To Mexico: There and Back Again

We headed out for the Mexican border on Thursday morning at 7am. We were driven by Gino, who has worked for the parish for over 20 years. We took his small 1970's car. Supposedly if a Guatemalan owns their own car, they can get 72 hour passes into Mexico. We planned to head to San Cristobal in Chiapas, Mexico - about 2 hours inside the border.


Road trip!

Clara tests out her carseat.

We made it to the border after about 7 hours of winding roads through the highlands of Western Guatemala. At the highest point of the journey Gino told us that they call that part of the country "Alaska" because its so cold.

At the border we found ourselves in a bustling town called La Mesilla. We came up to the customs building and I headed in with Gino while Lois and Clara waited in the car. It turned out that Gino could cross the border with his car, but only if he stayed in the town on the other side of the border, he wasn't going to be able to travel. I guess we were supposed to pay a bribe at this point too, but we had already decided that we weren't going to do that. So now what? I asked the customs officer how long we had to stay in Mexico before coming back for a renewed visa. He asked why we needed to come back so soon - when I explained that we had a 4 month old in the car, that our driver couldn't continue, and that we were volunteers and preferred not to travel anyway, he said, "Just head over to Mexico, get your stamp, pay your exit tax, and come on back. Thanks for being a volunteer."

So we did just that. Between the two customs areas there was about 2 miles of road, so Gino was able to drive us into Mexico, where we filled out our customs forms, got our stamps, went back to the end of the line, waited, and then paid our "exit" tax, got an exit stamp, and back we went to Guatemala. Our 20 minutes in Mexico.

(A quick aside - the only other time I've been to Mexico was about 5 years ago when I accidently ended up in Mexico City while trying to get to Bolivia - long story. Regardless I flew in from Miami, had some problems in customs and with my seat on my connecting flight, and ended up flying back to Miami after about 8 hours. If the Mexico government ever were to look into my travel history, they might wonder at my reasons for visiting them.)


We made it!

By the time we got everything arranged and stamped and paid, it was about 3:30pm - so we drove back as far as Huehuetenango, spent the night in a hotel, and eventually made it to San Lucas at about noon yesterday with another 90 days of legal immigration.