Flores to San Cristobal de Las Casas

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Well, being up around 0500hrs has gotten unfortunately common. Today we were looking to head back into Mexico from Flores, Guatemala. Being up this early allowed us to catch up with Jon, a dutch guy doing a border run to reset his visa. We tagged along on his coat tails since it sounded like he'd done this before. We wanted originally to cross at near Bethel and do a river border crossing, but Jon was crossing at El Ceibo so we went along with it. During the long bus ride we learned Jon had opened a surf school on the pacific coast of Guatemala and it had only been open three weeks. It was cool hearing about all the stuff he had to go through to get it going. Anyways, we were able to take a bus from Santa Elena towards El Naranjo; the bus let us out at the intersection to El Ceibo and the border. Thankfully we only had a short wait in the sun for the shuttle to El Ceibo.

The border was simple. It had rather a good looking shopping area on the Guatemala side where Jon got a bite to eat and had some trouble getting money out. Since we'd recently experienced it ourselves we had no problem lending him some cash for buses etc. The border control on the Guatemala side was a small trailer; on the Mexico side it was a huge structure with loads of space for trucks and all kinds of stuff. We thought it looked very similar to one of the major crossings between Canada and the U.S., but only on one side.

We walked a little way from the border to find a bus and were dismayed when they gave us the departure time. Though we were happy when it turned out we had crossed a timezone (Mexico observes Summer/Winter times) and only had a half hour wait instead. From El Ceibo we caught the bus to Tenosique de Pino Suarez, not all the way to Palenque as we'd originally hoped. Fortunately we had a ballin' bus driver who, instead of kicking us out in the center of town with no idea where to catch the next bus, drove us to the other bus. It was a good 10 minute drive so it would have been a pain to try and get there on our own, and as it was we only got there with about 10 minutes to spare. That bus got us the rest of the way to Palenque which was nice and, having been there only a few months before we knew where to stay and where to get food. Jon was still having trouble with his bank card and called his bank in the morning and got it sorted out. We weren't really worried about it either way (other than he wanted to buy our GTQ off of us and we didn't want to find another place to exchange) since we'd lent him about the equivalent of CAD10 for the whole trip and a friend once passed on some wise advice, "Don't lend money you can't afford to part with."

We were only in Palenque one night before redoing the collectivo trip to San Cristobal de Las Casas.

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