Our day started at 7am with an alarm. Even though I was in bed & asleep before 10pm, I was still tired. Tom went out drinking last night with a big group from the hostel, he's looking a little bit worse for wear this morning, but still manages to jump out of bed before me.
The tour van picks us up outside the hostel just after 8am & we choose seats at the back thinking we'd have more room, lol. We drive through the town collecting another 9 people & the van gets very full.
The town of San Cristobal de la Cases is so lovely, especially in the morning. The houses are beautiful pastel colours, the streets are brickwork & there is plants everywhere. If you look towards the edge of town you can see clouds hanging low over the mountains & the sun rays slanting down casting shadows on the early morning before eventually penetrating through the clouds.
It's a lot of driving today, something we guessed after looking at the locations of the waterfalls on the maps.
We definitely weren't told about the distances though. Still, it's nice to see rural Mexico & the way farming families & communities live. Mexico is very pretty & in the short amount of time we have been here, we have seen very different habitat. Everything we would see today is really green & surprisingly there are a lot of pine trees. We don't see a cactus or dry chunk of land anywhere.
There are still lots of mountains & I'm feeling reasonably motion sick as we wind our way through the land.
I'm grateful that I only are a banana for breakfast. Tom pretty much sleeps the whole way there.
We arrive at our first stop after nearly 3 hours of driving. The chiflon water falls. We see the blue water & the mist cutting through the side of the green mountain a few kilometres before we get there. At 120 metres tall, it's a real eye catcher, even from the distance.
After we arrived, our driver handed us over to a guide. Tom & I didn't really know what was going on & the guide only spoke Spanish, so we found ourselves following the group, so we didn't accidentally get lost or left behind. Looking back, I wish we knew that 3 of the other people in our group could speak English & that we could have asked for a meeting time to be back at the van & be left to do our own explorations.
The waterfall was quite nice, as was the walkways around it & the multiple view points. We were a little bit disappointed that in some areas you could see humans had interfered & redirected the water with ugly pipes & cement barricades.
We had 2 hours here, before arriving back at the van & continuing on to the Montebello national park & the lakes.
It was another couple of hours driving. We shared some biscuits & finished off our water. It was hotter than we anticipated. We had another banana packed but Tom discovered it squished through the bottom of the bag, which was disappointing & funny all at the same time. We both napped awkwardly in the van trip & woke with stiff & sore necks.
At the first lake (I'm not sure what any of the 3 lakes are called & I would only be guessing the name's) we went down a walkway & paid extra to use a kayak. We spent an hour kayaking around in the 3 lakes that were connected to each other & divided by the cliff formations. The water was these amazing colours of blue varying from a deep blue to a nearly clear turquoise. In some sections it was very deep, but we could see all the way down to the bottom.
We paddled out to a section at the back of the 3rd lake where there was a slightly sandy/pebbled section of 'beach' where Tom had a swim. I didn't want to get fully wet cause by this stage it was 4pm & there was a slight wind blowing through the trees that hinted at the cold to come tonight. I really wish we had arrived at the lakes first.
Our next lake was set up very similar to this, however in the carpark there was stalls selling Mexican souvenirs such as sombreros & poncho's and food stalls. Thank god! By this time it was 5pm & we had barely eaten anything today. We were both starting to get grumpy & I had a pounding headache.
We found a stall with 2 elderly Mexican ladies with kind faces. We ordered 2 x meals. All we knew was that they had some Cheese wrapped in banana leaves & we said 'No carne, Vegetariano" like 5 times.
What they served us was genuinely delicious! There was the fresh made cheese, which they heated up inside the banana leaves, It was quite nice & tasted like a mix between haloumi, feta & mozzarella. This was accompanied with brown beans, salsa, pico de gallo, avocado, mushrooms, lettuce, tomato & a huge stack of fresh, warm tortillas.
The food was gone, instantly, they watched us scoffing it down, looking very amused before hurrying to heat up more tortillas. We paid 220 pesos, for the meals & 2 bottles of water, a bit more expensive than your average street food but totally worth it.
After this we drove to the 3rd & final lake which was just a parking lot with a view across a bridge at the lake & the houses set up on the other side. from here, we could see Guatemala! No wonder it felt like we had been driving all day, we have covered a lot of kilometres.
The drive back was long & uncomfortable. My denim pants & bikini's didn't dry out properly after the kayaking & became itchy.
We were both impatient to get back & to pack our stuff. despite not doing much today, we felt exhausted.
On arrival back in the town of San Cristobal, just after 9pm, the streets were absolutely packed with people & was midway through a festival celebrating the Mexican independence day. We knew that this was happening & regretted once again, that we were on a very tight timeline. It would have been so nice to have been going back to get ready & then head out for a night of celebration. Everyone we saw on the street was so happy.
It's sad to be writing that we were well behaved & that we did actually go back to the hostel, shower, pack our bags & got into bed. We had about 5 hours before our 3.30am alarm would go off & we would need to be up again.
