Transit terrors

In the past week we bounced from rustic Havana past the tropical Caribbean outpost of Belize to the stunning Guatemalan highlands via a couple of seedy port towns. We spent five of the past seven days on buses, boats and planes, from air-conditioned coaches to water taxis and old American school buses in Belize and the infamous Guatemalan chicken buses.

The following is a big ol rant about our hellish 30-hour passage from Havana to Belize City via Cancun in Mexico. If you don’t like nightmare transit tales, best to tune out now. We thought we spread this trip over two days. It had seemed so easy – just a one hour flight from Havana to Cancun, a one hour mini bus to Playa del Carmen where we would spend the night, then a bus to Belize City changing at the Mexican border outpost of Chetumal.

As soon as we’d been dumped at the wrong airport terminal in Havana, I suspected it would be a mission. When we found the right terminal, we found out that our flight had been cancelled and that we would instead have to fly to Cancun via Mexico City, turning a one hour flight into two, two hour flights with a measly 45 minutes in between.

Belizean bus lines: second-hand US school buses

The connection in Mexico City was ambitious – in that 45 minutes we had to leave the plane, find luggage, have luggage screened and check in again. Naturally the plane was held up on the tarmac and our luggage took ages to arrive and we missed the flight. After waiting in the mammoth check in queue, we find out the next flight isn’t for another five hours and won’t arrive in Cancun until midnight - 8 hours after the original ETA. This left us without accommodation for the night as we had reserved a hostel in Playa, and it was now too late to catch a bus.

It is nearly 1am by the time we land in Cancun; we decide to head to the bus terminal to go directly to the border. We arrive 15 minutes after the last bus has left, so we bought tickets for the 5am bus and got comfy on the metal seats in the departure lounge.

We tried to get on the 5am, but were told we didn’t have the right tickets and that our bus hadn’t arrived. Nearly an hour later, the conductor admitted that we should have been on the bus, but the lady at the ticket window refused to put us on the next bus until we paid an extra 50%.

By this time we hadn’t slept in 24 hours, and were getting cranky after being continually stuffed around. So I let loose, in Spanish. I demanded that she put us on the next bus and said I wouldn’t pay a cent more because it wasn’t our fault the conductor stuffed up. When she wouldn’t comply, I demanded to see her boss. She said he wasn’t in until 6am but I kept at her until she relented and called the manager over, who immediately changed our tickets to allow us on the next bus.

The rest of the trip was blissfully uneventful. Six hours later we arrived at the Mexican border, crossed into Belize and spent another four hours bumping along on an old American school bus, with the wind in our hair and reggae blasting out of the sound system. Thirty hours after arriving at Havana airport, we made it to Belize city - with only a hike accross town in 30 plus degree heat with our packs standing between us and a shower/bed.

An upside to having our flight cancelled was that it affected several other travellers as well, and we met a really lovely kiwi couple who helped us pass the time when we were stuck in Mexico City.