# Boss! Da Plane! Da Plane!



## Hound Dog (Jan 18, 2009)

Just this morning, I drove my darlin´wife and her associate to the Guadalajara airport from Lake Chapala (a short and easy drive as the airport is a short distance away from the north shore of the lake in Tlajomulco) to take that (relatively) new Volaris non-stop flight to Tuxtla Gutierrez which leaves at noon and, along with Vivaaerobus´s early morning non-stop flights, means two hours between the two cities on comfortable equipment with no need to (shudder) stop over in Mexico City and thus take up the better part of a day to get from Guadalajara to Chiapas cooling your heels in the DF airport for up to a few hours. 

This may seem like much ado about nothing to some of you but it is indicative of the substantial changes in the transportation infrastructure of Mexico since we first moved to the Chiapas Highlands in 2006. For those of you interested in visiting Southern Mexico and the states of Chiapas and Oaxaca, among other places, but who were put off by the challenges of getting there, I assure you times have changed for the better - actually for the much better.

Not only are there now non-stop flights from Jalisco to Chiapas but the highway network between West-Central Mexico and Southern Mexico has been greatly improved over the seven year period. Using the drive from Lake Chapala´s north shore to San Cristóbal de Las Casas and environs in the Chiapas Highlands, as an example, easily modified for the reader´s own itinerary since this is the way most drivers would get from Central to Southern Mexico, the obstacles in one´s way back in 2006 included the necessity of driving through the heart of Mexico City over constantly changing sub-routes with the ever-present threat of major traffic tie-ups or that city´s thuggish cops out looking for mordida - especially extorted from drivers of foreign plated cars - and negotiating the narrow, twisting mountain roads skirting precipitious cliffs to the otherwise difficult to access Chiapas Highlands. Today, one bypasses the Mexico City urban zoo on the new Arco Norte Cuota (a modern state-of-the-art expressway from the Michoacan/Mexico State Line to Puebla) and the once-harrowing mountain road from Tuxtla to San Cristóbal has been replaced by an expressway that has cut the driving time from 2 1/2 hours to 45 minutes. 

I would say tahat the aforementioned roadway improvements have cut a good four hours off of a once-difficult drive and that´s if one does not run into difficulties getting through Mexico City as in pre-Arco Norte days.

There are many more improvements in highway transportation coming. For instance, when they finish the new cuota from Oaxaca City to Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, it will be feasible to drive the Guadalajara to Chiapas route through the heart of Oaxaca State over excellent roads as an alternative route to Veracruz State.

No, I do not work for the Southern Mexico Chamber of Commerce and it´s no skin off my back if you guys reading this in central and northern Mexico pay me no heed but since we´ve been thoroughly impressed by the beauty of Southern Mexico for the last seven years and by the significant improvements in transportation there, I decided to pass it on.

Oh; the _"Da Plane_" bit which started this thread referred to the Tuxtla Gutierrez airport which is so lightly used that the air traffic controller only works on Thursdays from 10:00AM to noon.


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