Mexico - Yucatan Peninsula and out

From Merida, we carried on to Campeche.  This is a UNESCO city and it is indeed very nice.  The Old Town center is still made up of colonial style buildings, all of them painted in their own colour.  We had a seafood meal in a traditional restaurant, complete with Mexican guitar players serenading the diners with typical Mexican songs.  No, not mariachi – that wouldn’t go well with a cosy dinner setting!

After spending time looking around, we started collecting local views on the wisdom of driving around Mexico.  It turns out that it can be done, in limited areas and during daylight hours only.  Then they told us that nobody local ever does it anymore, all internal Mexican travel is done by plane.  As Yucatan is safe if you apply normal travel caution, we decided that leaving the nice part to go to where you constantly have to look over your shoulder wouldn’t be a nice experience.  In addition, we have had positive dealings with police in all the countries where we have been.  So we decided to leave Mexico, and look for a way back to Guatemala.

The advice was to go via Belize!  Back the same way we arrived.  It would take days, and we really didn’t want go back to places where we had already been.  We agreed to go via El Ceibo, the shortest road distance to any border crossing from Campeche and perhaps the one with the lowest rating of being dangerous.  As we left the Peninsula and encountered police from different areas, our experience changed.  We were stopped and had to bribe our way forward.  Now we were sure we did the right thing to change the plan and leave Mexico, even if we drove through Tabasco to get to El Ceibo.

We saw the Gulf of Mexico before we turned away inland.

We spent the last night in Tenosique.  Driving from there to the border was through one of the most beautiful natural environments we have seen.  Magical!  It was still stressful as we weren’t supposed to drive through small, lonely roads and we had to as it was the only option.

The crossing itself was smooth, there were almost nobody crossing.  It felt good to be back in Central America.