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Colonial Mexico, 15.2. – 5.3.06
Wednesday, 15.2.06Got up before the crack of dawn at 5 a.m. Given the “hub-and-spoke” system we first had to fly from Tucson to Phoenix before catching the plane to MEX. Relatively boring flight, American West, as “cheapo” airline, did not offer any food. Thinking ahead, we had packed some sandwiches but in reality we slept most of the 2½ hour trip. They have a spanking new airport in Mexico City , entirely not like a 3rd world airport. They did have something new there: at customs one is invited to press a button on a machine, and if a red light goes on you get your luggage searched. A kind of DIY randomiser, which I thought was a cute idea. The search was quite perfunctory, though Next, the rental car. Last time I was in Mexico City (in 1998) they did not have a car for me at all, despite a booking. This time, however, they did, and we got as decent car, by Mexican standards, anyway – a VW Derby, with A/C. I had also been a little worried because both the guide book and the reservation itself had insisted that I’d need an International Driving Licence. But I hadn’t before in Mexico, and as it turned out, I didn’t this time, either. Would have been too stupid for words to be stuck because of that. The directions to find Teotihuacan, our destination for the day, sounded straightforward. However, matching those directions with reality was something else. At last we were battling our way through the rush-hour periférico: millions of cars, a rather fluid understanding of lane discipline, uncertainty about where one was (given the scarcity of traffic signs). But we made it to Teotihuacan which is only some 50kms north of Mexico City but the trip took us 2 hours. Mexico City is huge, and quite an experience. Mainly chaotic, seemingly, but still organised after a fashion, old roads and old cars next to spanking new highways and expensive cars, fashionable avenues and shanty towns built wildly into the hills around town. We ended up in the Villa Arqueológica, a small chain of Club Med-run hotels which we knew from the Yucatan. The young lady at the reception got us wondering about the mix of peoples here – some very European-Spanish looking, some 100% Indian, and anything in between. We had our first Margarita of the trip and then settled down to a proper dinner well earned after a long day. Thursday, 16.2.6Teotihuacan is the remains of a very large city which blossomed ca. 200 BC - 700 AD. But when the Aztecs got here they found a ghost city. It's known that Teotihuacan was not built by the Maya (who were further south, in the Yucatan and Guatemala) but the Aztecs brought it back to life, until the Spanish destroyed the Aztec civilisation leaving us only Montezuma's revenge. Unfortunately the Spanish then also went on to systematically destroy any historical records they could find. To be fair, the Conquistadors only wanted the gold, but the clergy, in its typical hypocritical arrogance, wanted to completely obliterate anything 'heathen'. Their efforts, of course, not only made sure that the Indios suffered centuries of slavery but also makes it very difficult for us today to figure out what pre-Columbian history was all about.
Coming back from Acolman we took the normal, as opposed to the modern toll road. My, this is hard work! Lots of traffic, and those pesky topes every 200 yards. Topes, as you may or may not know, are very steep and nasty speed bumps, which you literally have to crawl over at snail's pace. They have been described as “capable of derailing a tank”. From now on, as much as we can, we will stick to the modern toll roads. (More on topez cf. here.) On the way, we stopped at a small inn which had a romantic garden, for a coffee. We asked the waiter for his recommendations as to find the road to Querétaro, which is supposed to be our next stop. He returned with the son of the owner, who then sat down at our table and engaged in an hour-long conversation. Nice chap, asked us all about the World Cup and German Autobahns. He initially mistook us for Americans. A pleasant afternoon Friday, 17.2.06This morning, at last, we met the manager of the Villa Arqueológica. We had gotten used to meet the boss at the other Villas , so we had missed him here. As soon as we spoke French with him, he, being French, became very friendly indeed, invited us to his office, gave advice, and, when we told him we’d stay there on our way back, offered us a decent discount. Next, a cross-country adventure to find the ‘autopista’ to Querétaro. We wanted to avoid going back to Mexico City at all costs, and a brand new outer ring road wasn’t yet on our (new) map. But that chap we had spoken to yesterday afternoon had given us directions which seemed cryptic at first, but turned out to be correct enough. The tolls are quite steep for a country like Mexico ($US 18 for 200km) but well worth it. Even on the autopista it took us quite a while to escape the environs of Mexico City (the smog and the slum dwellings stretched out for miles and miles). It is, after all, a city of an estimated 22 million people, of which ca. 10 million settled illegally. The country then gave way to gentle if arid hills. We’re still at more than 2000m above sea level, which would explain why it’s not extraordinarily hot. It can be hot if you stand in the sun, but that’s what shade is for.
