After a fun, low-key week on Caye Caulker with Grammy and Papa, it was time to say goodbye. We went to the water-taxi pier with them and watched them board the boat back to Belize City.

Our last night of goofing off

Hasta Luego!

One last lunch on the beach

We stayed in the “Red Caboose House” (our VRBO rental) one more night. Early the next morning we boarded a boat to Chetumal, México. This saved us the long (5-hour) bus ride from Belize City.

At the back pier on Caye Caulker

Chetumal ended out being pretty nice. We walked to a restaurant near the waterfront and had some amazing Ceviche for dinner. We commented that it felt good to be back in México. Belize has a much more Caribbean feel to it, and lots of the wonderful foods we’ve grown to love weren’t available there. We couldn’t even get limes and avocados on the island. Although to be fair, there is a shortage of limes right now.

Our hotel in Chetumal had a great pool.

We had one afternoon in Mexico City on our way back, which we occupied with a bus tour of the city.

During our last couple of days in Belize we got some very good news about the van. Leanne, our hostess at Overlander Oasis, had been calling the Ford dealership to bug them about the status of repairs to our van. They said they had fixed a partially blocked fuel line, and Leanne and Calvin went to pick it up for us. They test drove it and reported that it was running great, even when going up hills!

After two more days of planes, busses, and automobiles, we arrived back in Oaxaca. It took us a full day to move all of our stuff from Calvin and Leanne’s storage room back into the van, do some laundry and restock on groceries, and then we decided that we’d try one more time to get our diesel stove running better. That took another day, and on the third morning we were finally ready to depart, nearly 5 weeks after we had first arrived in Oaxaca.

Taking the kitchen apart to work on the stove. This time we put in an access panel to make it easier to get to.

Meanwhile, Jen and Quinn went to Oaxaca to drive the cars some more.

We made it about 20 miles the next morning when the van lost power. We pulled over and after a couple of minutes of rough idling the engine died. Needless to say we were feeling pretty low at this point. I can honestly say that the thought crossed my mind to leave the van on the side of the road, hitchhike back to town and fly home! Although where is home now, without the van? Our storage locker?

Before making such a rash decision I checked whether the fuel pump was working. It wasn’t, and fortunately we had a spare in the back of the van. After an hour of cursing and one diesel-soaked shirt, the van was running once again. We turned around and once again headed back to Oaxaca. Jen had called Leanne to let her know that we would be returning to stay there for the night, and they met us at their gate with a cold beer.

We didn’t want to leave again without a spare fuel pump on board (at this point I often feel like we should be towing a spare van behind us) and we were able to find one that could be there in a couple of days. So after one more day of waiting the fuel pump arrived, and the next morning (our 3rd attempt) we departed once again.

We covered over 300 miles that day, and thankfully the van ran just fine. Even though we were a little nervous as we started out, it felt good to be on the road again. On our way from Oaxaca to Chiapas we drove through the Pacific side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec – the winds here are legendary (blowing from the Caribbean to the Pacific Ocean through a low section of the Sierra mountains) and they did not disappoint us. The crosswinds on the highway were noticeable and we saw the largest wind farm we’ve ever seen along our route.

The Eurus Wind Farm consists of 167 turbines with a capacity of 250 MW.

The next morning we visited the Sima de Las Cotorras, a sinkhole in the ground that is home to thousands of Green Parrots. We went for a hike around the sinkhole and had a good lunch of tamales at the restaurant overlooking the hole. We spotted lots of birds, including the parrots, as well as some lizards and huge ants.

A Vermillion Flycatcher

You can just make out the parrots in this photo.

Each morning the parrots leave their nests in the sinkhole and fly out to hunt.