Chiapas, Without Reservations

Very Public Transportation

If you just want to see the highlights, scads of tour operators in Palenque and San Cristobal de las Casas -- Chiapas's main tourist hubs -- sell reasonably priced package tours. But we wanted to see the whole highway on an unscripted journey open to chance encounters and random weirdness. As such, we opted to travel on public transportation and eschew reservations, following an itinerary so vague that it verged on impressionist art. We did know we'd stick to Mexico, but that was only because there were few accessible sights on the Guatemalan side.

I loved the do-it-yourself approach, but it's not fast, efficient or even marginally luxurious. Almost no full-size buses serve the remote border area, so travelers rely on combis -- vans and microbuses that comfortably accommodate about 15 passengers. In practice, this means that "full" combis carry up to 25 passengers, and often their poultry. It can get tight.

But travelers face other complications. Most major attractions sit on side roads, not on the highway itself. When taxis weren't available to cover the extra miles, we begged rides with people we met along the way -- or we walked.

And military checkpoints! There are lots of them, especially on the road's desolate southern half, where soldiers search for drugs, firearms and undocumented immigrants passing through Mexico on their way north.

Chiapas is also home to the Zapatista rebels, who staged an armed uprising in 1994. While "rebels" and "drug smugglers" sound scary, they don't normally affect travelers. The Zapatistas are currently more a social movement than a violent rebel group, and the U.S. Embassy has no record of violence against tourists on the highway. An embassy official did stress that the area is very isolated.

What he didn't say is that this isolation breeds a sort of borderland alternate reality -- a world that's unpredictable, quirky and sometimes just plain weird.

I experienced it at our first stop: the Maya ruins of Palenque, near the Border Highway's northern end.

One of the most studied and heavily visited Maya sites, Palenque is an archaeological cover girl. Green, jungle-covered hills frame perfectly proportioned, gray-and-white limestone pyramids. Tourists stream in by the busload.

Along with most of the Maya world's great cities, Palenque collapsed in the ninth century. Our ponytailed, English-speaking guide, Raúl Morelos, offered several possible reasons why: overpopulation, civil strife and the possibility that Palenque's rulers "opened a door to a new dimension and walked right through it."

I hadn't considered the "new dimension" possibility, but I probably should have. We were, after all, camped at El Panchan, a hippie-commune-cum-travelers'-hangout that clearly inhabits a different astral plane.

Set in the dripping jungle between the modern town of Palenque and the ruins themselves, El Panchan has lodging, restaurants and a cross section of the international backpacker scene. Swiss girls with shiny faces and strappy tank tops sit by Italians and Frenchmen with roguish stubble. There are a few older folks, and plenty of pretentious bohemians -- white kids with dreadlocks and neo-gypsy girls with wide headbands and flowing skirts.

We pitched our tent at a campsite called "The Temple," a round wooden platform 10 feet above the jungle floor. Vines with huge leaves spiraled up the support bars, and a sizable tarantula clung to the tin ceiling above. At night, the distant noise of a band drifted through the drumming of rain.