The best and worst of Mexico

Day 119

Current Location: Puebla, Puebla (Mexico)

Total Countries visited: 3

Total Miles Driven: 19,265

Hello everyone, I hope you all had a great weekend !  I just arrived in the town of Puebla a few hours east of Mexico City... Finally a city that had some planning going into it - it's flat, the streets are wide and straight, they are numbered so that addresses are easy to find (my GPS got there on the first try !!!), it's easy to park, I love it !  Not that I hate getting lost driving through narrow curving slopes, but you'll understand my relief in the following section.

Driving update

Driving today around Taxco, I finally came upon the following two realizations: (1) Large Marge might have been the perfect vehicle to travel in the US, but she is too big / tall for Mexico travel; and (2) Driving in Mexico is generally very frustrating and I don't like it.

Mexico has some very fine highways connecting some of the larger cities - those are great, smooth and fast, just like in the US.  The main problem is that they are few and far between.  You are lucky if the two-lane highway lasts more than 100 km - then you're back on small bumpy roads or you are stuck in traffic somewhere.

The smaller roads are just annoying.  They seem to make an effort to pass through every small village possible instead of going around them.  And Mexico is infatuated with speed bumps.  Just today, I probably passed more than 60 speed bumps.  Of course, speed bumps do their work - everyone slows down - however they are realllllly annoying.  Especially when they come at the end of one of the above-mentioned highways.  In one instance today, I saw a sign for speed limit of 110 km/h (about 70 mph) - then 100 yards later there was a speed bump because the highway just ended.  Needless to say, I missed a couple of the speed bumps (only a handful of them give you advance warning).  Ouch.

Also, there is construction everywhere.  Today, a trip that should have taken me 2.5 hours took me 4.5 hours - most of the delay was due to highway construction and city traffic.

An other (minor) annoyance is that many of the highways have tolls.  And these are not the children's type of tolls like we have in the US.  These are manly tolls - every half hour or so, literally you have to shell out between $5 and $10 for the road - only to be stuck in traffic when the toll road reduces to one lane a few miles later.  Frustrating !!!

None of the above is really that big of a deal - it just delays my travels by a few hours here and there, pushes my patience a bit and costs a little money - minor inconveniences.  What is really a big deal is city driving and parking.  That truly has been a nightmare in the last 4-5 days.  As many of the cities in the heart of the country are built on hills, streets are impossibly narrow and it's incredibly difficult to park.  And the drivers...

There is no such thing as courtesy when you drive in Mexico.  Mexican drivers make Texas drivers look like little those cute little horse carriages in Central Park.  The only predictable thing about them is their unpredictability.  They could turn in any direction from any lane without advance notice - turn signals are not used consistently, so I stopped relying on them.  If you want to change lanes, good luck.  As soon as the driver who is in the lane you wish to turn into sees what you are trying to do, he will accelerate and close the gap.  The only way in is to force your way in - and hope that the driver behind you is smart enough not to hit you.  If you wait for someone to yield to you, you might as well forget about Christmas.

I fathom that for many Mexicans their car maintenance budget is far below the priority list.  I have seen dozens of vehicles stalled or broken down in the middle of the street or highway (causing traffic jams, of course).  Most of the heavy transportation trucks are double trucks tied together, and always filled to capacity - given the weight, several of those trucks go extremely slowly - - - imagine driving up a curve at 50 mph and you find yourself approaching one of those trucks going at 10 mph... the reaction time is very short.

And then, there is Mexico City.  It took me 3 hours to drive the first 300 km - and 2 hours to drive the last 10.  Traffic was ridiculous.  And of course, there was no parking anywhere near the hotel - everything was low clearance and Large Marge could not fit into them.  So I drove aimlessly through incredibly narrow and crowded streets, with scooters and pedestrians buzzing around and in front of me, until I spotted what seemed to be a parking area on the left.

And that's when I incurred my first accident (one involving another person).  I turned left from the right lane, and someone hit me on the side (of course they didn't stop to let me pass).  It was 100% my fault - blame it on the stress of driving in the city.  I pulled over while the other driver stayed in the middle of the road (blocking it, but she didn't care) - and examined the damage.  Nothing ! Large Marge had no damage at all.  I still wonder how that's possible because I definitely felt a hit.  And when I looked at the other car, there were dozens of scratches - the lady driver picked one of them and claimed that it was new, caused by me.  Oh well - I paid her off with a ridiculously small amount (I'm pretty sure I didn't wanna deal with insurance and cops), and  she drove away.  I am glad, things could have been a lot worse.  Either way, I hereby officially declare that I will never drive in Mexico City again.  Ever.

