Music plays as locals ride the public bus from Santa Elena, Guatemala, to Melchor de Mencos. The route is popular with travelers going from Tikal to Belize. Click the icon in the lower righthand corner of the player to expand the video.

Due to its proximity to Tikal National Park, many travelers choose to head back home from the Maya ruins through Belize. Here’s how I reached the border.

You’ve just finished spending a few days touring Guatemala’s Tikal National Park, and now it’s time to go home. You could arrange transportation to the distant capital of Guatemala City to catch a flight. There’s another option, though, that’s considerably closer: traveling internationally to the nearby Belize City airport via shuttle and bus. Including a park map and my own custom map of the northern Petén Basin, here’s the steps I took to reach the Belizean land border from Tikal:

1. Catch a ride on a bus or shuttle to Santa Elena

Tikal is served by a steady stream of shuttles and buses passing in and out of the park throughout the day. You will find most of them near the information kiosk (Spanish: kiosko de información), which is marked in the lower left quadrant of the park map below.

While the public buses (known locally as “chicken buses”) departing for Flores arrive regularly and are cheaper, I elected to spend a little extra money with my hotel to reserve a scheduled shuttle to Santa Elena. It’s the closest city to Tikal with public transportation service to the Belize border.

I stayed two nights at Jungle Lodge Tikal, one of the few lodging options within the remote park. The cost for a seat on the hotel shuttle is $120 GTQ (around $15 USD), and it must be reserved the night before your departure. Shuttles leave at 5 a.m., 9 a.m., 1 p.m., and 4 p.m. If you are staying at the Hotel Tikal Inn or Hotel Jaguar Inn, you can check with the staff to inquire whether they offer similar transportation services.

2. Make your way to the Santa Elena bus station

The trip from Jungle Lodge Tikal to Santa Elena took approximately an hour and 15 minutes. You can follow the south-then-west route through the small cities of El Remate and El Cruce on my custom map below.

While you shouldn’t have to worry about this if you elected to take the public bus, be advised that the hotel shuttles’ official destination is the Maya World International Airport (Spanish: Aeropuerto Internacional Mundo Maya) airport in Santa Elena, so you will have to instruct the driver to take you to the nearby bus station. Saying something like “Estación de autobuses, por favor” (“Bus station, please”) should do the trick.

3. Get on the bus heading to Melchor de Mencos

Once you arrive at the Santa Elena bus station, look for a bus with the letters “MELCHOR” painted in white on the window; this will be your ride to Melchor de Mencos, the Guatemalan border city on the western bank of the Mopan River. While it won’t be collected immediately, the fare should be in the range of $40 GTQ (~$5 USD).

4. Make the two-hour journey to the Belizean border

Once you have settled into the bus to Melchor de Mencos, sit back and relax; it will take around two hours to get to the international border. Soon after it wheels out of the bus station, your driver will make a stop at the Santa Elena market to pick up more passengers. You can buy refreshments from local vendors there.

After you leave the city, there will be other sporadic stops to drop off and pick up passengers and even deliver packages. In places like the Petén region of Guatemala, bus drivers often double as parcel carriers.

5. Walk to the Guatemalan/Belizean land border

Around two hours later, your bus from Santa Elena will arrive at Melchor de Mencos. My driver parked at a gas station only a few hundred yards from the bridge that crosses the Mopan River. You can easily see the border facilities from the bridge. Begin your walk toward the Guatemalan immigration office.

6. Read my travel guide for immigrating into Belize

Crossing the land border from Guatemala to Belize is a breeze so long as you don’t miss a few key steps. Click to read my travel guide “How to Cross the Belizean Land Border from Guatemala” to learn how I immigrated successfully.

Related Content
– Click to view my high-resolution photo collection from Tikal National Park.
– Click to read my travel guide “How to Get to Tikal from the Belizean Border.”
– Click to read my feature article “Tikal: The Day the King Died” about how Mesoamerica’s most mysterious metropolis altered the course of Maya civilization on one fateful day.