Border crossing: a most unusual day

I have to say I have never done a border crossing by boat! But more of that later!

We leave in the dark and the surrounding hills are covered in mist as we drive towards Guatemala. José is our guide; the driver's name I did not catch. José is from a family of 12 - his mother was a 'healer'. He learned his English selling postcards alongside the road.

We drive through villages in the semi-darkness: very simple dwellings, very poor. People are standing by the roadside, waiting for a bus. There are banana plantations. Speed humps in every village - serious ones; our driver is very cautious and we are very grateful.

One village we pass through there is a military checkpoint and our guide José says this because of the drug dealers coming across from Guatemala. But he says you can't tell the difference between the dealers and the police because they have colluded and the dealers have uniforms and even better weapons than the police! He says this road we are on is said to be the best in the state of Chiapas because it has been paid with drug money. He points to the trucks coming in the opposite direction to us from Guatemala and he says they transport cattle, pigs etc. and that the drugs are put in the stomachs of the animals.

This is in fact EZLN territory: the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, a revolutionary group comprised of largely indigenous Mayans whose 1994 uprising was quickly put down by the Mexican army.

The mist continues - I don't think we'll see a sunrise. It is about 7 a.m. We encounter kids walking along the road to school. Men with tools like machetes are walking to work. Dogs, chickens skitter through yards. Some of the dogs even sleep unperturbed in the middle of the road! These test the skills of our driver who carefully negotiates his way around them - the dog is respected here. They are used in these parts to hunt armadillo (not permitted by UNESCO elsewhere in Mexico. 'Here, no rules apply' says José).

The sun breaks weakly through the mist. We stop about 8:30 a.m. at Frontera Corazol which is the Mexican side of the border; here we have our passports processed for exiting Mexico. We pay 500 Mexican pesos, not the 400 we were told. This took us down to almost no pesos - enough for the driver and the boat man only and so I had to pay José his tip in $US.

Next, we take a dugout canoe with outboard motor from the embarcadero (boat launch) at the nearby 'resort' of Escudo Jaguar along the river Usumacinta that marks the border between México and Guatemala to the archaelogical site of Yaxchilàn. The 25 km boat ride is very pleasant and we see a few crocodiles along the way.

Yaxchilán is an ancient Maya city accessible only by the river. We were somewhat 'over' Mayan ruins by now but the jungle setting definitely makes this site very special - it is quite beautiful. As José says, Chiapas is the most attractive state in Mexico (it used to belong to Guatemala) but he says 'the US took Texas from Mexico, so we took Chiapas'!!

We return by our boat back to Escudo Jaguar where we had a nice lunch - tacos with diced tomatoes and onions (so fresh!) plus vegetable soup then delicious grilled chicken and salad then sliced fresh fruit. I declined and just ate tidbits off My Friend's plate. He had already eaten his sandwich provided by the hotel; I still had mine to go.

Then back in the little dugout boat for a 30-minute spin upstream (past women washing clothes on the riverbank) and we were greeted by Eduardo our next 'guide' (he didn't guide so much as manage the transfer on the opposite side of the river).

We are now in Guatemala! Our new driver Tomas drives us a short way to migracion (this is Bethel on the Guatemalan side of the border).

What a hoot! If I could have taken a photo I would have. The 'office' was a small room with 3 girls who were having lunch on a sofa watching the TV. When we appeared, one disappeared and called out to someone, came back through, went into an adjoining room, brought out a carefully folded white uniform top from off a bed and went back outside. Soon after, a man appeared with a towel wrapped around his waist and white (aforesaid) shirt on. He sat at the computer near the window we were standing at and processed our passports. That was it - although we had to borrow 20 quetzals from the driver!

It was now after 1 p.m. and we took a bone-jarring drive along an unsealed road for 64 kms with potholes the size of craters which had Tomas driving from side to side to avoid them. We travelled 35-40 kms/hr. This part of the trip was rural: cattle, corn, papayas, large haciendas.

We finally hit tarmac a bit before 3 p.m. and then had a break while the boys ate their (late) lunch. A truck pulls up at the service station - it is not full of animals, but people!! And a station wagon arrives loaded up with at least 10 people!

At Las Cruces (we are in the state of Petén in northern Guatemala), we stop so we can change some Guatemala money - the quetzal; for the conversion we now need to work with 7.5 (we are converting $US). It makes the $US-Mexican peso transfer look very easy (divide by 20) but at least we now don't have to deal with wads of notes!; the Mexican peso is a bit like the Italian lira of old! The exchange at the bank involves a careful checking of the US notes: the girl straightened out imaginary creases and then put the notes into a scanner looking for signs of counterfeit.

By about 4:30 p.m., signs are pointing to Tikal, our destination.

We pass Lake Petén Itzá, the 2nd biggest lake in Guatemala. Later, as we get closer to our destination, it is less rural, although still interspersed with jungle, lots of tiendas (like corner stores), kids gathered together home from school.

It is 6 p.m. by the time we get into our Jungle Lodge at Tikal having travelled about 205 kms since Bethel on the border.