We left San Cristobal with ceaseless tears in our eyes. Chiapas is one the most extraordinary places – not only in Mexico, but in the world. With its wonderful nature, culture, Zapatistas, history, and, of course, people, it deserves a “ten.”

I can only describe its people’s gentleness by giving an example:

The cute owner of our hotel is named Carolina. For safety reasons, she made us park our car a few metres away inside the garden of one of her relative’s garden. One morning when we got there, we saw another car was parked in front of the garage door. Carolina apologized to us a thousand times like it was her fault. I mean, she made sounds I interpreted as apologizing. I tried to give her consolation and tell her it was meaningless for her to be sorry, by making similar sounds and assisting those sounds with gestures. She went around asking the shopkeepers if anyone knew the owner of that car. She didn’t get any answers. Then came two swarthy Mexican boys, and they realized we had been looking for them and seemed embarrassed. They apologized. And they repeatedly thanked Caroline for her kindness.

Now, let us assume all this happens in İstanbul. First you swear a mouthful to the owner of the car once you find the parked car. Then you elevate the windshield wipers and then mutter and shout “to which disrespectful being does this belong, etc., etc…” Then two people with cokes in their hands turn around and say “why do you keep shouting like we went to sleep? We just left the car for a minute to buy cokes”, like it is all your fault that you are angry. Then they say “ok, cut it short.” And of course this leads fighting, getting hurt, and in some cases, if they are crazy enough, one of the sides ending up dead. Am I exaggerating? No, really, what do you ever fight in İstanbul for? Girl issues, parking, yielding, pushing with shoulder while walking, generally leads to rotund swearing followed by fists and then extra materials flying around, with even mothers getting involved.

In short, we hit ourselves on the terrific roads of Chiapas, out of gentle San Cristobal. We greeted Zapatista autonomies, sometimes stopped by and had a chat with them, hopped on Hidalgos (you know, the speed bumps), grinned at police check points (since we are tourists, thus their bread and butter, they don’t touch us), and arrived Palenque.

According to the most famous book (a classic, according to Manuel) on Mayas that Fikret is reading, Palenque is the most beautiful antic Maya city. We found a room at the Maya Bell Hotel by the city – not the city centre, I mean the antic city.

Maya Bell is a typical traveller’s place. You know, sort of a place where people exchange ideas on where to stop and eat on the roads, talk behind tourists of mass tourism and love nature, chat about yoga and their adventures in India… Ooops, I think this kind of description was made about another place in these pages… So let it be a second edition. An assumption for these kinds of places is that “Hit the Road, Jack” should be sung when people are cheerful and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” should be sung when people are sad, and having the worst kind of an acoustic guitar is a must. That worst guitar here was accompanied by a microphone, and the guitarist was a Paco de Lucia wannabe Taco de Lucia. And he believed he could sing.

Yet, apart from these, the ambiance was magnificent. The sounds of monkeys in the jungle heard at moments the guitar was muted were delightful. We got exposed to the music while we wrote our blog, but then we couldn’t update it because there was no Internet. And after that we landed on our beds like Garfield and slept.

The next day, after we went downtown Palenque and didn’t like it, we had a fast breakfast, updated our blog and headed to the antic city.

Since I am not fond of visiting stones, I had a quick look around, liked what I saw, sat down in a corner and communicated with people through sudoku, while the other two wandered around for some time.

The Palenque you see in the photos is only 5 percent of the whole city, and the rest is under the ground and woods. Yet even the 5 percent I saw was impressive enough.

We didn’t want to be a part of the dinner at Maya Bell like last night, so we ate at a Mexican restaurant owned by a sympathetic brother and after that we went to our room at Maya Bell. Our beverage adventure for the night had started with mezcal, and we had to finish it with rakı of course. Then we went to bed.

We went to bed early because we had to wake up early in the morning. The road to Campeche was not in Chiapas anymore but in Campeche state. And according to our map, it was approximately 400 kilometres. It gets funnier after this point. After driving for a while we saw a sign saying Campeche 315 km. We said “Nice.” “Okay, we made a bad calculation. Now we are 50 kilometres ahead of our plan.” Then, just as we drived for 20 kilometres or so, we saw a sign saying Campeche 240 km. We said “No way.” And the distance kept getting shorter and shorter fastly. 220, 180, 160, 140… Then… 215! It was like a joke. It was even more ridiculous while on the road, but I won’t give the details because I don’t want to bore you. I think the guys who make these road signs in Mexico drink to much tequila.

