Mexico: Access Denied

Put simply: 14 hours, 13 dollars in bribes, 9 buses, 6 cities and 2 boarders later Felicitas and I were finally able to renew our visas.

Put not so simply: Yesterday Felicitas and I decided that it was the day to make the notorious trip to the Mexican boarder in search of a 90 day extension aka a new visa. The technical rules of the game are that you’re supposed to leave Guatemala for up to 72 hours and then reenter. The not so technical rules of the game are find a boarder official willing to bend a few rules, be prepared to hand over a bit of cash and then get a new visa. At the first boarder we went to the lady wanted nothing to do with our explanations about how we are volunteers in Xela, need to work tomorrow (a bit of a white lie) and want to get the visa taken care of today. At first she just told us that we would need to go to the capital to get a visa extension (Mind you that the capital is 8 hours in the opposite direction and offers worse chances of success). Finally she suggested that we cross the boarder (Tecunuman) and then try and reenter though another boarder (El Carmen) that same day. As this conversation was going on, another person walked up who seemed much more friendly toward our circumstances. He suggested we walk over and talk to the Mexican officials to see what we could figure out. Under the sweltering, staggering heat we crossed the long bridge to the Mexican side. Upon hearing the situation, the ladies on the Mexican side were quick to negotiate a bribe but said that they would need cooperation from Guatemala before they could do anything. So they sent a man back to Guatemala to set a price for us, or so we thought. 45 minutes later the man returned and told us to go back and talk to Guatemala. When we got back to Guatemala we were still dealing with the same lady and she seemed even more unwilling to help us then before. As everything was becoming increasingly mixed up and confusing, we decided it would be best just to cross into Mexico and try to exit at El Carmen. When we told this to the lady she flat out told us we couldn’t go into Mexico. That’s right, we were denied access to Mexico. Lets all take a moment to note the irony. She told us that the man that had come to talk to them told them that he wasn’t go to let us through therefore she couldn’t do anything. We really had no idea what exactly happened, but after 20 minutes of trying to talk to this lady (trying being the key word as she was stoutly ignoring us) we realized there was no way we were going to get though the boarder. This left us, as you can imagine, frustrated and uncertain as to what we should do. Walking back toward the bus terminal we decided to head for El Carmen. Two buses later we arrived at El Carmen. Before approaching the authorities Felicitas and I established our game plan… be calm, honest and simply explain the situation. As Felicitas has a generally soft demeanour I let her do the talking. (Side note: A couple times during the day Felicitas looked at me and really sweetly just reminded me to calm down… it’s so amazing to have friends who can call you on those things without making you feel bad in the least). The lady at El Carmen turned out to be really nice. She was smiling and joking with us. After a bit of talking to her she agreed to help us out for 100 Quetzales (about $13). She originally asked for 200Q but Felicitas pulled the whole “we are students, working for free in Guatemala” to talk her down. With everything on the Guatemala side in order our next step was to go to Mexico and get a stamp saying that we entered the country. This time it was my turn to do the talking. Again the guy was really nice, although he did ask quite a few questions. My tactic: be vague. “I don’t really know how long we’re going to be there for. We’re volunteers and Xela and we just wanted to check out this area,” etc. After getting our stamp to leave the country instead of actually leaving we blended into the crowd and headed back toward Guatemala. At first we couldn’t find the lady we originally talked to, BUT we did run into the director of our Spanish school and the guy who is overseeing my volunteer work (they’re married). Coincidence… some might call it that. We talked to them for a while and told them the whole story of our day. They helped us to find the original lady we had talked to. Minutes later we paid our 100Q and had our visa for 90 more days in Guatemala. Edna and Mynor continued on with their vacation in Mexico and Felicitas and I were faced with the daunting task of getting back to Xela. It took us three buses to get to Coatepeque where we thought we could catch a 1 hour bus back to Xela. Little did we know what lay ahead. We did find a bus back to Xela… this bus back not only happened to be the last bus of the day, but also a bus that went through Reu (Reu being a city 3 hours out of the way). With little options we boarded the bus and began the 4 hour ride through sweltering heat and traffic. About one hour into the ride Felicitas turned to me and told me to tell her a random story. And thus to pass the time, we told each other random stories from our lives until night finally descended and the bus finally climbed up into the cool mountain air of Xela.