It took almost ten and a half hours to get from Belize City to Cancun by the ADO overnight bus. We arrived at the northern border town of Santa Elena in Belize around 11pm. It was the most expensive departure tax of our 100 plus day trip by far – $18.75pp. After waiting for all the passengers to get through immigration, we took the short bus drive over the border into Mexico, where again, we had to wait for everyone to go through immigration and suffer random baggage searches. By now it was almost 2am and we still had 5 hours to go!

Mexican customs

Mexican customs

We hadn’t done our homework about the drop off location as thoroughly as we should have. The bus stopped at Playa del Carmen, followed by the Cancun airport, and then our planned dropoff of downtown Cancun. Andrea was panicking about not being ready for work at 7am and we had only just arrived in the center of town. If we had looked on a map beforehand we would have seen that it’s closer from the airport to the Marriott – oh well we had made it to the room by 7:30am.

Cancun is a big concrete jungle, full of chain hotels and tourists – we will not be heading there again anytime soon. We were very glad we only had a single night. All other travelers we had spoken with had avoided it, and had either arrived on the day of their flight or stayed in Playa del Carmen, located an hour south along the coast.

For the final evening of our Central American adventure we found a very nice Mexican restaurant on the Caribbean. We both sat discussing the previous 105 days and how funny it was that a week later we would be flying to Rio for Carnival.

The final night or our Central American adventure

The final night or our Central American adventure

Cancun beach

Cancun beach

We had an uneventful flight from Cancun into Fort Lauderdale and the first leg of our Around The World adventure was completed. See you next week Rio…

Central America by the Numbers:

  • 2 nights in a Nicaraguan hospital
  • 1 emergency room visit
  • 28 different hotel beds
  • 8 nights with a shared bathroom
  • 2 rental cars
  • 2333 miles traveled
  • 2 taxis with flat tires
  • 6 volcanoes climbed
  • 2 nights spent on buses
  • 596 hours Andrea worked
  • 10 days of Spanish school
  • 6 items misplaced – comb, headlamp, sunglasses, socks, shampoo, conditioner
  • 3 flights
  • 7 countries visited
  • 106 days away

January 30th – February 1st 2013

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