Still here in San Cristobál de Las Casas

Today, I accomplished something I never thought I'd achieve. It was so bloody difficult to pay for a tour I'd booked on El Chepe (a very scenic voyage through a copper canyon, which can not be achieved by any method of transport, apart from that train), that I had just about given up. I thought I was going to have to travel there and put cash on a counter, to be able to book. And that was just not possible. I'm so far away and I didn't want to go there (even if I had known where the office was) ahead of time. Mexico is much bigger than I thought and it takes an age to get from anywhere to anywhere else you might want to go. It might involve a bus trip of 12 hours or more (like the one that brought me from Oaxaca to here in San Cristobal de Las Casas) or a project to find a travel agent that deals with airlines. (The majority of them, and there are many, only deal with tour packages from a certain town/city and not at all with airlines.) I knew that I couldn't book my own tickets online. I didn't have enough information.

Well, I had tried to pay many times for my El Chepe train journey on a link the Chepe Explora sent me, but my payment was rejected each time. I had to put my Telstra sim back into the phone to call NAB, to be assured that they weren't rejecting my payment. It was the Mexican tour company doing that. (Each day I use the Telstra sim, they charge me $10. Telcel in Mexico charges me about the same amount for a month!) 

Then I tried something else after the tour company, over many WhatsApp messages, let me have their banking details, bank address, business address, etc. One problem was that I had to keep putting my Telstra sim back in the phone to get codes from NAB so that they would allow my money to flow from my account (even though I'd already changed my phone number to the Mexican number on the NAB app). 

There were two addresses of twenty words each to enter in the Foreign Transactions section of the NAB app, and when I took too long, the app would shut (for security reasons) and I had to start the whole thing again. The app kept rejecting the stress marks used in Spanish words, so I had to keep starting again for that reason, too. It took me four hours, at least, today, to pay for my tour on El Chepe. BUT I WON! I managed to pay for the tour before they cancelled my booking!

Today is Monday 08/05/20230. On Wednesday, I'm taking a tour to Palenque from San Cristobal de Las Casas, and to avoid being on the road for 4 hours there and 4 hours back in one day, after hiking up and down a mountain in between the road legs, I decided to stay in Palenque at the end of the tour, and not return to San Cristobal de Las Casas. I'd seen there was an airport in Palenque, but when I tried to book a flight somewhere else from there online, every search I did showed there were no flights available. 

I thought I was going to have a hard time getting to Los Mochis to start my El Chepe tour. But I learned it wasn't that the airlines were fully booked.

The  Chepe Explora tour begins on 18/05/2023. Today is 8/05/2023. I thought that I should have booked flights earlier, etc, but I found out today, from a travel agent who deals with flights, that although there is an "international airport" in Palenque, it is closed. The nearest airport is a two-hour drive away. 

(This is not very interesting, I'm afraid, but as there's no-one reading this, I can be as boring as I like, recording the frustrating details of planning travel without the insider knowledge of a local travel agent.)

I found a travel agent who can book flights by rolling up to one that never has anything to do with flights. She told me where the office of the travel agent who books flights was. I found my way there with my usual spacial/directional incapacities, and managed to get flights which will take me into and out of Los Mochis so that I can board my train and return to Mexico City after my train journey, in time to catch my flight back to Oz.

Let's hope everything goes well, that no flights are cancelled or postponed, and I get to the airport in time for all of them. Fingers crossed please!