Tuesday, July 26, 2016

Chicken Bus Fever: Part III Mal Estado

The trip from Huehuetenango to Coban by collective bus shortly took a place among the most miserable bus rides in my memory, which I will describe now: 

 The most painful bus ride was from San Cristobal to Palenque and back, a 17 hour affair involving a million speed bumps that actually injured my neck because the seat had no head rest and I wedged my body in a corner at a bad angle so each speed bump caused my head to snap forward across my shoulder and then slamp back into the window frame, so my neck and head were injured for about 10 days after that trip and I have almost no memory of the tourist sites we visited because the majority of the day was spent with my face buried in the seat in front of me. Many times I actually moaned in pain or screamed in agony. We departed at 5am and returned at 10pm. Insane. It is simply a foolish way to travel because the natural and archaeological sites should be enjoyed for more than 1 hour and the vehicle travel should not exceed 12 hours. If you drive 8 hours to walk in a circle among Mayan ruins and then get back in a van and drive 8 hours back to where you started then you are an idiot. The better way would be to take a big bus to the city of Palenque and sleep there and visit the site and then go back to the hotel and then take a bus back to where you came from. Trying to visit Palenque on the same day you leave Tuxtla or San Cristobal is an insult to the restoration work involved in that site. 

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.