Nearly two months had passed in Mexico. It was time to continue our trip southeast through Central America. Next destination: Guatemala.
It took a long overnight journey from Playa Zipolite on Oaxaca’s coast to reach our final stop in Mexico by dawn. The city of Tapachula sits just 17 km from the El Carmen–Talisman border crossing (location) between Mexico and Guatemala. Compared to the busier, truck-choked, tout-infested crossings of Tecún Umán and La Mesilla—or the remote jungle route at El Ceibo—this border is easily the best option. For us, it was also the most convenient in terms of route. The obvious choice.
We had planned to head straight for the border and reach our final destination in Guatemala that same day. But, tired as we were, we changed our minds. Standing amid the inchoate chaos of the awakening market street where the bus had dropped us, we decided to look for a place to stay. We ended up booking an Airbnb in the nearby village of Cacahoatán for two nights and headed there by colectivo.
Over the short time we spent in the area, we realized this border crossing wasn’t as unfrequented as we’d thought—not the jungle surrounding it at least. Migrants from across the continent were crossing the Río Suchiate, rafting or swimming, nonstop through the night. Military police were stationed on every corner, checking documents, arresting people in plain view, denying them the dream at this penultimate border. On the second day of our stay, as we headed to Tapachula by colectivo, we were stopped too. They detained Sophie on the roadside, letting me go back to fetch our passports.
Every local we spoke to in the area warned us to be cautious when they heard we were heading to Guatemala. They had nothing good to say about their neighbors. I didn’t worry in the least. It was obvious they’d never crossed the border themselves and were judging an entire people by the vilest gangsters they’d seen collared in the streets.
Besides the unwanted migrants, the area also attracted a different kind of outsider: welcome, paying refugees. We met an old European guy who told us he lived in a nearby off-the-grid, crypto-utopian, anti-vaxxer community—one of many founded in Mexico at the time by disenchanted Western cranks.
After two restful days, we resumed our journey, catching a colectivo to the border. The crossing was, quite literally, a walk in the park. There was hardly any legal traffic—so quiet that most of what we heard was birdsong. At both checkpoints, there were no queues, and the passport control lasted only a fraction longer than the fastest a human being could possibly stamp a passport.
That was the first land border I ever crossed on the American continent. Accustomed to the chaos of Africa and Asia, I was delighted by how easily we breezed through. And so it continued: the same cakewalk repeated at every border on our way to Panama City, with the one notable exception of Nicaragua, which turned out to be quite an ordeal.
Unlike in Mexico—where modern, comfortable, conventional coach buses operated—here the job was done by brightly painted, lavishly decorated, repurposed old North American school buses, known to travelers as chicken buses. With one transfer in the small town of Malacatán, two of these brought us to Quetzaltenango: Guatemala’s second-largest city.
We settled there for about a week and went on two excursions—one to the summit of Santa María volcano, and another to the sacred crater lake of Chicabal—before continuing on to Lake Atitlán.
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Accommodation & Activities in Guatemala
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