Size max and budget for Mexico and Guatemala

Tip for Guatemala and for that matter - everywhere.

Travel super light and uncluttered. Far less strain on you and chassis. Sometimes the Guatalmatecan border Aduaneros at La Mesilla and across from Cd Cuauhtemóc want to see EVERYTHING. Deep in storage compartments. I weigh my rig before I travel then return home and start pitching "indispensables". Fill up in Comitán or Tapachula before continuing south. Guatemalan fuel prices will make the knees knock. Same for LPG. Do it in Mexico. Purified water as well. This allows for some breathing room and time to sort things out. But beware of Guatemala agriculture and meat restrictions. The US Consulate travel tips will really help.
Your best up to the minute border crossing tips will come from fellow travelers at your closest to the border last night campsite.

And Belize is not Mexico, or Guatemala or anywhere else on earth as far as anal officials are concerned. The ones I have dealt with could care less if a single tourist entered their domain. Paste on a serious polite smile and grit the teeth.

Just came back from visiting the state of San Luis Potosi. We didn't even turn on our GPS. We relied (using common sense, or course) on our Google Maps on the phone. Was 99.9% accurate even in small towns.

Sailorv wrote:
We want to soak up some Caribbean (snorkeling/clear water) and Mayan culture. We are planning on bringing a sailing kayak and a sup maybe.

That sounds exciting. We (me and an expedition partner) kayaked the Mosquito Coast (Central America; Caribbean-side) in a 2-man Folbot (with a Spectra sailing rig) for a month and change.

If you ever require a bone to be set (or dislocate a joint that needs to be reset), look up the Maya "bonesetters" of San Pedro La Laguna (Lago Atitlan, Guatemala)...

On edit:

OSM (OpenStreet maps):

I loaded the most recent iteration of the OSM dataset covering Mexico, and overlaid onto the most recent WorldView III super-spectral, high-resolution commercial satellite imagery, and looked at some very remote villages (in Chiapas), and I believe that OSM has the most up-to-date roads coverage I have ever come across for Mexico (developing country roads are updated and corrected hundreds of times per day, real-time and published daily, not once a year).

I built my own super-GPS system, using a GIS software (a navigation system propagated across all our laptops) called: QGIS. I typically have 70 to 400 thematic map layers (depending on country) I can engage whilst "on the road" --including live WMS weather radar layers, sea surface temperatures, near real-time ocean currents, meso-scale layers, and winds at 6 altitudes (all the way up to 90 hPa), and conflict risk polygon layers, and natural real-time disaster layers, etc, etc, etc, etc...

Mexico Wanderer wrote:
Sometimes the Guatalmatecan border Aduaneros at La Mesilla and across from Cd Cuauhtemóc want to see EVERYTHING. Deep in storage compartments...

...hah. I have to laugh (not in a derogatory way) at the zoo that Cuauhtemóc was (in the days that I crossed there; time-irrelevant to this question), when compared to Mesilla "facility". I always avoided Cuauhtemóc like the plague after experience there in the day, and preferred the more compact (but intensely happening) Mesilla. And, the drive on through to Huehuetenango (Huehue) and Xela is like no other in the country...

However, just to put it into context temporally: ....the last time I crossed at Mesilla, the EZLN (Zapatistas) were in control of the Mex 307 region....

Guatemala has poor, I mean legendary squalid "Caribbean Experience" beaches. Mud, mosquitoes, the whole bad juju. After shrieking at the Disneyland prices on the beaches of Quintana Roo. No more. Even miserable Xcalak was 5x as pricey as the Pacific Coast.

Head down. Palenque is getting like Chicken Little Yucatan - flooded with a thousand tourists. BAH!

Guatemala has TIKAL. Much less expensive and a tiny fraction of the turists. TIKAL is huge, exciting and authentic. Nearby services. Then vault across the Belizian border (continue east past TIKAL). When you hit the hummingbutt (oops I mean Hummingbird) highway then head south for PLACENCIA. There you can find decent prices and sand and Palms instead of mud and mangroves like elsewhere in mainland Belize. When Quicksilver gets a new 10-year TIP this fall, I am going to continue on down to Nicaragua. Costa Rica may be considered Costa Mesa (California) because of exorbitant prices. Gringos have commandeered many used-to-be-nice Pacific Beaches in Panama. Yeah, Ten bucks to boondock park Lucy's Bed & Breakfast.

Mex:

Yep. Gotta agree with ya vis the "invisible shockwave of cost increases" spreading across the once lightly traveled" Central America.

I used to spend a lot of "beach time" in Tulate (Guatemala Pacific Coast). A great place to relax and write. I had access to a 40 foot wide gazebo on the beach (when the General wasn't at home LOL!)....zero tourists (but don't EVER go there Semana Santa week!!).

