After driving a tanker full of sand out of an oil refinery compound with people dressed in Ice Hockey gear, I found myself wondering through the desert towards a town ruled by Tina Turner…. Oh wait that’s Mad Max (II & III) not my life….
Right so we’ve spent about 9 hours on the crappy bus or King Quality as it is advertised . Driver was a legend bus was shite. We know we are getting close to Tapachula and we are getting pretty excited. We go round this corner and down into this valley into this small crazily busy little town. The driver tells us to get out as this is Immigration., well everyone bundled out of the bus and when I asked drives what was going on he pointed to the immigration sign. We dutifully listen to drives and jump out with our passports. We are met by about 25 Guatemalan guys who are shouting and waving wads of pesos in our faces and asking if we want to change dollars to pesos. We decline and line up at the immigration window, as we do, we turn round to see our coach disappear. Now we had no idea if this Tapachula or Mexico or what was going on. We stuck our head against the window used our pigeon Spanish paid some money and then legged in the general direction of the bus. We saw our bus about 200m up the road and Drives unloading our stuff. We were thinking, are we here? What the f**k is going on? Drives informed us that we had to carry our stuff across the border. When I say informed he pointed in the general direction said something in Spanish that neither of us understood. We still did not know if this was Tapachula or not. We head towards the border with all these kids trying to blag money off us for carrying our stuff. Well being the international savvy traveller I am I leave my bags with the street urchins pay 50c thinking that my bags will be safe as houses!! And to be fair the bags were safe and it went smooth, but the whole time we had to fill out our forms I had visions of kilos of cocaine being rapidly stuffed into my board bag, it wasn’t. So we grab our bags from the honest street urchins and head through the border, now this part of crossing borders in Central America is great, you all line up and get to press a button as you go over the border, if it goes green your home free, if it goes red you get your bags emptied out and stuff rummaged through.. We’ve been green every time!!
Right ok im waffling now, the rest of the journey is arriving at Tapachula, drinking for 5 hours and eating spicy beef and beans (bad idea ahead of 13 hours on a bus), then on another bus for 13 hours over night to Peurto Escondido, multiple stops and being searched by army people, then arriving in peurto Escondido….
By Stuff
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