Cancun to Chetumal

Mariano in Cancun helping us get out onto the street.

We decided over breakfast that we wanted to get out of Cancun and away from the tourist traps ASAP. The night before, since Tom was sleeping, I read a Cancun tourist guide given to us by the campground, and decided that if something was listed in the guide, we probably didn’t want to stop there. That changed our plans a little bit, because the original point of driving around the Gulf and up the Yucatan Peninsula had been to drive down along the Caribbean through the Mayan Riveria, but the Mayan Riveria is all part of the Cancun tour business. Between Tom changing the air filter and checking the fuel filters on the truck, and the fact that I was moving very, very slowly, we didn’t pull out of the RV park until after 11:00. We got through the traffic in the city and headed south on a 4-lane highway with the goal of making it to Chetumal, the border town for crossing into Belize, by nightfall.

We were moving along with traffic, and had just passed one of those radar speed display things that said we were going 84 kph. Shortly after that, Tom looked out his window and saw a dark car trying to push us off the road. Tom speeded up to get ahead of him, and then he whooped a siren at us and we realized it was a police officer. We pulled over, he pulled up behind us, and walked to the window. He spoke enough English and we spoke enough Spanish for him to make it clear that he had pulled us over because we were speeding. He said we were going 95 kph in a 80 kph zone – which we weren’t, but since it was our word against his, and we don’t speak the language, and we were in fact speeding by 4 kph, Tom went with him to his car and gave him his license. He told Tom that the procedure was for the cop to take Tom’s license, and we were to drive to the police station and wait for him, and then we could pay our fine and go. He told Tom that he wouldn’t be there for at least an hour, so Tom told him that we wanted to be in Chetumal before dark, and asked if there was any way to resolve this on the side of the road. Of course there was a way – just give the cop $1146 pesos (about $105USD). Tom came back and we went through our pesos and managed to come up with EXACTLY $1146 pesos, which he gave to the cop who we know would not have provided any change, and who returned his license and told him to respect the speed limits – which Tom did for about 50 miles, much to the distress of the lines of traffic that were piling up behind us. Once we were south of the Mayan Riveria and traffic had thinned out and we were back to “normal” Mexico roads, he started driving like he’s been driving for the rest of the trip and we had no further problems.

It was frustrating, because to that point in the trip all the bad things we’d heard about Americans traveling in Mexico had been completely false. Nobody had tried to take advantage of us, and everybody had gone out of their way to be helpful, and we’d always felt safe, even when sleeping on the street in the middle of the city of Campeche. We know the cop just pulled us over because we had American plates, since lots of cars were passing us, and 4kph is even less of a reason for a speeding ticket than 4mph in the US. Tom had budgeted a few hundred dollars for “mordida” (bribes) which we hadn’t touched, so the $105USD was in the budget, but we thought it was a shame that we had made it to the last day of our drive through Mexico without any problems, and then the only problem we had was in an area that is such a big attraction for tourists that we wish we had just skipped. I guess this highlights why we’re moving to Belize – life seems a lot friendlier to us when we’re off the beaten track.



The only other set of steer horns on a truck we have seen and it is a FORD! Men working on the roads in Mexico - obviously gesturing to us that we have "cajones" (balls).


We found a great campground in Calderitas, near Chetumal, named Yax-Ha. It’s right on the Carribean, and our trailer is backed up right to the sea wall, so the waves break about 10 feet from us when we’re sleeping. We racked up more complaints about the Sanborn’s guide since while it had the location of the campground basically correct, the name was wrong, the landmarks weren’t accurate, and the distances from point to point in their directions did not match the actual distances. However, it was definitely worth finding, since it’s beautifully landscaped, has a great pool, the cleanest bathrooms we’ve seen on the trip for hot showers, free wi-fi, and, like most of Mexico, great people.

The only problem was that when we pulled in, I was in the same condition that Tom had been in the evening before. I started making dinner for Tom since I had no intention of eating, but ended up letting him finish it while I took a handful of ibuprofen and curled up under a pile of blankets with the three dogs.