It doesn’t feel as if there’s much to tell about 350km of road-riding. We’re back up high again, and it’s blissfully cool, verging on cold at night, with warm but not hot days. San Cristobal will probably be our last entry in Mexico before we venture into Guatemala. “Progress” at last, after being in Mexico since mid-November.

We’ve both been doing a lot of iPod listening to while away the road-miles, and have discovered the usefulness of podcasts. So we’ve been listening to lots of different things from the 2010 Reith Lectures to A History of the World in 100 Objects and various other bits and pieces. These fill up the time, and are free, which is an improvement on audiobooks which definitely aren’t!

The route continued on the flat Istmo de Tehuantepec past an enormous wind farm to a welcome climb away from the coast at San Pedro Tapanatepec. Sarah hit 10 000km nearly 2 days ahead of me as she got ahead of the game with some solo trips in Silver City; but we’re both feeling as if we’ve cycled a significant distance now.

We had a morning of glorious tourism on a lancha (river boat) doing a 3 hour round trip up into the Cañon del Sumidero from Chiapa de Corzo. This gorge with limestone walls a thousand metres high at points carves its way through the mountains north of Tuxtla Gutierrez, and has a hydroelectric dam at the northern end. Knowing that we then needed to get to San Cristobal that afternoon in order to catch Ned and Charlotte who we’d met in Oaxaca, we have to admit we cheated a bit on the 70km climb. After 14km of steady chugging, Sarah managed to thumb down a passing truck, and we enjoyed a breezy 50km standing in the back :-)

Now we’re planning our idiosyncratic progress into Guatemala, via a loop to take in the Mayan ruins at Palenque, so the next update will be from somewhere in Guatemala. We ended up staying 3 days rather than pushing straight on, so Sarah got the chance to mooch around with the camera – much fun :-)