Day 9 - Tlacotalpan - Pijujiapan

Day 9
Tlacotalpan – Pijujiapan

We got up, took cold, refreshing showers and headed to the truck by 6am (we got to sleep in today!). Mexico is so pretty! Lots of beautiful fields, lush shrubbery, and hills of green. It’s been neat to see Mexico from the north to the south and how the landside changes throughout. We’ve seen desert, agriculture, lots of hills, ocean, palm trees, lush thick trees, etc. Nothing too exciting today – just lots of driving. It was pretty warm today (got to the 90’s at one point) and very humid. We climbed lots of grades today and then descended – very pretty. Mexico has lots of toll roads and we use them whenever we can because the roads are so much better. The cost adds up pretty fast because we pay by the axle – truck and trailer. The cost has ranged between 30 pesos and 300 pesos depending on the road. The roads are surprisingly nicer than I thought they would be – but there are millions of topes (speed bumps) that are all over the road. We’re going along at 60mph and all of a sudden there are topes for a few blocks and we slam on the brakes to go over them. But our truck takes it like a champ.
One road that we thought we’d have to go on has extreme switch backs down a grade which would be hard to do with our trailer, but we were going to try and have John and I go ahead to spot while Tristan drove. But praise God – a road they had been building was just finished and it replaced the switchbacks so we didn’t have to go down them!


We’re stopped for the night in a nice hotel to rest. We’re all pretty tired. We are an hour and a half from the border of Guatemala and we cross tomorrow morning at 7 (yep – that means a 4am wake up call). We hope to make it to Guatemala city at the least tomorrow.

398 miles
10 hours.