My bus adventure in Mexico

Holla' from Mexico. I arrived in San Cristobal yesterday morning at 3am after the longest bus trip ever. Let me recount the last few days of my life for you...

Sunday Evening, Easter: It's our last night in Xela, so my friends and I decide to throw a little fiesta in the hostel where most of us are staying. It's a pancake party where with lost of different toppings. We made so many pancakes, and ate really a lot of sugar. Stayed up late, said goodbye to Xela, got to bed around 2am, the latest I've stayed up since I left Washington DC.

Monday: Got up at 6am, shockingly still tired for some reason. Ate the remaining pancakes on the way to the bus station. Missed meeting the rest of out group at the bus station and because of this got on a different bus than everyone else at 7am. We asked for a bus to Mexico, we should have been more specific. So we're on a chicken bus, the actual slowest chicken bus ever, to a border town way south of where we really want to go. 5-6 hours, three rickshaws, and one taxi ride later we arrive in the bus terminal of Tapachula, Mexico. Luckily we got through the border without any problems and got plenty of time on our visas for mexico. So now it's 1:30pm and we wait in Tapachula for the next bus to San Cristobal which leaves at 5:30. Not too bad. People keep telling us that it's a 5 hour ride, so we figure we'll get there in time to get a room for the night. When we get on the bus I'm shocked and excited to find out that it's not the recycled US school buses that I'm used to but a first class pulsh fancy shiny giant of a bus. So nice. This feels like the ritz after Guatemala. About three hours into the ride we stop and I start to get off thinking that we're in San Cristobal.. nope. Apparently when people told us that it was a 5 hour ride to San Cristobal it was some kind of cruel joke. It took 10 hours and two horribe movies to reach our final destination. I slept most of the way which was nice, but I could have done without arriving at three in the morning. We figured it was too late to get a room, and we didn't want to we walking around with all of our stuff at three in he morning so we decided to stay in the bus station until the sun came up. We slept (or tried to) in the wooden seats and listened to the blairing Chiapas tourism video about 500 times. After a few hours I figured out that I was sitting in gum. It's cold in San Cristobal at 3 in the morning. It was a bit of a long bus adventure, but I suppose it'll make a good story. I think it makes me sound tough.

Tuesday: We finally met up with our friends, who had arrived at 4 in the afternoon the day before, and got all checked into a hostel. Had a pretty rocking day exploring San Cristobal and trying not to fall asleep. We ran into some folks we knew from Xela and had a really good veggie dinner with them. Small World I suppose.

San Cristobal is cool, a lot more colorful than Xela, but it's also got a lot more gringos. People keep trying to sell me Zapatista dolls in the street, and we found a store where you can buy the masks for like $2.50. There's a cool Mayan medicine museum that we're going to check out today.