Road to Yaxchilan, Sunday 13^th September

Last night after something to eat it started raining so we stayed in the bar sheltering from the rain. We took a short respite from refreshments to visit the local church on a hill where a wedding was taking place so no photos there. But there was a photo shot opportunity with a modern Bocho starring Zoe and Clare before it started raining again and so we sheltered from the rain…again in a bar.

Sunday morning was an early start to take the long road north via Palenque to Yaxchilan, a long way, through mountains on twisting roads and steep gradients. After driving for nearly three hours and seeing the sun come up, we stopped at a restaurant.

Nothing remarkable about that but the signs outside were ones that I had seen a few times. The caption on the left says that parking is reserved for clients of the restaurant and the caption on the right is a stronger warning than back home announcing a car towing area, roughly translated as ‘we puncture tyres for free’.  

We were making reasonable time but one feature of this road was the number of speed bumps. They were not just on the outskirts of towns but were liberally scattered all along the road, seemingly at random but in some quantity. I challenge anyone to come up with a road that has more speed bumps on it anywhere in the world than Route 186 north out of San Cristobel. We had taken five hours to travel just 160kms.

We took a longer break at Aqua Azul, a series of picturesque waterfalls and local beauty spot just off the main roads.

We stopped for food shopping in Palenque and then continued south east to wards Yaxchilan. The scenery changed to lowland hills as we travelled up a river valley with the river which marks the border between Mexico and Guatemala just a few kilometres to our left.

The weather was warmer and humid and we saw banana and date plantations at the road side which was special to me and brought back memories as I had worked on plantations many years ago. Progress was still slow partly for yet more speed bumps but also livestock on the road.

The border area is farmed but there is little traffic and we managed 125kms in three hours. We stopped for a break in the middle of nowhere as there were few villages to stop at. This was definitely jungle with the sounds of crickets, howler monkeys in the distance, vines hanging from all sorts of tall broad leaved trees and palms plus the sounds of unfamiliar birds shrieking, twitting and hooting.

We had survived bear country, moose, scorpion and rattlesnake country; now we had to be careful of crocodiles in and around water, snakes in the grass, panthers and jaguars behind bushes and spiders in the trees.

We found our lodgings for the night, a pleasant hotel on the river. We didn’t have rooms and it was too hot for tents so we spread ourselves out on the open top floor of the hotel under a palm frond roof. Being the rainy season it rained that evening but we were nice and dry plus no wet tents to put away in the morning.

 Plus a local taxi, a tuk ruk which I couldn't resist adding.