9th April 2015 – Lake Atitlan to San Cristobal de las Casas in Mexico

Today we have a 400 kilometer drive to our overnight destination of San Cristobal de las Casas in Mexico. We leave the lake at 6:30 am as the border crossing could take us a while, apparently it is renowned for being disorganized.ÿ ÿWe drive on a winding hilly dual lane highway and climb to 3,000 meters above sea level. The road narrows to a single lane road that winds through small villages, each one having a speed hump every 100 meters, some of them catching us out and nearly putting us through the roof, others we scrape over, even when we are crawling over in 1st gear. We drop down through a steep gorge before arriving at the Mexican border after 5 hours of driving. On the Guatemala side off the border there are stalls selling clothes, shoes, curtains, food and more. Between the oncoming traffic, pedestrians and vendors there’s not much room to squeeze through, it’s chaotic. Exiting Guatemala goes smoothly and we then move on into Mexico and do our immigration, then the cars need to be sprayed and we travel about 4 km down the road to do the customs for the cars. After a total of 3.5 hours we have 6 cars through with just 1 car to go. It’s decided that 4 cars head off to the hotel while RIP, Shiraz (now nicknamed rough red with its dented mud guard) and Navy car remain at the border. 3.5 hours later the remaining 3 cars take off in the fading light for San Cristobal which is 180 kilometers and it’s now 7:30 pm. Before long it’s dark so we are very grateful for the upgraded halogen headlights and halogen spot lights on Shiraz. We stop in a town for a fast food feed and get back on the road after a short break. The drive is a mixture of divided and single lane roads through dark countryside and small towns. There are many speed humps on the road coming into San Cristobal and when we get close to the town centre there are cars and people everywhere. The street the GPS is telling us to take to get to our hotel is blocked at the main square so we have to start detouring and working our way around the one way streets. There is a festival of some sort going on in town.ÿ By now it’s 11:30pm we’re all tired and we can’t find the hotel, so Michael and Dave go on foot and work out where the hotel is and how we can get to it with the one way streets. We drive around, check in and collapse into bed at midnight, the rest of our group are all tucked up in bed.