Crazy Moebius Explores the Americas: It's a jungle out there

Day 111

Current Location: San Luis Potosi, San Luis Potosi (Mexico)

Total Countries visited: 3

Total Miles Driven: 18,234

Hello again, from the beautiful town of San Luis Potosi, in the state of the same name. This is now my 6th night in Mexico, and I am really starting to get the hang of it. Where at first I had been feeling out of my comfort zone, I am now starting to feel at ease and letting loose a bit more.

Language update

It's amazing what a few days will do. I feel a difference every day, in what I can understand and the complexity of what I can say.

Thankfully, I have had multiple opportunities daily to practice on a live target. On two occasions, I have had to hire a driver / tour guide who would drive me around and show me the highlights of the area. Otherwise, I always have to order food and drinks, get hotel rooms, ask for directions, and last but not least, staying out of trouble is requiring some spanish language skills as well.

I had mentioned in my last post the military checkpoints one encounters traveling in Mexico. There really are a LOT of them. I'd estimate that every 200 miles or so there is a military checkpoint, packed with uniformed 20-somethings carrying AK-47 automatic rifles. They stop every vehicle for a quick check, ask a bunch of questions, and search some of the more dubious (or in my case, some of the more unusual) vehicles. At first, this really scared me but now I don't see it as such a bad thing. In fact, they make me feel safer because they probably act as a deterrent for some of the road bandits that are roaming the country. Plus, I have found them to be very courteous and friendly, and they always end up their interview shaking my hand or asking me if I have a job for them in the US.

Now for the language hurdles of the last few days:

Finding a parking spot. This one was really dumb. Everywhere I went, I had been looking for the ubiquitous P sign that means there is public parking. But, guess what, I wouldn't find the P sign anywhere. Instead, there was this weird E sign all over the place (what does it mean!) - and for at least 1 1/2 days I didn't make the connection. DUH ! Parking in spanish is Estacionamiento.
Directional signs. This one was not so obvious, but also caused me a bit of navigation trouble. In one particular instance, I was looking for an address which was on street Benito Juarez Ote. I thought I was pretty smart, because I figured that Ote was the abbreviation for Oeste, the word for West in spanish. So I would just type W for West in my GPS, which promptly directed me to the wrong address. I tried every which way to cajole my GPS into taking me where I wanted to go, but she wouldn't listen - until I realized that Ote stands for Oriente (which means East), not Oeste (which means West). Argggh.

Navigation update

I have accepted the fact that I am going to get lost in this country. A lot. Basically, every time I need to go somewhere, I expect with 92% certainty that I won't get there on the first try. At least that's been my experience so far... The first round get me to the right city (most of the time), then I have to use my entire set of tools (including my brains) in the second (and successive) rounds to get me to the final destination. Here are the main reasons for that:

First, GPS systems in Mexico are not nearly as precise as those in the US or Canada. The streets have many names, many directions, and sometimes there is the same street name twice in the same city but 10 miles apart. Every time I type an address in my GPS, I get 3 different choices... I guess I need to get a 3-sided coin. Plus, you cannot search for a hotel monument or park, because my GPS never finds it.

Second, the GPS doesn't have any idea of the direction of one-ways. Perhaps they change all the time, I don't know. But I have to find my own detours whenever the GPS makes me go the wrong way (which is about 50% of the time).

Third, I notice that in Mexico there are a lot of pedestrian-only streets - meaning that they either consist of stairs or of narrow lanes where only a bike could fit. But they are still considered "streets" with addresses on them, and the GPS still thinks I can drive Large Marge up a set of stairs at a 20% incline. Wishful thinking, but I can't.

Fourth, my Mexico travel book (Lonely Planet) - although it does a stellar job at telling me what are the cool things to see - it does a terrible job of telling me where they are. Half the time, the book tells me to "go to this place, it's unbelievable" but then give no address or set of directions. Do they expect me to have a map of every town in Mexico in my glove compartment ?

In the most frustrating situation I have encountered yet, I drove for about 2 hours looking for a famous park in Monterrey, and finally realized that the park was not in Monterrey but in Santa Catarina, a suburb of Monterrey. Neither the Lonely Planet or the park's own web site mentioned that semi-important fact.

Sightseeing update

The language issues will fix themselves soon enough, and I will have to learn to live through some navigation challenges... that's not such a big deal. Otherwise, my first few days in Mexico have been wonderful. Here are the key highlights of my travels for the last few days, starting from my side trip to Cuatro Cienegas.

