Oaxaca from Lonely Planet

I left beautiful San Cristobal on Tuesday and pulled an all night bus to Oaxaca town in the neighboring state of the same name.

With Mexico City now only five hours away by bus, I am near the completion of the loop I started a couple weeks ago when I made my way to Palenque via Veracruz and Villahermosa.

My first impressions here are that while Oaxaca is a nice town, by comparison to San Cristobal it's a bit expensive for lodging.  I'm paying 400 pesos here for something I could get in San Cristobal for less than 200.

And while San Cristobal had dozens of low cost laundry services available, here I've been unable to find any service but dry cleaning!  A minor annoyance perhaps, but clean clothes would be nice. . .

Check out the Lonely Planet's take below:

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/mexico/oaxaca-state/oaxaca

Back to the Highlands: Palenque, Chiapas State

I finally have some travel momentum happening after bailing out of a somewhat flooded Veracruz early Friday morning.

Ernesto made its mark in Veracruz but we must have been on the very edges of it.  We had plenty of rain but it was on and off all day, and not continuous.  It was windy as well, but nothing like what you would expect with the fiercest of tropical storms.  I spent much of Thursday taking photos of a rainy downtown Veracruz.

Yesterday I caught a bus first thing in the morning for the trip to Villahermosa, the capital city of Tabasco.  What should have been a six and half hour trip of just over 300 miles stretched to almost ten hours of construction zone jams, stops at police/army checkpoints, and one very long wait at a toll plaza.  Arrgghh!

So I was happy to get a room late yesterday just across the street from Villahermosa's bus station which enabled me to quickly catch another early bus this morning for the two hour ride to Palenque.

Once I got checked into a room here it was only 11.00 a.m. and plenty of time to run out to the ruins and the national park surrounding it.

I spent a happy couple hours roaming the massive site--one of the major Mayan archeological sites in Mexico--shooting photos of the immense structures, dodging the many mostly Mexican tourists, and walking through the very well kept jungle paths leading down from the site to the excellent museum and park exit below.

I think I'm much happier in the highlands than on the seashore.  It's still very hot and humid here, but there are decent airconditioned rooms available for 300-400 pesos--still pretty much within my budget.

So instead of heading deeper into Yucatan--it's still almost 1000 kilometers to Cancun from here--I will continue to make my way further south to San Cristobal, capital of Chiapas state, and Mexico's southernmost state.  The guidebooks say this is a very beautiful region, and if Palenque is any indication, then I'm sold.

In 1994 this region made world headlines when the Zapatistas began their New Year's Day revolt under Subcomandante Marcos.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapatista_Army_of_National_Liberation

From San Cristobal I will be able to loop back west and north to Mexico City by way of Oaxaca and other points.

Check back here in a day or two:  I'll try my best to post again from San Cristobal. . .

Trapped By Hurricane Ernesto 2012

My plan had been for today to travel further east to Villahermosa, the last big stop before the Yucatan, but Ernesto has given me pause.

After three days here of temps in the 90s and high humidity, rain finally came late last night here at the very western edge of the storm.

I've just googled the weather outlook and read the latest stories about Ernesto, and see that it touched land near a tourist area, causing the evacuation of some 1300 people staying at a resort.

The land fall caused the storm to lose power, but it's headed back to sea and is expected to hit land again further inland closer to Veracruz state later tonight. 

Last night there were officials in the streets here distributing flyers with emergency service numbers and advice for how to wait out the storm.

Of course it would seem rather foolish to travel any further east at this stage, so I think it's better to sit things out for another day and see how things develop.

This is reminiscent of my experience in southern Guatemala during Tropical Storm Agathe in 2010.

 At that time I was held up for a few days waiting for the rain to stop.  When it was over a five hundred year old bridge in a nearby village was badly damaged by the torrent of water breaking the banks of the local river.


http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ernesto-crosses-yucatan-picks-strength-031706304.html