Sorry, this is a brief account of about two weeks of travel but I had to get caught up somehow.I’m going to go through this quickly because I feel like I need to get caught up with the blog and I can’t just skip to current events and leave big hole in our travel story. So here’s an attempt at brevity:

We left Mexico City and continued southeast to Puebla, which we blew through pretty quickly and made it to Oaxaca before nightfall. We were still hoping to secure a Couchsurfing host but were only able to find a contact with no spare room. Enrique was his name and we came down to meet us at the main cathedral near the central plaza. He helped us find suitable motel accommodations and took us around town for a bit to show us where to get some good grub. His family owns a Mezcal distillery and he took the time to explain some of the subtle differences between the local distiller’s products. Oaxaca is a very nice town with nice weather and beautiful views everywhere. It’s situated in a lush green valley and stays relatively cool.
The next day we took advantage of beautiful weather and headed to Monte Alban, the ruins of a huge Mayan city that used to overlook the valley that Oaxaca now occupies. There were very few other people around felt like we almost had the whole place to ourselves. It was a good day.
Our next destination, after Oaxaca, was Puerto Escondido and by the looks of the road on the map, it was going to be a fun ride. After we were about 50 K out of Oaxaca the road began to climb into the mountains and was never straight for more than 100 meters again until we reached Puerto Escondido. This road was a motorcyclist’s dream for most of the length of it. There were, however, many small sections of road that were in disrepair amongst the sections that had been freshly paved. I will give credit to the engineers and road crews in Oaxaca, the curves, bends and chicanes are all beautifully banked and provide for some peg dragging, fun as hell motorcycling. That is, until it gets dark! After it got dark the pristine pavement and freshly painted lines gave way to the road from HELL. We made it safely into town and found a hotel quickly. I was so glad to relax and kick back at the end of that day. That ride took a lot out of me!
We hadn’t done laundry for a week so I asked our new hotel manager friend, Celso, if we could use their facility. He was happy to oblige and he pointed out that their main machine broke down a few weeks back and we would have to use an older machine which required us to do some manual work between cycles. To make a long story short, I fixed the broken washing machine in exchange for our stay at the hotel.
While in Puerto Escondido we hooked back up with Becka, the Australian girl who had couchsurfed with us in Mexico City. She was attending Spanish school in town and snuck Dexter into her class for some free Salsa lessons one day and art and crafts the next. We also struck out with Becka to give surfing a try and we both experienced moderate success. Dex was even able to get to his feet and ride a wave in for quite some time! This I do know: there is a reason all the surfer dudes are buff, surfing is really hard work! Two hours and we were both exhausted. The next day I had sore muscles in my shoulders that I didn’t even know existed previously. Puerto Escodido involved a lot of trying to stay cool during the day and luckily our hotel had a pool. This was our first stay, on the entire trip, that had a pool! We did experience our first theft of the trip; also, some bastard got into my tank saddle bag and stole my Redwings hat. That was all they took. Clearly, they know true value when they see it down here.
After Puerto Escondido we decided to head to San Cristobal de las Casas. We have been excited about getting to Chiapas and tried to get there in one day but ended up stopping short due to nightfall and ended up in Salina Cruz. We didn’t really get a chance to check out the city much but it seemed like a small port town without much to see, and kind of dirty. We were fortunate, in that there was a Mexican Walmart across the street from our hotel and we we’re able to pig out for dinner on the cheap. Aside from the chicken dinner, we nearly ate an entire chocolate frosted, chocolate cake between the two of us. The next day we reached San Cristobal fairly early in the day and it afforded us the opportunity to shop around a little and find a place to our liking. We had followed signs we kept seeing all over town, pointing us towards a place call Don Juan’s. I would definitely recommend checking the place out if you’re ever there and it’s in your price range ($80/night). It is a really cool place and very nicely appointed. We were looking for something a little more budget and ended up staying in the motel next door. It had hot water, free pool table and the owner, Christofer, was really cool and hung out with us most of the night. Ok, San Cristobal was cool, and then we moved on.
We decided that we were going to make a run for the border early the next day, find out how long that takes us, then figure out our next destination from there. Well, the border crossing went fairly easy and we managed to get through immigration and customs on both sides of the border in about 2 ½ hours. At that point we decided we should try to make it to our destination in San Andres Itzapa since the GPS said it was only 3 ½ hours away. It was after 3 hours of riding that I noticed that our estimated time until arrival never decreased on the GPS as we drove. Mexico was a Garmin map that came with the unit. The remainder of Central America was downloaded from open source maps on the internet and obviously my GPS didn’t know how to calculate ETA using this map. Again we find ourselves on a crazy, curving, pothole filled, unmarked mountain road as it is getting dark. Luck smiled upon us at this point, just as the fog was starting to drop on us and it got very dark (It gets dark really fast when you’re driving through mountains that go straight, and I mean STRAIGHT UP 3,000 ft. all around you). We rolled into Quetzaltenango and the crazy, curving, pothole filled, unmarked mountain road suddenly turned into an absolutely perfect, brand new, four lane divided highway. We had finally encountered the Pan American Highway and it was beautiful! The rest of the way into town was a breeze as we drove past a thunderstorm passing over Lake Atitlan. And there you have it. We are now in San Andres Itzapa, Guatemala. It is perfectly situated between Lake Atitlan, Guatemala City and Antigua and its accompanying volcanoes. It’s hard to decide where we want to visit on our first trip out of San Andres Itzapa. Probably Antigua.