Our journey has begun . So far we have spent one night in Merida, One night in Campeche and are now at Coatzalcoalas, Tabasco. The grassland and hills are beautiful. The hotels and meals have been very nice. This is an oil refining town...impressive operations and we saw many oil platforms offshore, not far out from lovely beaches witih only a few people on them. You could sure have a beach to yourself here. I really liked the  banana, coconut, ginger and sugar cane groves and all the healthy grass cows and horses.

The roads to this point have been very good and far more interesting than the Cancun - Merida tollway.  We had a very interesting experience yesterday at a toll both just east of Villahermosa.  The 6 lanes of the toll booth appeared to be closed, with all of the overhead signs showing red Xs, but a number of people standing in the road were waving us forward.  As we approached, we could see that people were camping and sleeping in the central lane.  Arriving at the booth, a woman told us that the toll was usually 80 pesos, but today only 50 pesos.  We paid it, and the people manually raised the gate to let us through.  A short distance further down the road, the Federal Police had a check point, stopping all vehicles and scanning them.  We surmised that the crowd of people we had encountered were migrants en route to the US border, that they were avoiding the checkpoint, but that somehow, the toll collectors had turned control of the federal highway toll gates over to them to allow them to raise some money for food and necessities.  This concept was affirmed further along the road as we encountered 2 additional groups of people further along the road, carrying belongings and gathered in areas where they appeared to be getting some level of assistance (food, water, shelter) from the local community.