Cycling days 67-70: Entering Guatemala
Trip Start
Apr 07, 2010
1
59
120
Trip End
Jan 19, 2012
San Cristóbal Totonicapán, Totonicapán, Guatemala
Friday, February 25, 2011
We leave El Hostalito in San Cristobal de las Casas at 9:30am. There is a bit of hill climbing to get out of the city. We are enjoying the morning riding until Yannick witnesses a dog getting run over by a car. Luckily Shirley didn't see it happen or she would have been way more traumatized than Yannick was. What disturbed him most about the incident was that the dog was just walking across the street with cars coming in both directions and it didn’t even acknowledge the traffic. The other strange thing is that there was a speed bump in the road, so all the vehicles were driving 10km/h at most. The dog just walked right into a slow moving car…it didn’t yelp or moan, it just lay there twitching. Yannick wished he had a gun or something to put it out of its misery. As we stood on the side of the road trying to make sense out of what just happened and watching cars drive around the dog lying in the highway, the man working at the tienda moved the dog off the road and into the bushes.
We continue riding and try to think about other things such as how beautiful the scenery is, how nice the temperature is, and about our border crossing into Guatemala tomorrow! The road is mostly flat with a good amount of downhill, so we cover over 100km today. We’re about 80km from the border and if all goes well, this will be our last night in Mexico!
Day 68 (2/23/11): 98km
We get up early and start riding at 7:30am – we want to make sure to have plenty of time for today’s border crossing just in case we run into problems along the way. Thankfully, the riding is easy and we cover 50km by 10:30am. By 11am, we cross through Mexico’s immigration office without any trouble. Now, we ride 4km uphill to the Guatemalan border. Geez, that’s steep! We arrive at the immigration office dripping with seat and it takes us a little while to catch our breath. The border town of La Mesilla is crowded with people and we don’t want to leave our bicycles and gear unattended, so we decide to go through immigration one at a time. Yannick goes in first while Shirley waits outside to keep an eye on the bikes. He returns in about 20 minutes with his passport successfully stamped with a 90-day visa. A kid sitting next to the bicycles and staring at them the whole time made Shirley a little wary, so Yannick keeps a close eye on him while Shirley goes into the office. She expects to be asked a few general questions like Yannick did, but nope…nada. The officer smiles as he takes her passport and gives it to another officer behind a desk. He swipes it into his computer and stamps it. In 15 minutes, Shirley has her passport back with barely a word spoken. She steps back outside into the heat and Yannick tells her that the thermometer on the bike computer reached 49 degrees Celsius sitting out in the sun. It’s now 1pm and we search for a bank to change our leftover pesos to Guatemalan Quetzals, but they only want to change US dollars…ugh. Yannick walks back down the street to change the pesos with one of the many guys standing around with wads of cash in their hands who kept asking "Change money?" Quetzals (and buying power) in-hand, we ride out of town with the temperature reading 44 degrees Celsius. We ride uphill for a few kilometers and start through the mountains that form a natural border between the two countries. We thought we would be in for a really hilly and twisty climb through these mountains, but are pleasantly surprised by the gradual grade of the road following a river running though a steep-walled valley. Amazingly, the scenery makes a dramatic change from Mexico to Guatemala – here, the vegetation is very green, jungley, and dense. As we ride along admiring the view, we find ourselves saying hello and waving back at people every few minutes. The people are so friendly and excited to see us pedaling by on our bicycles!