We decided to go the extra 60kms for San Miguel de Allende, which is a lot smaller and entirely Spanish Colonial. So much so, in fact, that the streets are just wide enough for one burro each way – no hope of parking a car anywhere. However, our guide book suggested to stay at the ‘Misión de los Ángeles’ just outside town, where, after much friendly discussion, we found a most excellent room for a mere $83 (as opposed to the official $190). Hacienda-style, with a large pool in the central garden, and a middle wild birds. By 4 p.m. we had settled in and sat by the pool. The weather had become a bit cloudy, which is just fine.
Before dinner, and before it got completely dark, we went for a little cruise by car to find a super-market. Spoilt by US shops , we passed a score of ‘hole-in-the-wall’ shops, a whole street of mechanics which became a street of shoemakers, but no supermarket. However, a PEMEX, the ubiquitous state petrol station, had a decent convenience store. By then it had gotten dark, and the roads so much more adventurous, that we decided to go back to the hotel. Saturday, 18.2.06We had generally noticed, observant as one is in foreign parts, that the Mexicans tend to speak Spanish (or, at least, the Mexican variant thereof). Even in hotels. Exclusively. My mum wanted a simple boiled egg for breakfast, and what did she get ? A ham and cheese omelette with ‘mole’. Close, but no cigar. I admit that Spanish is their language (plus dozens of indigenous languages) but if they want to encourage tourism it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a smattering of English. It’s difficult for a globetrotter to learn the language of each and every country he visits. That flying salesman in Teotihuacan knew English, German, French, Italian, Russian and Japanese (yes, there are Russians in Mexico – popular since Trotsky fled here). A thorough exploration of San Miguel followed. The entire town centre is a jewel of colonial architecture, two-storied baroque villas, narrow cobble stoned streets, and masses of churches and ex-convents. We walked it all and enjoyed it in spite of the largish number of tourists. It seems that this ‘arty’ town has also been chosen as a place of residence by a few thousand American retirees. We even saw a few cars with Texas plates. Mexican modern history, with all its wars and revolutions, oozed from every corner. What a wretched history, too: total destruction of the Indian cultures, 300 years of oppressive rule from Spain, followed by civil wars and incompetent ‘caudillos’ for another 150 years. Only Benito Juarez was an exception. At least he ‘nationalised’ church property. Also, ever since then, no priest may appear in clerical clothes in public, and no churchman is allowed to make a public comment on matters political. Only in the 1950s did it seem that the country settled down and start to address the grotesque social inequalities which are still a bane of Mexican society.
Sunday 19.2.06The egg saga continues. We had tried to explain the concept of “boiled egg” yesterday, and thought we had made progress. Until, this morning, the call for a boiled egg was answered with a plate of scrambled eggs! Not to forget a large helping of ‘mole’. (Mole, as you may remember, is any kind of Mexican sauce – not salsa! – as in Guacamole, sauce made of avocado. They take the best fresh ingredients they can find and boil it down to an undecipherable mush. Sometimes it also includes chocolate – the real, bitter stuff. The results can be quite disgusting.) Once more, we had a longish, friendly discussion with the restaurant’s Capitán, and he seems to have understood now. We’re on the way to Guanajuato. First stop, the convento at Atotonilco. This is where Father Hidalgo started the call for independence in 1810 and claimed to celestial help of the Virgin of Guadalupe. A Big Thing for Mexico. The convent was in the centre of a tiny, dusty village straight out of a Pancho Villa western, with a market in full swing. The church was quite beautiful, very romantic, and it being Sunday, quite busy.