All the above venting probably helps you understand my joy upon arriving in Puebla - with its wide streets and light traffic, and parking aplenty.

All right - now for the fun stuff.

Trip update

Zacatecas

Zacatecas is one of those old colonial cities in the heart of Mexico that truly gives the country its richness of history and culture.  The city is packed with beautiful baroque buildings and churches, especially the main cathedral downtown.  You can see the cathedral from everywhere in the city, so it is difficult to get lost.

I had a great time in Zacatecas.  Life there seemed easy, people were happy.  Everything went at a leisurely pace, nobody seemed to be in a hurry... the markets open late, somewhere around 10:30am, and the shop owners spend most of the day chatting with each other - I enjoyed walking through the city and enjoying the warmth of the locals, tasting their food.

Zacatecas is built in a valley, surrounded by huge mountains.  It has enjoyed most of its growth due to the silver mine that is located just above the city.  The mine is no longer in operation, but is now open to tourists as a museum.  The mine tour was great and helped me understand the terrible conditions that miners had to deal with (most of them were indian slaves captured by the Spanish, including children and women) - there were on average 4 fatalities per day in that single mine during the worst of the Spanish occupation of the mine.

Zacatecas also boasts of having the only nightclub / bar in the world that is located in a mine 300 feet below ground.  Isn't that cool ?

Incredible facade of the cathedral.

Happy chubby Zacatecas girl.

In the mines.

Nightclub deep into the mines.

Fantastic view of the city of Zacatecas.

Guanajuato

I am completely, utterly in love with Guanajuato.  It is the most unique town that I have ever encountered in my entire life.  And this town takes the cake as the most Mexican as well (that I have seen so far).  You won't find a Taco Bell up there.  Everything about Guanajuato is either really cool, incredibly gorgeous or otherwise amazing (or all three).

My guidebook had warned me that parking in Guanajuato was a nightmare - but somehow I decided to try anyway.  The city (like most of the cities I have seen in the center of the country) is once again built in the mountains - however, unlike other cities this city was built for pedestrians.  There are only 3 major streets that travel above ground - the rest is a maze of tunnels that pass underneath the city.  It is impossible not to get lost in those tunnels - they twist and turn, and you never know where you are going to come out.  One cool thing is that they hold car races annually in there - I would love to see that!  Either way, I really loved driving in the tunnels, but that didn't help my situation.  I kept coming out in the same spot as I had been before, and I was looking for hotel in another part of town that was rumoured to provide free parking to its guests.

Well, as I learned to do in my high school chemistry classes (I wasn't always listening) - if you want to get out of a labyrinth, you need a strategy - a random path won't cut it.  So I decided to follow the "always turn right" strategy and see what happens.  Guess what, it worked !  I found a different tunnel exit that was just a few yards from the hotel!  Unfortunately, Large Marge did not fit in the "free parking" - so I followed an even better strategy - which I shall name "get a hotel outside of town and take a taxi" strategy.  That was my best idea all week.  The hotel was great, with plenty of parking, and only a 10 minute cab ride from Guanajuato.  Then I was free to explore the city on foot without worries.

And what a city it is !  It has impossibly narrow pedestrian-only streets going all over town, and I enjoyed walking through those for a bit.  I also fell in love with the main garden area downtown - it had terraces and mariachis all over the place, an opera house, a gorgeous church... it doesn't get any more charming than that.

Last but not least, Guanajuato is home to the museum of the mummies.  The story is that some time in the late 19th century, there was a massive epidemic (I forgot what disease) and so many people died during that time that they mostly filled up the city cemetery.  Around 100 years later, as cemetery space was running out the authorities decided that all the families of the deceased needed to pay some kind of "rent" in order for their loved ones to rest in peace.  All those whose families did not pay rent were disinterred and stored elsewhere.  What happened though is that through some kind of chemical reaction due to the soil composition, many of those bodies did not decay but instead became mummified - their skin hardening but keeping structure.  The museum of the mummies is a repository of some of the most gruesome of those mummies - those that had died of horrible pain, and those that were buried alive.  Touring the museum was a life-changing experience - gruesome (the most gruesome was a mummified foetus that was buried with its mother) but amazingly interesting at the same time, as I was looking at the facial expression of those people who were frozen in agony until the end of time.

You can still see the agony.

Creepy and incredible at the same time.

Beautiful view of the city.

Beautiful church near the main garden.

Narrow streets everywhere.

Tunnels underneath the city.

Opera house - beautiful on the outside.

Inside the opera house - just as rich as the outside.

