pictures of the jungle mountains around us, the thatched homes tucked away in the hills, and the folks along the shore.

Once we got out, another bus loaded us up, we went through customs, and headed off toward Palenque. While in that border town, to Bo's great annoyance, we were hit up for one more fee. It had something to do with the environment and was only $15 pesos ($1.10 US) but to Bo it was the principal that they were just taxing us to tax us and for no other reason.

The bus ride north through Chiapas was very different than the ride down the eastern Yucatan coast in Quintana Roo a few days earlier. Chiapas is known mostly for being the home of the Zapatistas, a revolutionary group in favor of the indigenous Mayans and retaining rights to their land. Along the roads the military presence was quite noticeable. Every now and again we'd pass fortified checkpoints, and at one point passed a convoy of supply trucks that were flanked front and back with trucks filled with heavily armed soldiers.

Something else Bo and I had come across in our research to get to San Cristóbal from Palenque was that taking a night bus was highly inadvisable. We read a thread online from this past August of a man warning that his bus had been robbed going through the mountains there, and that this was a common occurrence. People responding to his post talked about how it was quite frequent for pick up trucks to block the road so the bus stops, then, at knife point, will raid the passengers inside for cash or valuables. Back in Cancún, I'd also heard that it was bad enough that buses would travel in convoys of 10 or so with police escorts.

This had us rattled a bit, but, of course, when we got into Palenque and found out the next bus left at 5pm and would get in at 10pm we bought tickets anyway fully aware but with no second thought. The man with the posting had said he left San Cristóbal at 7pm, likely getting in to Palenque around midnight, and the dangers were said to be highest between Ocosingo (a halfway point between the two) and Palenque. We consoled ourselves in thinking by the time we got through Ocosingo it'd still be relatively early in the evening and not late enough to try bus banditry.

Who knows? The main point is that we got through just fine. There was no bus convoy and we were never robbed. I wouldn't say the danger isn't still there, but we were fine. Arriving high up in the mountains at 10pm, though, we were treated to a change in climate.

San Cristóbal is 2,140 meters above sea level, which is about 6,500 feet more or less. We went from shorts and t-shirts to winter coats and long pants. We also had no ideas about any hostels or where to go. It was Saturday night, and it wouldn't be until the following evening that my school would put me up with a family for the three weeks I'd be studying there. Wandering toward the center of town, however, we quickly discovered that San Cristóbal has no shortage of inexpensive, good hostels.

We booked ourselves a place in the heart of the tiny city of 86,000 people for a mere $70 pesos a piece (just under $6 US). The town spoke to me right away with its colonial look and high mix of locals and backpackers. Despite our exhaustion from the days travels we still wandered the cobbled streets and got some dinner before retiring for the night.

This was the end of my initial wander about south of the border. The next day, Sunday, I would need to meet up with the director of my school and start diving into my studies. Bo decided she would soon be heading back to Guadalajara, so I'd be losing my travel companion and translator as well. However, roaming through those three countries for my first week out of the US with Bo was definitely needed to unwind my brain and ready it to suck in a new language.