Then on to Dolores Hidalgo, described in our guide book as ‘village’ but it turned out to be a large town. We passed by the Plaza Central (‘zócalo’), found no parking, and went on towards Guanajuato. Unexpectedly, the road took us over a couple of mountain ranges (we’re still at 2000m or so above normal). Wide vistas, greyish-yellow, much like Arizona. But this gave way to green mountains full of leafy trees (leaves, not fir, at this height!). They even had a nice scenic lookout built, but for some reason they charged a fee for the view – idiotic, since we had the same view all along the road. Guanajuato quickly turned into a nightmare. It’s a tightly packed former mining town squeezed into a narrow valley
(remember all that bullion the Spaniards were after?) with not a straight or level piece of road in sight. To try and alleviate
Further north, an industrial area ensued around the town of Leon. Just as suddenly, the countryside gave way, once again, to hill country. We took the ‘autopista cuota’ and made it quite quickly to Aguascalientes, but not before running into a military roadblock. The young soldier was quite flustered when I told him ‘turista alemán’. But since they had stopped us in the first place, he felt obliged to check the car anyway. He dismissed us with “Thanks” which was one of the English word he knew next to “Open!”. Aguascalientes is another quite large town, with a Nissan factory quite prominent. But as every decent Mexican town ought to, this one also had a Zócalo. We negotiated our way into the Hotel Francia, right on the main square (even though it took us many attempts to find it in the first place, given one-way systems and blocked roads. In the end, I got personal permission from a cop to drive into a closed road – no other way to approach the hotel.) Nicely settled in, we explored the city centre, and discovered an open-air concert (‘Mariachi’ contest), a mass, a brass band, and a fireworks display in open acoustic competition with each other. Mexico is a lively – some would say noisy – country! We spent some time at the plaza, enjoying a sandwich without ‘mole’, and watched people wandering up and down. Later, in the hotel, we can still hear the fireworks until late. Mexico is a noisy country.
Monday, 20.2.06The fireworks resume – at 6.30h. Imagine our joy. Breakfast on the Zócalo – croissant and Latte, no ‘mole’ – and a most pleasant conversation with the owner, who proceeds to proudly present photographs of his family. Once again, US-Americans and Indios are not his favourite people. On to Zacatecas! God motorway, and amazing countryside: if you shot a western here, it’d be a perfect fit. (Did you know that there is such a thing as a Mexican western? There is. Had never thought about it.) We rise even more, Zacatecas is at 2500m. Coming off the motorway at Zacatecas we spot a sign “Tourist Information”. It looks like a simple kiosk at first, but there’s a proper office with a young girl (plus her little baby) who speaks English and provides us with a wealth of brochures (alas, in Spanish only). This is the first such info stand that we spotted, and we are impressed. One of the most northern colonial towns with a silver mine, it’s a lot more charming than we had imagined after Aguscalientes . We steer towards the best hotel in the centre, and utterly fail to find it, directions by cop notwithstanding. Narrow one -way system, once again, and the map is of no great help – you have to cross the length of town if you missed a single crucial turn before there’s the chance of a “Retorno”. So, instead, we go for the best hotel at the edge of town (all the way through town, and back again on the exterior ring road). We meet the manager (half Mexican, and two-thirds Lebanese), and get a good deal for a lovely room with a patio overlooking half the town.