Mexico City

Aaahhhhh, Mexico City... Second largest city in the world... And definitely one of the craziest !!!  As I mentioned above, my Mexico City adventure did not start so great - but it did get better, and I got to enjoy some of the truly unique things about the city.

First, the crowds.  The city is so crowded, everywhere you go. There are over 20 million people living in the cosmopolitan area surrounding the city (and there are 5 million vehicles that drive on its streets... ugh).  And it shows.  Markets are jam-packed, streets are jam-packed, night clubs are jam-packed, you see the trend.  At first, it is really fun to see so many people in the same place, but it gets old quickly... especially on a Saturday night where you are just looking for a quiet place to sip a beer and listen to some music - all the night clubs and bars were completely packed with people, making it impossible to relax.

Plus, it was COLD.  Temperature on my last day dipped as low as 45 F (8 C) and it was raining.  I didn't come to Mexico to freeze off my bum !

My favourite adventure in the City was lucha libre - mexican wrestling, which is in many ways the ancestor and big brother of American wrestling.  For $8 a ticket, I was wildly entertained for over 2 hours.  There were 3 on 3 fights of big guys and small guys (the small guys were especially talented at flying kick maneuvers), there were a few girl fights where they were mostly pulling hairs and kicking in the groin, there were midgets fighting too (all the midgets ended up being caught and thrown around by the big guys and left the stadium on a stretcher)... I loved it !  There is an interesting culture about the masks - most luchadores wear their own colourful mask which is a symbol of their personality.  One of the regular fight rules is that you cannot remove your opponent's mask lest you be disqualified.  However, a fighter is allowed to challenge another to a fight "to the death" - at the end of which match the winner will unmask the unfortunate loser.  Once a fighter loses his mask, he is never allowed to put another mask again.

I also went to a soccer match - Cruz Azul, one of the local teams, was playing.  Unfortunately, it was near the end of the season and Cruz was confirmed a playoff spot so the action left a bit to be desired... But as with many other sports, the fans are the exciting part - and they were great !  Screaming spanish epithets at the opposing team (great to brush up on my street lingo), throwing stuff at the field, they didn't stop for one minute.

My third adventure was Teotihuacan, the great ruins just an hour outside of the city.  Teotihuacan used to house over 100,000 inhabitants at its heyday - so the ruin city is huge.  One of its pyramids, the pyramid of the Sun, is the third-largest in the world (the top two being in Egypt).  From the second largest pyramid (pyramid of the moon), I could get magnificent views of the ghost city and its main avenue, Avenue of the Dead.

Otherwise, I spent most of my time walking around the city's very numerous plazas, seeing the gorgeous churches and other spanish-influenced buildings, and trying to blend in the crowd.

Mexico was not my favourite place to visit - it is just a little bit too crazy and disorganized for me... It has a wonderful arts and culture scene, a stunning variety of popular events, night clubs and bars, but it is also a mess of crowded streets, pushy vendors and dirt.  And there's the crime, which I did not see but definitely felt - it is said that there are on average 4 kidnappings PER DAY in the city - thugs hijacking your cab and stealing all your possessions.  I felt a definite sense of relief when I finally managed to get to the clear highways outside of the city limits, as if I had conquered a beast that wanted only bad things for me.

Lucha Libre.

Even Yoda got into it.

And the winner is... Monstro !

Market at the Zocalo.

Big Crowd at the plaza de la revolucion.

Several beautiful nude statues in the Zona Rosa.

Cruz Azul means blue cross - the crowd was definitely into it. 

Pyramid of the sun - 3rd largest in the world.

And here is the moon god about to open a can of wrath.

Stunning view of Teotihuacan.

Taxco

Finally, my last stop before Puebla was Taxco, the silver capital of the world.  Most of the silver mines in Mexico are not around Taxco, but Taxco is where all the artisans and other professionals melt and mend the silver into beautiful jewelry.  2/3rds of silver jewelry in Mexico is from Taxco.  There are literally hundreds of silver shops selling everything imaginable (I even bought a few pieces for myself).  And on top of that, it's a pleasantly walkable city with narrow winding streets, and an amazing market in the middle which sells meat, vegetables, clothes and everything else for rock-bottom prices.  Taxco is a very fun place to go shop and waste a few hours of a perfectly sunny day.

They really do sell everything.

Pretty streets with white buildings, most of them silver shops.

That's it for now, I am about to go visit the city of Puebla... and after that (I cannot wait) I am heading for the coast where it will be warm... next blog will hopefully be from the beach !

Hasta Luego,

DMR