I think they built Campeche by combining the plans of San Puebla in Oaxaca and an small city in United States. It’s a clean city, with no people walking in the streets and nothing much to for us to do.

What do you do in a situation like this? You guessed right! Of course, rakı and fish… We opened our Lonely Planet, and searched for a good place. And the book said “Go to Parador Gastronomico de Cockteleros.” And we did what it said. Its name makes you think the United Nations conventions are being held there. It was impossible not to be curious. We left our car and took a cab. However, it turned out that the only great thing about the place was its name. It was a tasteless place with tasteful fish. The weather was unpleasant too, and we were tired. We ate our fish quickly, saved rakı to ourselves and went back to the hotel. We drank for a while, and then surrendered to our weariness. We canceled the plans to stay there for another night and went to bed.

Our next destination became Merida, the capital of Yucatan state.

Well, finally a drive that wasn’t tiring, and finally a magnificent city… Since I have to compare, I should say here too looked a bit like Oaxaca. Tortillas were not as well fried as they were in Oaxaca, but were more like dough, resembling the ones in Chiapas. But there wasn’t much problem apart from that. Lively, cheerful, typical Mexican metropolis…

We walked around the streets as usual. Nur felt tired and went to bed. Fikret and I wandered around for some time and watched a play in zocalo for a while (reminder: zocalo is the name given to the wide spaces set up against the cathedrals in every city). Our being no fans of theatre added with the fact that we understood none of things they said made us realize what a meaningless thing were doing, and we began wandering again.

There was free Internet in the park, so not all of the people there were interested in the carnival. I, personally, had never seen so many men lined on the benches with laptops in my life.

The next day, with the suggestion of a friend in Turkey, we headed to a fisher village called Celestun. Since not to drink rakı there would be rudest thing, we didn’t take our car.

Celestun is a nice coastal town. We opened a bottle of rakı among pelicans, birds we had never heard of, fishermen, and flamingos (which we didn’t see but Nur did). And we didn’t fail to drink a considerable amount before we closed it.

The people of Celestun were hospitable, and the place was cheap. They sold us fish as big as grouper for 80 pesos (6.2 dollars) each.

Of course we immediately added rakı next to fish. In the evening there was an event in San Antuan square, a place close to the zocalo. First a folklore performance they called ballet, and then a concert.

We inhaled a bit of Maya/Yucatan culture and headed to our hotel.

This morning something happened, which actually should have happened two days ago. A tourist man from United States knocked our door and said “Hey, aren’t you Turkish?” And Nur gave the natural answer. The man said “There’a restaurant over there, and it is owned by a Turkish guy called Osman. A Jewish guy from New York who knows Turkish and likes Turkey told me about it.” Nur, slightly dazzled, could only say “Well, thanks.” Strange things happen in this world.

The place he talked about was just on the opposite of our hotel, beneath the parking building we kept our car. So we went there and said “Is there somebody here called Osman?” And we found him in no time.

Our new friend Osman is a sympathetic guy. He has been living here for 20 years, and lost his Turkish accent a bit. He fell in love with a Mexican 20 years ago. He packed up and came here. He is married to her now and has two kids, aged 15 and 8. We had this talk while drinking coffee at his restaurant.

As a matter of fact Fikret and I were passing in front of that restaurant one day ago and we said “Doesn’t here look like the pancake restaurants in İstanbul? Let’s sit down there.” That’s the place. Osman’s way of preparing tortillas was inspired by the ones in İstanbul.

Both he and his wife are sympathetic people. We wished we had met a day before and had rakı together. It wasn’t only us. He too had to keep his wish inside, too. All we could do was to present him a Yeni Rakı. And he gave us some valuable information about our route. And he talked about his business a bit. He had rented four or five shops. He is managing a stationary, the restaurant, the travelling agency of the hotel on the opposite, and the restaurant of the hotel. We hailed to his entrepreneur spirit.

Okay, you’ll ask what the title of this entry has anything to do with what I have written. It doesn’t. I stole the title from a photo a friend of mine had taken during his military service. Our dear car Kukuracha had its wheels turned so much lately that I couldn’t come up with a better title.

So with Osman, we put an end to our visit in this beautiful city and headed towards Chichen Itza.

Photos: Fikret Bekler as usual.