Seeing Mexico by public bus

Latin America — By Bob Riel on November 30, 2006 at 7:30 am

The most recent Washington Post travel section carried a fun story by Ben Brazil about a journey he and his wife took through southern Mexico, entirely on their own and via public transportation.

For nearly a week, my new wife, Laura, and I had been traveling Mexico’s Carretera Fronteriza del Sur — the Southern Border Highway — a 262-mile route that hugs the border between Guatemala and Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. We had climbed the Maya pyramids at Palenque, studied the ancient frescoes at Bonampak and taken a sunrise boat to the riverside ruins of Yaxchilan, where howler monkeys roared from the treetops.

Between ruins, we visited a shaman, forded a jungle river and hitched a ride with a cool 43-year-old Mexican hippie and his hot 24-year-old Swedish girlfriend. …

If you just want to see the highlights, scads of tour operators in Palenque and San Cristobal de las Casas — Chiapas’s main tourist hubs — sell reasonably priced package tours. But we wanted to see the whole highway on an unscripted journey open to chance encounters and random weirdness. As such, we opted to travel on public transportation and eschew reservations, following an itinerary so vague that it verged on impressionist art. …

I loved the do-it-yourself approach, but it’s not fast, efficient or even marginally luxurious. Almost no full-size buses serve the remote border area, so travelers rely on combis — vans and microbuses that comfortably accommodate about 15 passengers. In practice, this means that “full” combis carry up to 25 passengers, and often their poultry. It can get tight.

It’s not recommended travel for everyone, but it’s a fun read.