Then out and about, to the top of a nearby hill with a large Revolutionary Museum (did I mention constant revolutions and civil wars?), and are afforded a lovely view down over the town, which at 1700h is still in the midst of its siesta. Whoever we talk to is most friendly and charming and trying to be helpful, if in Spanish. So we teach them some German in return. There was a tourist office in town in one of those baroque homes, with a young chap who spoke fluent English. We congratulated him on the Zacatecas Tourism Bureau, and he said that the various Mexican provinces actually compete against each other in that respect. So they have the idea, but the industry seems young, and they have ways to go. – One of the titbits he told us was that Zacatecas used to have snow at that time of year, but no snows for the past couple of years. Great surprise, no-one had ever mentioned snow before. I find a PC with Internet at the Tourist Office in town, and get some bad news from home – one of my uncles had a heart attack. Bummer. We’re worried. Tuesday, 21.2.06More breakfast adventures. A young boy eagerly served us but again, if I hadn’t picked up a little Spanish, we’d have been stuck. In any case, my fried eggs came loaded with Mole and Salsa. But I had managed to convey the “huevos tibios”. Which came in a glass, accompanied by an extra plate wilt Mole. We then spent the morning walking through town, from one little plaza to another. The main cathedral on the Zócalo has the
most amazingly complicated facade. It's said that the artist in charge had been convicted to death but given a reprieve until
After a while one does notice the height – walking the hills isn’t as easy as in the lowlands. Brilliant sunshine necessitates a hat and shades. It’s a charming little town, but there’s a distinct lack of road-side cafés. We did get a coffee from a hole-in-the -wall, but, as so often here, the coffee was pretty poor. Even a local specialty, coffee with mole. Strange, that – Mexico does grow coffee, after all. It seems that the eastern Med has its own very special coffee culture which somehow hasn’t travelled well around the world. Surprise when we got back to the hotel – it was 1 p.m. and the room wasn’t made yet – and the hotel wasn’t full by any means. Again more discussions about the ‘camarista’ in Spanglish, until they got the message. After a short siesta we went out to Guadalupe, an adjoining town, where the Franciscans had their HQ whence they started their missions north; i.e. the Texan, New Mexican, Arizonian, and Californian missions were started from here. Wednesday, 22.2.6Early start since today will be our longest tour (400km to Guadalajara). First, great disappointment – no coffee at breakfast. No idea what the boy was trying to say, but the long and the short of it was – no coffee.
Thursday, 23.2.06Today’s programme – a drive around Lake Chapala. We passed through one tiny, tight little village after the next. It’s a wonderment of how many cars, people, and markets can share the same space.
But the latter, eastern half of the lake turned ugly. Heavy urbanisation, industry, choking traffic, topes – all this made the trip home rather tiresome. Surprisingly, the circuit round the lake was some 200km – much more than we’d thought. Lake Chapala is about 5 times as large as the Bodensee, as it turns out
The whole area is supposed to possess a superb climate (they make a point that the caudillo Diaz spent time here) and it’s true, the weather is mild and most agreeable. Amazing, too, the wild bougainvilleas which seem to sprout everywhere out of their own volition. These, plus some lovely flowering trees, certainly confirm the local name of “Ribera Chapala”. There’s a place called Tuxcueca, which is Indian for “clamour of the rabbits”. Charming, isn’t it? (Obviously a breeding ground for killer rabbits.) Another typical feature here is that the most attractive places are hidden behind high walls. You need to venture into courtyards to really appreciate the beautiful gardens and the ‘hacienda glory’. This also applies to the many middle class villas, not only to the aristocratic residences. We’re much taken in by the colonnades, intricate stone carvings, and beautiful tiled floors. There are countless churches, of course. Virtually all of them baroque, but often lack artistic certainty. Many are a real hodgepodge of stuff, often in garish colours, and most appallingly kitschy statues of various saints, often dressed up in real modern-day clothes. Or maybe this is a ‘naïve’ local art form. Many churches apparently lack funds for upkeep – the Vatican could make good use of its fortunes here. The Spanish method of conversion to Catholicism by fire and sword proved only too successful (hidden remnants of ‘pagan’ religions notwithstanding): there’s a lot of naïve, by-rote churchgoing here. ‘Native’ Mexico manifests itself in a lot of Indian place names, which are virtually unpronounceable for us. It really cannot be recommended to drive around here in one’s own car: the old cobblestones and surfaces are so rough as to ensure a short lifespan for any car – or you end up driving a rattletrap. In general, there are some very nice hotels here, but, again in general, there is room for improvement in service: people are very friendly but often they promise things which won’t actually materialise. An exception is the Nueva Posada, which is outstanding, and would command high prices back home. Friday, 24.2.06Today, we follow the advice of a guide book once again, and drive to Tonalá: “Few places in our country are as attractive
as Tonalá”, etc. It was a battle to get there, traffic, confusing road signs, a surfeit of cops (Policía Federal, Policía Estado,
It’s a wonderful experience to be back in the oasis of our hotel. If somewhat short-lived: a quick siesta was made impossible by a) staff loudly sharing the latest gossip outside our door, and b) a gaggle of elderly American ladies loudly sharing their latest experiences & discovery of their respective rooms across the corridor. Mexico is a loud country. Ah well, all was made up for by another lovely evening at the Nueva Posada. Saturday, 25.2.6The Pacific awaits! Full of hope and high expectations do we set off towards Puerta Vallarta. The ‘autopista’ takes us around the outskirts of Guadalajara, again. Oh boy. Picture the scene: a heavy lid of pollution over the city. Lorries and buses belching up thick clouds of diesel fumes. Wild rubbish tips bubbling in the sun, spontaneously creating life forms hitherto unknown to man. The occasional dead cow in a ditch. Dogs flattened by lorries on the street. What exquisite aroma! Throw in bumper-to-bumper stop-and-go traffic, with eager drivers fighting furiously for every centimetre’s advantage. Sudden potholes and topes trying their best to shake off every last part of the car. If you have your eyes peeled on the road and pushy buses, you miss the sudden and once-only appearance of important traffic signs. A hot clutch defines a successful driver.
