Taking the night bus to Palenque

By now, I have gotten used to the backpacking life: choose a place, book a hostel, choose a bus, pack my backpack, and off we go. Currently, I am together with my friend Elena on the freezing bus from Bacalar to Palenque. It's 1:58 am and we will be on the road for about 8 hours, so we will arrive around 10 am. Palenque is located in the east of Chiapas, if I understood correctly from Google Maps. And it's right in the jungle, where we will visit the Mayan ruins. Provided that we don't freeze on this bus. The bus arrived about half an hour late. We were already falling asleep at the bus station. The driver was also quite unfriendly, I showed him the ticket on my phone...he tried to scan it...'grande..grande..' he impatiently said. I quickly made the barcode bigger...still didn't work...'rio..rio.' - yeah, I have no idea, my Spanish skills definitely need improvement. He took out his phone, made the screen brighter...ok, rio apparently means bright...well, fine. At least Elena and I have two seats each, so we can lie down and sleep. Outside, the temperatures are a little over 20 degrees. Here on the bus, I'm wearing a sweater, cardigan, and scarf. Covered with a towel. The other passengers also brought blankets knowingly. To our horror, we found out that the bus doesn't even have a restroom.

We are incredibly tired because our journey started already at 7:30 pm in Mahahual. There should at least be a bus to Bacalar. We have to go there because the night bus to Palenque only departs from there. However, there was no bus to Bacalar. With our limited Spanish, we were able to share a taxi to Limones with a local. 60km. The three of us paid 350 Mexican pesos for that. That's about €17.50. From there, we took a collectivo - a minibus that can fit about 15 people - to Bacalar. Very adventurous indeed. And communication is only possible in Spanish. Hardly anyone speaks English here, except in the tourist areas. And even there, few speak good English. Now I will try to sleep a bit here. My legs are still cold and I hope I don't have to use the restroom.

I had to. However, we stopped every few hours for restroom breaks. When the bus suddenly stopped again, I thought, next restroom break, take the chance. But when everything in the bus remained dark and everyone was asleep, I looked through the curtain at the window: everything was dark. Hmm. I looked down the bus aisle, as we were sitting quite far back, and suddenly I saw a man in military clothing shining a flashlight in my face. Startled, I threw myself back in my seat and pretended to be asleep. But he kept walking and shining his flashlight row by row. Then he left and we continued driving. Phew, what was that? I wondered. The rest of the bus ride was calm and I slept most of the time. We reached Palenque around 11 am and it was sunny and warm when we got off the bus.