So many curious people…everywhere! Since the border, there hasn’t been a break between towns…a continuous line of houses along the highway, which makes us really worried about finding a place to sleep tonight. We might have to ask someone if we can sleep in their yard. Some clouds have been shielding us from the direct sun, but we’re still suffering from the heat and feeling really dirty from sweating so much, so when we see a shower of water dripping from the canyon wall, we can’t help but take advantage of it to wash and cool off. Now, it’s 5:15pm and time to start seriously looking for camp. Right when Yannick says, “The other side of the canyon would be great for camping” (but it’s on the other side of the river), the road begins to turn and a bridge appears…crossing over the river! We take a dirt side-trail and find a perfectly flat, camouflaged place to sleep. We can’t believe our luck sometimes – the only campable, private spot we’ve seen since entering Guatemala at the perfect time…and just after we took a refreshing shower! Feels so good to go to bed not feeling sticky :)
Day 69 (2/24/11): 88km
The road climbs and drops steeply throughout the day, passing next to clusters of houses that seem like villages, but don’t have road signs indicating their names. At times we pass by small tiendas selling snacks and junk food, but the heat is making us crave fresh fruit, which doesn’t seem to be readily available this early in the morning. At midday, we finally pass a substantial city (Huehuetepec) and stop inside the grocery store to resupply our food bags. Yannick goes inside and takes a long time getting his bearings – a new country, new currency, and different products makes this round of grocery shopping complicated. He walks around the store and picks up what we need, but doesn’t really like the prices. We heard/read Guatemala is supposed to be cheaper than Mexico, but we aren’t feeling it. Filling our fuel bottle at the gas station also cost a lot more than we expected. Along the road, there are guys selling gasoline in gallon jugs at a cheaper price than at proper gas stations – Yannick is curous about how they are able to do this and one guy tells him that they go to Mexico and buy the gas because it’s cheaper there. Hmm…cheaper in Mexico…so we aren’t doing our math wrong and aren’t that crazy for thinking we’re still spending about the same amount of money since crossing the border. We speculate the price breaks are probably for lodging, public transportation, and restaurants…things we haven’t yet taken advantage of.
Although prices haven’t really changed, other things have. Drivers are more aggressive here and give us much less room as they pass at full speed. And most of the time their honk isn’t a, “hello, good going guys!” but rather, “I’m coming and you better get out of my way!” We also see more signs partially written in English, more American brands/companies than in Mexico and the people in Guatemala throw out whatever English they know at us as we ride by. Some phrases are, “Goodbye,” “Hey, what’s up!” “Keep going,” and “Good morning.” We also hear the very popular word “Gringo!!!” yelled out at us. Usually, it’s a couple little kids excitedly shouting “gringo” and waving at us, so it doesn’t bother us much, but when an adult says it in a condescending way, it’s a little hard to shrug off sometimes. Those moments are easily overshadowed by heartwarming encounters with other people though. For instance, today a man came down from his house and waved us down to give us three oranges. It meant a lot to us because we could tell he really didn’t have much, but still went out of his way to give something to us. As we stood there talking to him for a little while, we could immediately tell he had a good soul – he is a happy person with an easy smile. Moments like that re-energize us and give us something nice to think about as we suffer up steep hills in sweltering heat. We make it to 2,600m in elevation by the end of the day, setting up our tent behind some trees, next to an abandoned house. Not the quietest spot, but it’s the best thing we’ve seen all afternoon.
Day 70 (2/25/11): 31km
We wake up early and as we pack up, a 62 year-old man with a machete comes by our camp on his way to chop firewood along the hillsides. We talk to him for about 15 minutes and as he is about to leave, he asks for a “regalo.” We don’t understand what he’s asking, so we look it up in the dictionary. Hmm, he’s asking for a gift. We find this a little strange that he’s being so forward and asking if we have a gift for him, but figure we’ve been chatting for a while, so we reach into our bags and give him some cookies and chips.
We hop on our bicycles and ride down the road an easy 31km to San Cristobal Totonicapan. When we get to the city, we search for Jesse’s place (from CouchSurfing). As we wait for him at the Municipal, we start talking to the local reporters. When Jesse arrives, they all decide it would be nice to do an interview with us to help promote tourism to San Cris, talk about our trip, and ask questions about MedShare. Afterwards, we walk with Jesse to his place to drop off the bicycles and gear, meet Mega (another CouchSurfer), then take a walk to one of the waterfalls nearby to pick up trash and collect plastic bottles for one of the projects he’s working on.
In the evening, as we hang out at Jesse’s place, we find out another couple of touring cyclists are in town. We go chat with Florent and Aurelie for a couple of hours and find out they have roughly the same itinerary as us – bicycle South to Ushuaia with the intent of making it to Peru and Bolivia in time for the climbing season along the way. So, we might see them again somewhere down the road!
We head back to Jesse’s place where Stuart, Nick, Amanda are all hanging out and preparing for tomorrow’s hike up Tajumulco, the highest peak in Central America.
