Sorry for the Group Email

From Oaxaca we went to Puerto Escondido. The name, in Spanish, means hidden port, but in fact it was a lively resort town of wooden cabins and terrifying-looking retired American men, who spent their days shirtless around the pool, pestering the tired-looking barstaff and playing cards.

The plan from Mexico sounds simple enough: leave Oaxaca, and take the inter-American highway to Costa Rica, then return to the United States. This encompasses seven countries including the USA, though, and ten border crossings.

Driving in Mexico was becoming second-nature to us. There are a few things to beware of, of course. People drive faster and the cars, on average, are in worse condition than in the United States. This means balder tyres, worse brakes, and, frequently, broken tail lights or unused indicators. The roads are variable as well. The best highways are nicer than anything the US has to offer, but the secondary roads look and feel like they were recently subject to mortar attack.

And that’s before you consider the topes. A tope is a speed bump, but while in the UK this means a sloping, gentle ramp perhaps four inches off the ground, in Mexico it can mean very nearly anything. A tope can be anything from a gentle one-incher that you can take in fifth gear, to a bone –shaking, eight-inch high monster with vertical sides. Some topes are painted yellow and black. Some aren’t, and look like innocent shadows across the road – from a tall tree, perhaps – until you hit them at thirty miles per hour, causing everything in the car to shoot towards the ceiling and the suspension to make a solid thud as the front wheels land again. Most topes in Mexico, at anything other than dead slow – i.e. walking pace – are ruinous for a car, particularly for one with little ground clearance like our Cavalier. We took, eventually, to following Mexican drivers through towns: there seemed to be a kind of sixth sense when it came to topes, and often other drivers would spot them when we didn’t. It also helped, we found out (somewhat belatedly) that it helps to drive diagonally across large speedbumps, putting one wheel over at a time. This frequently saved the horrible metallic grinding noise that accompanies you dragging a valuable car over rough concrete.

We made it to Puerto Escondido in five hours, and stayed there for two nights before moving on. Our next stop was Zipolite, an even-further removed mile-long stretch of beach. There were fewer people but, it has to be said, they were more interesting. We stayed in a hotel with paper-thin, wooden walls: we could smell the cologne of our neighbours through them. So when our neighbours-but-one had a foulmouthed, stand-up row it was hard not to listen.

It was sensational: the kind of thing that would have Jerry Springer’s bodyguards leaping onto the stage and restraining both parties.

“F*** you, you ****ing ****!” He would roar, as a bottle hit the wall.

“F*** you, you redneck son of a bitch!” She would cry. Then there would come the sound of something else hitting the wall, a door slamming, and confused, angry footsteps stumbling back towards the bar.

They were both, it almost goes without saying, extraordinarily drunk.

Zipolite gave way to Puerto Arrista, which of all the beach towns we visited in Mexico, was the smallest. It was twelve kilometres off the highway, and the last few hundred metres were along a sand-strewn, cobbled street. Arrista is a town of nothing but hotels, but those that were there looked perilously empty. Bored-looking men sat in front of deserted parking lots and sprang into life when we approached, eager to guide us to a parking space and help us find a hotel. In the end we stayed on a campsite of sorts which offered double-bed cabins, under the watchful eye of a spectacularly-bearded Canadian called Jose.

We spent the night in Puerto Arrista and headed the next day for the border.

The thing about Central America is that you need a lot of car insurance. Lots can happen to a car once you get out of the USA: road accidents, vandalism, theft and breakdowns are all part of an unpretty picture. So it was that we had Mexican car insurance that covered us for everything from total loss of the car to running out of petrol.

Mexican insurance doesn’t cover you in Central America, of course. Luckily we had Sanborn’s on our side. We had visited Sanborn’s in Arizona for our Mexican insurance, and although the company doesn’t offer Central American insurance itself, it was happy to arrange it. For a US$35 processing fee and US$386, we had a month’s coverage in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Costa Rica.

(Sanborn’s, incidentally, was fabulous. We had responses to our emails within hours of sending them, and ten days after our application was sent we had coverage. It was a genuinely great company to work with, whose employees genuinely seemed to have our best interests at heart. Weird for an insurance company, but there you go.

It’s also worth stressing, if you’re thinking of going, that car insurance in Central America is a minefield. It’s not obligatory in many places - the police won’t ask to see proof of it, for instance. But in Mexico, if you get into a traffic accident without any insurance, you’re going to prison - Mexican prison, obviously - until things are straightened out. And that’s before you consider the financial problems posed by potentially writing off your own car and someone else’s. The prospect of actually hurting someone else in a car accident without insurance is too hairy to even think of. The two exceptions to this are Nicaragua and Costa Rica; two countries where you must have government-minimum insurance, even if you already have third-party insurance.)

We still had to spend three days in Tapachula while we waited, though.

Tapachula is a town 20km from the Mexico-Guatemala border, which makes it the obvious place to hole up if you’re waiting to cross. It’s dusty and not a little dull, with an admittedly-fetching central park which sports, of all things, free municipal wi-fi. We bided our time in the Diamante Hotel, whose various charms included a view of the bus station yard, non-opening windows and, importantly, cable TV.

Tapachula isn’t particularly tourist-friendly. Our first inkling came when we left an internet café one day and walked into a scene from NYPD Blue. A man in plain clothes was crouching behind a pillar across the road holding a handgun, while two more men, this time with assault rifles, were looking nervous a few metres beyond him. At the end of the road was a black sedan, blocking off the street. It appeared that people were waiting for something or someone, although we didn’t hang around to find out what.

The night after that we heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire from a few blocks away.

Happy days, we thought. Finally, our insurance arrived. Next: Guatemala.

Dave can only apologise for the lack of pictures here. Tapachula just didn’t lend itself to photography, and taking a picture of a plain-clothes man with a handgun seemed like it would be pushing the limits of tourist photography. For pictures of Mexico - a hundred and sixty nine, to be precise, you should really visit the Mexico Flickr set.