San Cristobal

Lonely Planet describe Madre Tierra as 'San Cristobal's best breakfast place', which sounded like just what we needed when we arrived on Wednesday morning after our 14 hour bus ride. We were greeted promisingly with the aromas from the attached bakery as we settled down in the courtyard garden and ordered our food. The fresh bread that came with our coffees more than lived up to expectations and we were almost in danger of not leaving room for the tasty huevos mexicanos and chilaquiles that followed. (Just to make sure that breakfast hadn't been so good just because it followed such a long journey, we returned to Madre Tierra for thursday's breakfast. It was still tasty and so we also visited the bakery to stock up on brownies and cinnamon raisin buns for our next bus journey!)

 Matt relaxing in the garden of Madre Tierra after our big bus trip




We spent most of Wednesday wandering lazily around the sights of  San Cristobal sampling some very good local coffee. We managed to see all of the rather pretty local churches, and of course Dr Claire couldn't leave town without a trip to the Mayan Medicine Museum!

 Claire enjoying a Mexicano coffee (it has tequila in!)

 One of San Cristobal's many churches

On Thursday morning we got in a bit of altitude training and some more sightseeing before heading to the bus station for our 5 hour bus trip to Palenque.

 Matt got a bit left behind on our little morning jog!

 San Cristobal market

The buses so far have run pretty much on time but this bus didn't show up and everyone was transferred onto the next bus which left an hour later. We didn't think that was too bad , but they hadn't let us know that this bus took a somewhat longer route to Palenque. When we told we were still about 2 hours away after being on the road for 7 hours, we could at least console ourselves with the fact that we could add Tabasco to the list of Mexican states we had travelled through. Oh, and Matt informed Claire that she had now had a glimpse of what the majority of the country is actually like, as she had got to experience the smoggy traffic jams most of Mexico lives with.  Claire was just relieved that we´d made our morning visit to the bakery at Madre Tierra.