I have no idea what Tulate is like now, however...

It's no joke I find it much less expensive to visit by car, stay in hotels, eat in restaurants. Boondocking in balnearios (spas), and hotel side lots saves time and aggravation. Plus a ton on money.

Yep. Didn't take long for them to figure out the owner of a seventy thousand dollar rig taking a five thousand dollar vacation could "certainly" afford to pay thirty five dollars for a parking space worth a quarter of that.

This is why I made Quicksilver my bus almost totally autonomous. I can park anywhere and I need a feeble 350 watts at most from a rusted receptacle. Really hot areas I start a 5,000 BTU air conditioner alongside my bed.

Stay way way way away from tourist areas is my rule. Tikal and Honduras BONAMPAK are now my two favorite ruins sites. Gracias, Honduras makes a quaint mountain layover. Flores, Guatemala is a bit warm but exotic. I like the south side of Lago Atitlán but check out special travel safety procedure needed.

Wotta Hoot. Once pristine Isla Mujeres, near Can'tcun, now looks like Avalon on California's Catalina Island. You will never again find me east of Sn Cristobal de Las Casas, Chiapas.

The down the hatch route on 57 then jot over to Morelia, Patzcuaro, down to Zihuatanejo then Puerto Escondido, turn and Tapanatepec up to SCdLC to Lago Atitlan, Guatemala then to Tikal (maybe a side bus adventure to the IXIL TRIANGLE) then Tikal, to Plancencia, is my idea of a trip of a lifetime.

San Cristobal alone has side trips to Zinacantan, Simojovel (to purchase raw amber), then down toward Guatemala - Comitan and Lagos de Montebellos.

Mex wrote:
...maybe a side bus adventure to the IXIL TRIANGLE

....I did some surveying of a fairly significant ruin site and created maps for the Maya language group (a group that preserves the Maya languages and teaches it in primary school) up in Uspantan (part of the "triangle") back in '94. They have an office in the municipal building facing the parque central. If I remember, I spent appx 2 months in Uspantan doing mapping work. The year before, I rode with the UNHCR (based out of Nebaj) way into URNG territory (Batzushile (phonetic spelling) and Tzalbal) in a white Hilux with special marking on the cab roof. That's a spectacular region, with a little-know waterfall. At that time of course, there were zero tourists there (it would have been impossible for a tourist to get by the sandbagged machine gun emplacements leaving Nebaj in that direction; and then there were the PAC to contend with, of course).

One could probably "boondock" in any back-country hospedaje if you ask.

One expe I'd like to do would be on the newly-paved highway traversing the Lagos Montebellos national park (of which I have already camped in, back in 1993-ish when the road was nothing more than a 4x4 track), and continue across the Mex 307 to the Tenosique 203, into into Guatemala's El Peten region through El Ceibo.

IF one can travel by serious 4x4 (say, a 4x4 full-sized truck, with ruggedized light-weight truck camper-- like we have ), then I would recommend the Mex 5 through Coban (a nice place to camp, and fairly near Biotopo del Quetzal; I staged my treks and camping into del Quetzal from the small village of Tactic) up to Parque Nacional Grutas de Lanquin)....then, continue up the On edit: Guat 5 up to Raxruha and onward up to Flores, then on to Tikal (check with Coban for safety near Raxruha; the last time I was there, there were gun emplacements protecting the Rubelsanto oil/gas pipeline from guerrilla-led dynamiting incursions; but that was some time ago....decades LOL). The Raxruha road should be better now (mostly paved), and head into the Peten that way. The last time I did this, it was a 4x4 mudfest the entire way....but the roads are now paved. I'm going to do it again one day before I get too old, with the 3/4 ton 4x4 with my 32 inch DuraTrac tires & truck camper to handle branch trail explorations off the main road....this time on easier main roads LOL.

Tequila wrote:
I have just finished souting out the yucatan route for a commercial caravan next season. I deternine dthat Class A's over 40 ft or 5hs over 36 ft woudl have issues in that area. The infratructure is nowhere near as good as it is on the west coast.

Toads are not a good idea. they double tolls, increase insurance rates. One issue with them happened to us. Mexicans are not used to seeign them. In one heavy traffic situation, someone decided to push there way in behind a Class A, assuming the jeep driver behind would yield. Well that jeep had no driver, it was a toad.

The same thing happen to a guy that was parked at the Tachos, a guy tried to squeezz in between.

I used Sygic as a GPS with my I pad, it worked very good without internet, actually used it in the train going to Creel, Copper Canyon, and it showed all the little dirt roads along the train tracks. Co-pilot was pretty poor compare to Sygic.