The road winds through spectacular landscape, reminiscent of the mountains of Arizona. We pass through several valley and mountain ranges, and the road quality steadily deteriorates. The ‘cuota’ motorway gives way to a ‘cuota’ country road which in turn yields to a bog standard country road, which slowly serpentines up and down a valley.
The local drivers don’t hesitate to overtake slow lorries regardless of the ‘no rebase’ signs, so I follow suit. It’s a great bore, after all, to be stuck behind a slow lorry on a single lane mountain road. After some 400km we finally hit the Pacific, and Puerto Vallarta shortly afterwards. Oh dear. Far from being a charming little port town, it’s like Mallorca at its worst. A long bay plastered full of hotels. A huge traffic snarl all along the bay, and millions of “el cheapo” tourists, mainly US. We quickly revise the “el cheapo” bit, since all the hotels we stop at ask such outrageous prices that we’re speechless. $400 a room? You gotta be kidding! We keep hunting, but to our dismay the hotels all along the bay are not only all expensive, but full, too! We drive south along the coast as far as the road will go before veering off inland, but utterly fail to find anything suitable even in the quieter bays away from town. We spend an increasingly desperate four hours hunting for a place to stay, it being far too late to keep driving. At last, a Holiday Inn resort hotel deigns to take us in, at a very reasonable $190 for what is no more than a motel room. Not what we expected at all – instead of a romantic seaside cottage we’re now stuck in a 500-room package tour monster from the 1960s, and the live poolside band is clearly audible on the 9th floor. Later, a faux-pirate ship cruises by, with faux-pirates prancing about making fools of themselves, and a faux-cannon firing very real and very loud firecrackers over the heads of the partygoers. Mexico is a loud country. Sunday, 26.2.06We left this overpriced bunker early, and headed south. The road hugs the coast at first, and since the mountains go right by the water’s edge, it’s hilly and curvaceous. But the landscape is beautiful – rain forest by the Puerto Vallarta coast, and then changing in all sorts of manners until it becomes hilly agrarian, then flat agrarian.
Some 150km later we find a slow, sleepy village with just a handful of RV-tourists, and a quiet and beautiful beach, where we buy some stuff at a hole-in-the-wall and have us a nice picnic on the beach.
One single and sudden $370 resort later we come upon Barre de Navidad, where we follow our book’s advice and settle in a suite, which is really a 2-floor apartment. Later that evening we wander through the village, which is slowly adapting to become a tourist place for Mexican beachgoers , but hasn’t actually progressed to possessing a supermarket yet. At bedtime, I note that there is some sort of event not further than half the town away, and that the local announcer has fallen prey to the popular misconception that generous use of an amplifier somehow improves the experience. Mexico is a loud country. Monday, 27.2.06It’s definitely humid here. Paper goes limp, and everything is sticky. Not to worry, we’re on the coast, after all (note that we have descended from 2500 metres). An early morning coffee on the patio, and I listen to some salesman who drives through the neighbourhood, announcing his wares with the help of a roof-mounted loud-speaker and taped jingles. There’s a slight cloud cover, as so often in the tropics It’ll probably burn off later. We go to the beach, which is nice and empty (most of the locals congregate at the other end of the beach, where the loudspeakers are). A short dip in the Pacifico , and a couple of hours later the sun drives us away, there being no shade.
