Mexican and Guatemalan border crossing

Monday. Our first border crossing. After a lot of research we decided the simplest way to do this was to take a shuttle bus from San Cristobal straight to Lake Atitlan, and at 300 pesos it was cheap! 

The shuttle bus picked us up at 8am and took us to the Guatemalan border. There was a real variety of people on the bus, 1 Mexican, 3 Japanese, 2 Dutch, 1 American, 1 Aussie and us! 

On the way, there was a traffic jam, that kept us stationary for about 1hr. Once on the move, we passed the cause of this - locals making their own 'toll booths', and only allowing traffic to pass if they coughed up some cash. We came across this twice on the way to the border. Apparently this is nothing new, and is a way for the locals to raise cash for their community, as they have been forgotten by the Mexican government.

If you have been in Mexico over 6 days you have to pay an exit fee of 300 pesos. To ensure that this went smoothly, the driver collected our passports, exit card and pesos, and took it to the bank on the Mexican border. Here is where you get your exit stamp (make sure the exit date was correct).

We then left the the bus behind and walked for about 5 minutes to the Guatemalan border. 

We handed our passports over at the immigration office to get our Guatemalan entry stamp (no entry fee was taken much to my surprise).

Hey presto, border crossing complete.

We then had to wait for our connecting bus to take us to Panachjel.

Advice. If you have any pesos left over, you can change them at the border (black market) exchange rate is 2 pesos for 1 Q. Keep a small amount of pesos in change as you will need these if you want to go to the loo at the border.

During the journey we got to know how the Aussie made her life in Honduras, and some interesting travel stories from the American who now lives in Antigua, Guatemala. Some good advice was given about dodgy cash points, card cloning and bed bugs!

We discovered that the Dutch couple had no place to stay so I suggested that they come with us as we were staying in Panachjel.

Story continued on Week 4 post