Walking from Guatemala to Chiapas - Travelling to the border

Travelling freely in Guatemala can be more challenging than in any other part of South or Central America. Withdrawing money here is a disaster we had never seen before: our cards work on one out of twenty cash machines and the commission they charge us “foreigners” is daylight robbery!

Moreover the geographical features, ancient volcanoes concealed by the forests that have grown over them, often make the roads impassable and almost impossible to travel on. The agencies that organise tours offer the usual, predictable itineraries you can find anywhere: we avoid them completely and savour the new things here, immersing ourselves in our journey. As usual, we rely on personal contact with people to receive genuine help.

We prepare our rucksacks after a lovely cup of hot chocolate, meticulously calculating the times and anticipating all possible hitches such as strikes, flooding and erratic transport.

From the window of our Mitsubishi, poverty becomes apparent in the cramped local infrastructure. The convenient connections between the few major rivers that cross this wild country are remote as the Western mentality, which here disappears under the traffic used to press and recycle aluminium cans near humps in the roads. These are  “also” used to slow down the speed of some of the car drivers with no rules or respect for other people’s lives: the system is so effective that many families take advantage of this expedient as a free source of income.

The journey continues with the running commentary of a local football match at full blast, which brings a smile to people’s faces and generates discussions inside the minibus. In the meantime, stifling hot air enters uncontrollably through the windows along with large clouds of dust.

In between jolts in the road and the inquisitive stares from those who look at us as though we were from another planet, we take the opportunity to check our maps and read a book.

In Guatemala there aren’t many watercourses but there are a lot of barges that travel back and forwards between the riverbanks transporting buses, mopeds, shipments of rice, coffee, fruit and even buses of huge proportions.

The time we spend waiting for our turn in a thirty-five degree subtropical, humid climate is never-ending, but in the end we manage to get going again. Every kilometre we stop and pick up and drop off crowds of people carrying chickens, children, bags of groceries, cardboard boxes with so many sorts of food you would have thought they were refugees; happy people, accustomed to having to fend for themselves who, with great determination, live their lives apparently free of cares.

We travel for over ten hours squeezed in between families and the gazes of children smiling patiently in silent complicity, yet already fundamentally adults. Most of them have a younger sister clinging to their necks: forget child minders, Guatemalan society has made a virtue out of necessity!

The road continues to rise and fall beneath our wheels, there aren’t too many bends but the gradients are steep. The engine, worn away by the burden of its years, starts to cough and splutter, which is hardly reassuring.

The villages where we stop for petrol are few and far between and they all have a little main square where the local people’s run-down tuk tuks congregate. They all move around slowly here and love nothing more than to talk!

There is no tourism whatsoever outside of the Lonely Planet routes, as if there were an abyss between reality and the archaeological sites, which are now dominated by the selfie culture. Tourism here in Guatemala is exploding fast, leaving in its wake a two-tier society: one geared to mass tourism, which is developing in perfect “Riviera Maya” style, the other based on an agricultural system that is unable to meet the requirements of an increasingly standardised global market and is ruthless when it comes to biodiversity and the traditional culture of the local farmers.

Without seatbelts and at breakneck speeds we cross over the mounds of ancient volcanoes submersed by the vegetation and after 12 hours - 3 of which were spent at a standstill due to a puncture and makeshift checks on the engine– we arrive at the border between Guatemala and Mexico, venturing finally into the magical world of Chiapas!