MX 199, from Palenque to San Cristobal de las Casas

Like most rural highways in Mexico, MX 199 is the only paved road for miles around. Property with frontage along the right of way is considered prime real estate, if only due to ease of access, so even when there’s no actual town nearby, it’s not uncommon to see houses (and tire repair shops) on any flat section of easement wide enough to accommodate them. Driving south from Palenque, we saw many of these isolated homesteads spread out along the road.
(Note that most of the images in this post are screen grabs harvested from Michael Fritz’s GoPro videos, shot through the windows as we drove)









Isolated homes along the highway south of Palenque, near the Rio Tulia

This first half of the route, between Palenque and Ocosingo, was already familiar to us, after our aborted attempt to make this same drive two weeks earlier. We’d actually driven it twice, there and back again, and I remembered the road very well, one switchback after another, following one overloaded truck after another as they struggled up (and down) the steep grades. A closeup view of the map reveals just how many narrow curves have to be negotiated along the way. It’s a bit like trailing a long strand of spaghetti that was caught in a tornado, and flash-frozen!



Driving mountain roads like MX 199 is my favorite kind of fun. After I finished college (half a century ago?!), I spent two years driving all over the northern Andes in a Dodge Powerwagon that I shipped to Colombia from the U.S., and those two years were some of the happiest times of my youth. The mountains of Chiapas were no match for the Colombian Andes, but with all the lush tropical vegetation, there were more than enough similarities to tickle my nostalgia bone. When the road was clear ahead of me, I sailed around those beautiful curves in a state of bliss.





Scenes along the road, MX 199 between Palenque and Ocosingo: beautiful mountain curves, my favorite kind of fun!







Passing those trucks became a minor obsession, but once I learned the rules of the road, that got a little easier. There’s no such thing as a passing lane, but if a truck in front of you moves over toward the right shoulder, and then puts on their left turn signal, they’re telling you that the road ahead is clear, and that it’s safe for you to pass.

Some stretches were more populated than others, with houses side-by-side, and on both sides of the road. Still not quite a town, but definitely a unique community with its own sense of identity. In most parts of Mexico, we saw welcoming smiles from the people we passed in rural areas. In the Chiapas Highlands, we saw resentment. They were, for the most part, too polite to say it, but what they were all thinking was “Yanqui go home!”





The famous Pan American Highway passes through San Cristobal de Las Casas on the way to Guatemala, but there aren’t all that many travelers attempting that route these days. There’s an ongoing problem with criminal gangs in some parts of Central America, so people who might otherwise have done that trip are mostly staying away.



The vehicle in this photo is an exception. They’re engaged in a “Pan American Expedition” (according to a sign stenciled on the side of their rig), and they’ve found a unique solution to the worrisome crime problem: their camper is a converted armored car, complete with gun ports!



Approaching Ocosingo, the largest town along the route and the scene of frequent problems with the Zapatistas, we ran into the first military road block we’d seen along this road. The soldiers were polite, if curious, wanting to know where we were from, and where we were going.

Next up: Ocosingo, and on to Oxchuc, heartland of the Zapatistas