Travelogue: San Cristobal, Mexico to San Pedro, Guatemala

I left San Cristobal with two new traveling buddies, Jaime and Ciaran (pronounced Kai-Ron). Jaime is an Australian pilot mucking around for a bit in Latin America and Ciaran is an Irish unemployed young-professional like myself, also just wandering a bit.

We decided to ignore the direct-route buses and cobble together our own way to Guatemala in the interest of cheapness and adventure. A few evenings ago we took a bus to the border town of Ciudad Cuauhtemoc, arriving around 9:00 pm to find a town that consists of a few blocks of homes, buildings dedicated to Mexican customs/immigration, and a dingy restaurant/trucker motel/bus station. We inquired about crossing the 4km no man's land to the Guatemalan border town, where we had heard there is a small guesthouse, and were told in no uncertain terms that we shouldn't go anywhere unless we wanted to be robbed. The Guatemalan border and Guatemala itself is notorious for being extremely dangerous at night, so we decided for safety's sake to spend the night and cross in the morning.

The "motel" consisted of a few rooms that were all more or less connected. We took one with two beds because it had a door that closed and decided to try and drum up some food and beers to calm us down. We skittered across the street nervously towards the lights of a taco cart and spoke with the nice family operating it. We didn't have trouble here or when we bought beers, but a certain sense of lawlessness pervaded the dark town and we were definitely on edge and on guard. We were sitting out on a balcony drinking beers when we saw one of the girls from the hotel open our door with a man in tow. The three of us jumped up and ran in to see what was happening, and, once cleared up, found that she was just showing him a room and made a mistake. Still nervous, we watched the man from the balcony as he wandered up the street and wandered back drinking a beer. He walked up the stairs with a big suitcase and, feeling a little more confident, I decided to feel him out by starting a conversation about his Texas Longhorns hat.

Turns out he's from Mexico City and driving to pick up his fiancee in Honduras so they can get married. We get to chatting and, after seeing that our destination is on his way, he offers to give us a ride. The next morning we rose about 6:30 AM, but soon found out that, because I had not received a receipt of payment for my Mexican entry fee, I would have to pay it again, and could not do so until 8 AM. We had breakfast at a local comedor (brick hovel eatery, mice scurrying on the floor) until 8, took care of my business and proceeded on our way. We drove through the no man's land, where people actually live, and arrived at the Guatemalan crossing, which, despite the early hour, was quite chaotic with money changers, vendors, officials, and non-officials clamoring about the dusty streets. The border was nothing more than a crude boom-gate and it did not seem to me that anyone would have cared if we had just walked across. Paid, stamped, and cleared, we headed into Guatemala. Guatemala's roads, while paved, are rare. From this border town to the Capital there is only one main road, so everything from tuk-tuks to semi's to motorbikes to sports cars uses it. Our new friend Javier flew, weaving around the slow truckers, sometimes blindly passing on curves, but always seeming more or less in control. He spoke a little bit of English so we all were able to chat along the way and found him to be a really nice, enjoyable guy with an interesting story (to come). The only bad part was when we ran over a stray dog that, confused by the horns, ran right into our left-front tire. I cringed, but Javier didn't flinch.

We arrived at the town of Panajachel, on the shores of beautiful Lake Atitlan, in the early afternoon and bid farewell to Javier before boarding a water-taxi to the supposedly delightful hamlet of San Pedro La Laguna.