Searching for ‘Random Weirdness’ on Mexico’s Southern Border Highway

Travel Blog  •  Jim Benning  •  11.28.06 | 1:56 PM ET

We always enjoy Ben Brazil’s stories, and his piece in Sunday’s Washington Post about an ambling trip through the southern Mexican state of Chiapas didn’t disappoint. He and his wife traveled the 262-mile Carretera Fronteriza del Sur, a relatively new two-lane road which runs along the border between Chiapas and Guatemala. They visited the Maya ruins of Palenque, but that was only the beginning. “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,” he writes. “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.”

He continues:

We did know we’d stick to Mexico, but that was only because there were few accessible sights on the Guatemalan side.

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.

Among Brazil’s happy surprises were the Maya ruins of Yaxchilan.

Having already seen a number of Maya ruins, I was primed to be bored by Yaxchilan. But then we strapped on our headlamps to pass through the short, dark halls of the Labyrinth, where dozens of bats hung from the vaulted ceiling in creepy, squeaking fur balls. We hit daylight again in the Great Plaza, a grassy opening lined with low stone buildings and carved steles depicting great rulers.

Below was the river. Above, howler monkeys crashed though canopy trees, loosing throaty, murderous shrieks. We climbed a wide stone staircase to a hillside temple, where the decapitated statue of a king looked across the jungle and toward the river.

Nope, I wasn’t bored.

I never made it to Yaxchilan, but I’ll never forget the howler monkeys swinging overhead when I visited Palenque several years ago. The first time I heard their shrieks and roars echoing through the jungle I was convinced it was part some sort of soundtrack put together by Mexican tourism officials—which is either a sad statement about the world or my own scarred and cynical psyche; I’m not sure which.

In any case, happily, the roars were legit.

Tags: North America, Mexico


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