After driving down Baja and to Mexico City in the last two years, this time I drove from California to the Yucatán Peninsula in southeastern Mexico. Highlights included seeing flamingos in Celestún above and jumping into Ik Kil cenote below, plus visiting many world heritage sites along the way. Look for my individual site reports and coming summaries, Pyramids of Mexico and Colonial Mexico.

Recent headlines and photos of several burning vehicles have inflamed fears of travel to Mexico. Many Americans have a bad attitude about Mexico, wrongly believing it is too dangerous to drive around, imagining bandaleros and corrupt police demanding bribes around every corner. Some Americans apparently enjoy horror stories about Mexico, while ignoring gun violence in the US. I have now driven to almost every state in Mexico without encountering any crime. I spoke with other foreigners who have been visiting Mexico annually for decades, and they also did not experience crime. This trip, I went through a couple of checkpoints and had my car searched once, exactly the same as in Texas.

Of course, there is serious crime and violence in Mexico. So are the statistics accurate or are the reports overblown? I had a long conversation with my Spanish teacher about some common stories. She thinks that in most cases American tourists are not worth the trouble for criminals, who prefer to prey on poor Mexicans whose cases might not be investigated as thoroughly. The corruption cases she heard about involved Americans who broke the law and were trying to evade responsibility by bribing police officers, which is obviously illegal. I’ve also heard this kind of story where Americans break traffic laws, especially driving under the influence of alcohol. Such behavior puts Mexican cops in a tough spot, where they don’t want to ruin someone’s vacation, but they have a job to do. So, be careful, avoid drugs, follow the law and in my experience, you will be fine.

If you’re driving from California, Tuscon is convenient for getting pesos and printing out car documents like your Mexican insurance policy. You need a hard copy of that, in case you have any trouble in a place without cell service. I found the small Santa Teresa border crossing very quick and easy for getting my TIP—temporary import permit to avoid paying taxes on my car at customs—, and I ended up recrossing the border at Laredo, in order to take advantage of Texas’ high speed highways. Laredo is a great place to get pesos and cross too, and there’s an interesting little history museum next to La Posada Hotel.

Since there is a 542 mile gap in the supercharger network between Veracruz and Campeche, I charged at my hotel overnight. That’s also necessary to get to Calakmul and Palenque and from Veracruz to Sierra Gorda, so I booked hotels with destination chargers, which are cheap and convenient for guests since slow charging is fine overnight.

However, you need to confirm with your hotel in advance that they both have a charger on site and that it is currently working. I arrived at my hotel in Palenque, which advertises “electric car charging on site”, but they laughed at me when I asked to use the car charger. So I had to spend a couple hours at the local Nissan dealer slow-charging for $11. After that, I checked with the rest of my hotels and changed my itinerary when I found two other hotels without working chargers. In another case, a third party charging site at an important stop for me went offline sometime after I departed the US, another unpleasant surprise for me. Off the supercharger network, you need to double-check and have a backup plan, with adapters and third party apps to find alternate charging. But if I can drive to the Yucatan and back, it can’t be that difficult.