(25) Mexico City to Bacalar
Well, today is our last full day in Mexico. We entered Mexico on September 12th and will leave on October 27. Almost 7 weeks to transit the country. We’ve had a great time, but are looking forward to a change and entering Belize tomorrow. However, it’s time to catch up on our goings on since leaving Mexico City.
After a full week in Mexico City we spent the last week traveling every day. Our route was Mexico City to Cordoba to San Andres Tuxtla to Villahermosa to Palenque to Seybaplaya to Chichen Itza to where we are now in Bacalar. We arrived in Bacalar yesterday and are spending the day here mainly to get laundry done before crossing into Belize tomorrow morning.
The past week has been a lot of high speed (for us high speed is anything above 60 mph, lol) highway riding to try and make up for some of the extra unplanned time we spent in Puerto Vallarta, Melaque and Mexico city. Getting out of Mexico City was fairly straight forward. There were only a couple of crazy intersections we had to navigate before getting on the toll road toward our first night destination in Cordoba. One thing we were not expecting was to climb when leaving the city. Mexico City is at 7,300 feet in elevation and the first hour or so of our ride out saw us climbing over a pass before dropping down a bit. It was our first cold start to a day in quite a while. I’m not sure how high we got but the bikes definitely noticed the altitude as we had a significant drop in power due to the thin air. We have seen that before on the trip especially in some of the passes we went over in Colorado, so it didn’t worry us any.
Our only problem on the way to Cordoba was the second pass we had to cross just before dropping into the city. We hit some of the worst fog I’ve ever seen for about a half an hour going over the pass summit. Visibility was down to about 30 feet. All I could do was either follow the semi truck tail lights in front of me or go slow enough to see the white shoulder marker line to know how to stay on the road. This is the main highway between Veracruz, on the coast, and Mexico City. So it is very heavily trafficked with tractor trailer rigs as well as cars and trucks. My biggest fear coming down was someone hitting us from behind given how slow we had to go. Not only did the fog make seeing difficult, but our helmet visors had water condense on the inside of the visor where we couldn’t wipe it off and made seeing that much more difficult. While is was not really raining, the fog had enough moisture we were in our rain gear and the roadway was totally wet. All in all an experience we were glad to have gotten through once we came out underneath the clouds and were able to get off the road and wipe our visors off so we could see again.
I will do a description of general riding/driving in Mexico later in this update but coming into Cordoba gave us a chance to ride like the locals. There is a tool booth just at the edge of town and the line of cars and trucks was well over a mile long trying to get through. So rather than wait our turn we did like every other motorcyclist in Mexico would and just rode on the shoulder past as many trucks as we could. That is until we came to a bridge and had to change from riding on the shoulder of the road to riding on the sidewalk across the bridge to the front of the line. We were not the only motorcycles doing this and no one batted and eye when we merged into line up at the front. One of the rules of riding in Mexico appears to be that motorcycles do what they want.
Upon leaving Mexico City we really only had two goals before crossing into Belize. Those were to see the Mayan ruins at Palenque and Chichen Itza. We hit Palenque first and given it’s location it’s much less touristed than Chichen Itza. The Palenque ruins are not nearly as fully excavated as Chizhen Itza but it’s a huge complex and it was nice to be able to leisurely stroll around the grounds and just take in the temples. Chichen Itza on the other hand has some incredible temples, especially the main one as you enter and the ball court. However, it’s proximity to Cancun and Playa Del Carmen means that it is absolutely packed with tourists. Unfortunately, even worse than the tourists is the fact that every pathway is lined with hawkers all selling the same things and haranguing you as you walk by to buy their trinkets. Should you ever get the chance to visit one or the other site I would recommend Palenque any day over Chichen Itza. The other problem was that Chichen Itza was expensive. About $50 each for admission. Definitely not worth the money in my opinion, even if the ruins are spectacular. I’ll upload pictures of both sites in the gallery.
While in Palenque we ran into Bob, who we rode across from Baja to the mainland on the ferry with, again. He was staying at a campground just down the road from our hotel and come over for dinner and a couple beers. It was good to see him and there is a reasonable chance we’ll see him again as we are heading in the same general direction. In Chichen Itza, the town we stayed in is actually called Pisté, I made contact with Serge again. He is the Canadian guy we traveled with for a few days in Baja. We decided to meet up in Bacalar, where we are now, and cross into Belize together. Since we hadn’t seen Serge in a while we decided to celebrate last night and between the three of us we finished off the bottle of tequila that Neil bought when we did the distillery tour.
I really like Bacalar. It’s a nice little resort town on a big lagoon. Today Neil and I rented bicycles from the hotel and rode them out to one of the local swimming holes. It was a fun way to spend part of the day. Now we’re back with time to kill. So I figured it’s time to update the site and wait until our laundry comes back. We were anticipating needing to take laundry into down to be done, but the hotel has a sign that they do laundry for 30 Pesos per kilo. If we have 3 kilos of clothes between us I’d be surprised. Getting our laundry done for about $5 US seems like a deal to us. After that, it’s just get ready and make the crossing into Belize tomorrow. Tomorrow will be a very short day as far as riding goes. We have a reservation at a hotel in Corozal, Belize. It’s only about 50km from here. So even with a border crossing there is no need for us to get moving too early tomorrow. Plans are still evolving for Belize, but I’ll update that in my next post.