- Alli
The tour van picks us up outside the hostel just after 8am & we choose seats at the back thinking we'd have more room, lol. We drive through the town collecting another 9 people & the van gets very full.
The town of San Cristobal de la Cases is so lovely, especially in the morning. The houses are beautiful pastel colours, the streets are brickwork & there is plants everywhere. If you look towards the edge of town you can see clouds hanging low over the mountains & the sun rays slanting down casting shadows on the early morning before eventually penetrating through the clouds.
It's a lot of driving today, something we guessed after looking at the locations of the waterfalls on the maps.
We definitely weren't told about the distances though. Still, it's nice to see rural Mexico & the way farming families & communities live. Mexico is very pretty & in the short amount of time we have been here, we have seen very different habitat. Everything we would see today is really green & surprisingly there are a lot of pine trees. We don't see a cactus or dry chunk of land anywhere.
There are still lots of mountains & I'm feeling reasonably motion sick as we wind our way through the land.
I'm grateful that I only are a banana for breakfast. Tom pretty much sleeps the whole way there.
We arrive at our first stop after nearly 3 hours of driving. The chiflon water falls. We see the blue water & the mist cutting through the side of the green mountain a few kilometres before we get there. At 120 metres tall, it's a real eye catcher, even from the distance.
After we arrived, our driver handed us over to a guide. Tom & I didn't really know what was going on & the guide only spoke Spanish, so we found ourselves following the group, so we didn't accidentally get lost or left behind. Looking back, I wish we knew that 3 of the other people in our group could speak English & that we could have asked for a meeting time to be back at the van & be left to do our own explorations.
The waterfall was quite nice, as was the walkways around it & the multiple view points. We were a little bit disappointed that in some areas you could see humans had interfered & redirected the water with ugly pipes & cement barricades.
We had 2 hours here, before arriving back at the van & continuing on to the Montebello national park & the lakes.
It was another couple of hours driving. We shared some biscuits & finished off our water. It was hotter than we anticipated. We had another banana packed but Tom discovered it squished through the bottom of the bag, which was disappointing & funny all at the same time. We both napped awkwardly in the van trip & woke with stiff & sore necks.
At the first lake (I'm not sure what any of the 3 lakes are called & I would only be guessing the name's) we went down a walkway & paid extra to use a kayak. We spent an hour kayaking around in the 3 lakes that were connected to each other & divided by the cliff formations. The water was these amazing colours of blue varying from a deep blue to a nearly clear turquoise. In some sections it was very deep, but we could see all the way down to the bottom.
We paddled out to a section at the back of the 3rd lake where there was a slightly sandy/pebbled section of 'beach' where Tom had a swim. I didn't want to get fully wet cause by this stage it was 4pm & there was a slight wind blowing through the trees that hinted at the cold to come tonight. I really wish we had arrived at the lakes first.
Our next lake was set up very similar to this, however in the carpark there was stalls selling Mexican souvenirs such as sombreros & poncho's and food stalls. Thank god! By this time it was 5pm & we had barely eaten anything today. We were both starting to get grumpy & I had a pounding headache.
We found a stall with 2 elderly Mexican ladies with kind faces. We ordered 2 x meals. All we knew was that they had some Cheese wrapped in banana leaves & we said 'No carne, Vegetariano" like 5 times.
What they served us was genuinely delicious! There was the fresh made cheese, which they heated up inside the banana leaves, It was quite nice & tasted like a mix between haloumi, feta & mozzarella. This was accompanied with brown beans, salsa, pico de gallo, avocado, mushrooms, lettuce, tomato & a huge stack of fresh, warm tortillas.
The food was gone, instantly, they watched us scoffing it down, looking very amused before hurrying to heat up more tortillas. We paid 220 pesos, for the meals & 2 bottles of water, a bit more expensive than your average street food but totally worth it.
After this we drove to the 3rd & final lake which was just a parking lot with a view across a bridge at the lake & the houses set up on the other side. from here, we could see Guatemala! No wonder it felt like we had been driving all day, we have covered a lot of kilometres.
The drive back was long & uncomfortable. My denim pants & bikini's didn't dry out properly after the kayaking & became itchy.
We were both impatient to get back & to pack our stuff. despite not doing much today, we felt exhausted.
On arrival back in the town of San Cristobal, just after 9pm, the streets were absolutely packed with people & was midway through a festival celebrating the Mexican independence day. We knew that this was happening & regretted once again, that we were on a very tight timeline. It would have been so nice to have been going back to get ready & then head out for a night of celebration. Everyone we saw on the street was so happy.
It's sad to be writing that we were well behaved & that we did actually go back to the hostel, shower, pack our bags & got into bed. We had about 5 hours before our 3.30am alarm would go off & we would need to be up again.
- Alli
This is a screenshot from of Tom's Google Map's account, which shows how close we were to Guatemala when we were at the 3rd lake. The yellow star's on the map is where we were standing.
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