On Thursday morning, we left San Cristóbal de las Casas and headed towards Palenque. It was a long day on the road with close to five hours of riding on what was the worst road we have encountered in Mexico and a lunch stop in Ocosingo.
The road from San Cristóbal de las Casas to Palenque was a bumpy one with giant potholes, broken parts with gravel, some parts where the road had fallen off (literally), and speed bumps… SO MANY SPEED BUMPS. In case I haven’t mentioned this before, Mexico has an annoying number of speed bumps or topes all over the place and in places where they don’t always make sense. Take for example, a mountain road outside cities and with lots of curves don’t need speed bumps, but there they are.
Let’s not even talk about within cities. I’ve learnt not to consume any dairy before a long trip so that should tell you enough. I am convinced that someone with a lot of time to spare managed to acquire a large amount of concrete and then decided to travel all around the country, putting speed bumps in random places just for a good laugh.
The other issue along this route were the people that live in the little villages along this route don’t seem to have any qualms about testing the patience of travellers passing through. There was a car in front of us that was stopped by a group of young men that threw a wooden plank with protruding nails in front of the car. We were not able to decipher what exchange took place between the men and the driver, but the plank was removed and the car drove on. We were expecting to be stopped by the plank next; however, the men smiled and waved us through so we were on our way.
There were also many children along the way, pulling ropes in front of vehicles in an attempt to stop them so they could try to sell things. We were fortunate to have another car in front of us when we came across the first group of kids who did this and were sure to spot them from afar along our journey and gesture protests before they could do this to us. Thankfully, they complied because I’m not sure how much patience we could have exercised if their actions caused us to fall on a bad road with the loaded bike.
Despite the aforementioned occurrences, we made it to Palenque without a hitch. This time we had booked a room at the Hotel Ciudad Real for 887 pesos (~60.37 CAD) a night because we decided that we didn’t want any surprises after a long and tiring day of riding, and we were happy with our decision. A nice and clean hotel that was much nicer than the price would have you believe was just what the doctor ordered.
Also, we didn’t take any pictures along our route because all we wanted to do was to just get through. We probably should have taken a picture of the part where half of the road had fallen off. Oh well, such is life. You can look at the spider monkey from the Sumidero Canyon instead. He’s more fun 🙂
