Mex 199 and San Cristobal

On the way towards Palenque, Noami and I had been talking about whether the  Mayabell campground would have repaired and refilled the swimming pool, and if they had, whether we’d ever actually leave. After arriving, we established that the swimming pool was full, and began discussing how we’d break the news to our families that we’d decided to plant roots in Chiapas. Sadly the elation didn’t last long, a quick dip in the pool showed us that far from providing refreshment, the pool was heated by the sun to the kind of temperature that you’d run your bath if you’d spent the day naked, rolling around in snow, and we got out of the pool hotter and sweatier than we were when we got in. In addition, we are in a country where using the bathroom often costs 5 pesos, dramatically increasing the possibility of swimming in someone’s urine. Consequently we only stayed a night, and in the morning we got back on the road, hoping that being a Sunday, the Zapatistas would be busy relaxing and spending their riches, appropriated from passing motorists.

Mercifully we passed through Santa Maria with no trouble; the town had returned to being just another sleepy, rural town in the Chiapas highlands, albeit with several newly painted houses, a few newly refurbished shop fronts, and a couple of shiny satellite dishes.

The section of the 199 that we had travelled previously between Palenque and Agua Azul is a mixture of gentle hills interspaced with steeper sections; beyond Agua Azul, the road gets considerably more mountainous. The road is constantly climbing and falling, and I spent most of the day in third gear, and the 130 miles that we drove on the 199 took us more than 6 hours. I generally enjoy mountain driving, although perhaps not for six hours straight, but once again, the enjoyment was all but ruined by the copious numbers of topes on the 199. I would estimate that there are somewhere in the region of 300 topes on the road, and if their mere existence wasn’t irritating enough, many of them are located on steep uphill sections of the road. In a car, climbing back up from 10mph to 30 or 40 after slowing for a tope is no trouble, but on a steep incline in a heavy truck it takes a long time and many gear changes. It’s like a game of snakes and ladder’s except that you’re guaranteed to land on every bloody snake.

Once off the 199, we had a few minutes of pleasant relief driving down the straighter and gentler 190 before we arrived in San Cristobal de las Casas, which, like many other colonial cities in Mexico, has a dense network of small narrow streets. Unfortunately San Cristobal had no perifico road marked on our map, and so we were forced to drive straight into the congested, narrow Centro. As with the Moril Trailer Park in Guanajuato, the Church and Church book is clear that the Ranch San Nicolas Campsite is only accessible by vehicles up to 24 foot in length due to the problems with access through the town centre. Given our difficulties in Guanajuato I knew that access with Jim’s wide and tall 24 feet of length would be tight, and once again we squeezed through with millimetres to spare. Access would be straightforward if we could have driven all the way to Francisco Leon on Avenida de los Insurgentes, but with heavy traffic banned from the very centre, we were forced to navigate the maze of narrow streets. The backroads in themselves are narrow, but often there are also cars parked in awkward places, compounding the problems and making the road too narrow for a big truck like Jim. Consequently we had to take a tortuous route through the town to get onto the road out to the campsite, mounting the curb in several places, doing forward and back manoeuvres to get around tight corners, and squeezing past parked cars without a rizlas width between us.

Once out of the town centre, the short drive out to the campsite was straightforward, and we easily found the beautiful campsite at Ranch San Nicolas. At 2,000m San Cristobal is much cooler than the oppressive humidity and heat at Palenque, and the San Nicolas campground is surrounded by steep pinewood forest, and often drenched in thick cloud. It was a pleasant novelty spending our first evening at the site sitting in front of a roaring fireplace in the communal living room, after having spent a month in the non-stop sun and heat of the Yucatan Peninsula. San Cristobal is popular with travellers, and we met some great people at the campsite, in particular we enjoyed spending time with Brian, who has spent four years travelling from Alaska on a big BMW motorbike.

After settling into San Nicolas, we got onto the internet and, using google maps, quickly established that San Cristobal did actually have a perifico and that the road passing the campsite goes straight onto it, less than half a kilometre past the entrance gate. The perifico is reasonably new, and the road leading up to it from the campsite is even newer; consequently this access route was not possible when the Church and Church book was last updated, and neither road features on our copy of Microsoft Street and Trips. Not wishing to repeat our jaunt through the town centre, we walked up the road and scoped it out, hoping to use it when leaving in a few days’ time. Turning west out of the campsite gate, the road quickly degenerates, and the section of the road leading up to the perifico is a steep, rutted dirt track. For a truck like Jim, the route is no trouble, and would certainly be my recommended choice for any large truck based motorhome. Long bus based motorhomes with low ground clearance will probably struggle using this route, but even the biggest truck based camper would get up and down this road without trouble. With the alternative campground in San Cristobal now closed, anyone in a vehicle larger than Jim would do well to check the dirt road out first, before wedging themselves into a downtown alleyway that they can’t reverse out of.

Having established that getting to and from Rancho San Nicolas was pretty straightforward using the dirt track off of the perifico, I couldn’t help feel sorry for the huge MAN expedition truck which we saw sticking out like a saw thumb in the centre of San Cristobal. I guess that they were busy working out how they were going to get out of the centre because I didn’t see anyone hanging around the French plated truck.

We spent four days enjoying ourselves in San Cristobal, visiting local markets and museums, and eating and drinking well. I knew that the town would be interesting, but with the huge number of tourists visiting, and expats living there, it has a unique feel. We enjoyed a little international cuisine, after two months dominated by traditional Mexican food. I can understand why so many Europeans choose to settle in San Cristobal, but it is not a large town, and after four days we were ready once again to hit the road, continuing our drive west; this time headed for Oaxaca city, 375 miles away.