Cuatro Cienegas

The town of Cuatro Cienegas is as lovely as it is small. The main reason to go there is to visit the Biosphere reserve of Cuatro Cienegas, which counts one of the largest collection of endemic species in North America. Endemic species mean a species that live in one specific spot and nowhere else in the world. The reserve contains so many endemic species because of its pozas, or pools of water, that do not connect or flow through to any other bodies of water... the water comes from very deep underneath the earth, it is very warm (over 100 degrees Farenheit) and full of minerals that are highly conducive to aquatic plant and animal life.

Poza Azul, blue pool of crystal-clear water.

Another cool feature of the park is its sand dunes - the area is very dry and contains huge dunes that one can climb.

Dune man.

El canon de la Huasteca

Sorry for the intentional misspelling here, there is supposed to be a tilde (little squiggly) on top of the n of canon above - plus I'm omitting spanish accents left and right, I haven't figured out the spanish keyboard on my Mac yet.

This canyon is only 10 miles west of downtown Monterrey but when you get there, you feel like you are on the moon. There are huge cliffs of solid rock climbing up from the desert floor everywhere you look, and nothing else except for very sparse vegetation, a bunch of hippies and a handful of horsepeople.

Large Marge doing some rock climbing.

Caballero setting off towards the sun.

Gomez Farias

I think you will start seeing a pattern pretty soon. Mexico has mountains ! Lots of them ! I guess I always knew that on the back of my mind, but my prior (biased) view of Mexico was mostly that of beaches, oceans, and palm trees. Well, there's a lot more than that - and mountains are a huge part of it.

Gomez Farias is a tiny little town nested high up in the mountains - it has about 1,000 inhabitants and doesn't have much going on except that it lies at the entrance of another famous park, the biospheric reserve el Cielo. This is another unique place in that it has an incredible number of species of all sorts of animals, birds, reptiles, insects, plants - it really is a jungle up there.

It was a very chaotic road to get up and into the park - it took about 2 hours to drive 17 kilometers, up the side of the mountain. It was a very fun ride though - and at the end was a very picturesque little village called San Jose, population under 50. The guide took me to his mom's place who lives there, she cooked for me, then one of the kids took me hiking to visit some caves. Everyone was very friendly and made me feel welcome.

As you might expect, the life out there is ridiculous in its quantity. It's as if God, after fully populating the rest of the world with all sorts of living things, didn't know what to do with the leftovers and decided to toss them all in that jungle reserve in the sky, thinking nobody would ever find it. There were butterflies everywhere - hundreds of thousands. I saw dozens of horses, chicken, dogs, sheep, roosters, a few lizards, a snake, and the biggest and scariest spiders I have ever seen. This is also one of the best spots for bird watching in America - their intermingled songs create an atmosphere of constant chatter, especially in the morning. And at night you can hear a billion crickets chatting with the moon. Truly a treat for all the senses.

Peaceful scenery in San Jose.

Happy dog in San Jose.

What are you looking at ?

Butterflies hanging out on donkey doo.

Biggest and coolest spider I have ever seen. It's called calavera spider - because it has a skull face on top of its head.

Xilitla

Xilitla is another small town unlikely perched on the side of a mountain, with staircases that go up and down taking the way of navigable streets.

The main attraction in Xilitla is Las Pozas, where Edward James, an eccentric Englishman and poet who was insanely rich (and also probably insane), decided to build a garden of concrete statues in the jungle. James is the patron of the surrealist movement and was close friends with the likes of Picasso and Dali. The buildings that he designed - made of uneven angles and staircases that lead nowhere, some as tall as 30 meters high, surrounded by vines, palm trees and waterfalls, give the place an unreal feeling. I felt as if I had just jumped into an alternate universe, one of MC Escher's drawings or in the movie "Waterworld".

Entrance of a very strange concrete garden in the jungle.

More concrete buildings in the jungle.

Not sure what is should represent.

Taking a refreshing dip in one of the pozas.

I have done so much in so little time ! I think I am off to a great start. And I can't wait for tomorrow... I have another very unique place to visit (to be continued...)!

I will leave you now, with more urban pictures from the two largest cities that I have seen so far, Monterrey and San Luis Potosi.

Hasta Luego !

DMR