Late afternoon, and more wanderings about town. It’s in transition from sleepy village to tourist trap, but as yet teetering on the edge.
Tuesday, 28.2.06No bad after-effects. Must’ve been the good stuff. This, the Pacific coast, is the furthest we go on this trip. As of now, we’ll be slowly returning to Mexico City. We aim for Ajijic , since it’s on the way, and we liked the hotel there.
After Colima (with a huge volcano overlooking the town), there’s most spectacular landscape to admire: steep mountains, deep canyons, bizarre rock-formations. The old road (as opposed to the one we’re on) precariously hugs the cliffside like an old smuggler’s path. The modern road claims to be a highway complete with bridges over the ravines, but turns out to be single lane anyway. Goes to show that you cannot always trust a map, and especially not the description in a book or brochure. After CD. Guzmán, we pass through something called a laguna, but is in fact a dry lake: completely flat for miles on end, with the shimmering heat creating the illusion of shore or water not far away – the Fata Morgana effect. After some 300km we reach Ajijic. Distance can be deceiving, and what looks like a centimetre on the map might take hours to actually drive. It’s a huge country, after all, with maybe 100 million people, 5 ½ times the size of Germany. The population breaks down into: 10% white, 14% Indios, and 75% mixed. Guess where the wealth is. Wednesday, 1.3.06Patzcuaro had been promised as yet another jewel of Spanish Colonial charm and ambiente. The ‘autopista cuota’ went very well, but turning off towards the Lago Patzcuaro was a shock: probably the oldest tarmacadum in Mexico, last repaired during the Second Revolution. To be fair, the road did improve later on, and we slowly made our way towards Patzcuaro. We did get lost in Zacapu, since all road signs mysteriously vanished upon entering the city; but a copper showed us the way, in fluent Spanish, naturally. Patzcuaro itself was a bit of a disappointment. Supposedly nestled among pine forests along the shores of the lake, it was more of a 3rd-world semi-industrial bustle which one had to penetrate before reaching a Centro Histórico, which was, admittedly, quite nicely done up. The search for a hotel proved difficult, once again – the places in town were either substandard, or in old colonial houses, which meant here a room off a central courtyard with no exterior windows whatsoever, making the rooms dark and gloomy. There were a couple of very nice buildings, lovingly restored and appointed with great care, but these rooms were dark, too, and quite expensive (over $200). Now well into the second week of our trip our enthusiasm for Spanish Colonial decidedly begins to wane. After a while, it all begins to look the same, and Mexico doesn’t make it easy for travellers to move around and settle in. The Posada we finally opted for turned out to host a children’s do, and their arrival at night was akin to an invasion by Visigoths. Mexico is a loud country. Thursday, 2.3.06We awake to what must have been an amplified cattle auction nearby. (During the night, I had to shush up a group of students who had started an improvised debating club right outside our door. But they were quite nice about it – looking slightly shocked at the sight of this dishevelled and disgruntled tourist, but packing it up straight away.) Mexico is a loud country. The last leg takes us back to Teotihuacan, where we knew we had a comfortable hotel waiting for us. The countryside until Toluca was quite amazing, once again, but there were no parking bays along the way where one could indulge. In Toluca, we had one of those quintessential Mexican experiences. There was no direct connection between the motorway west and east of the city. The main road through town was suddenly closed due to road works, and the ‘deviation’ signs suddenly disappeared. Before we knew it, we were stuck fast in the middle of the Toluca rush-hour traffic, without a clue where we were or where we needed to go. It was the no-prisoners-taken sort of battle, a horrific experience: massive, aggressive and chaotic, vehicles switching lanes without indicating and with only inches to spare, pushing in from all sides, you couldn’t see where you were going because buses and lorries blocked the view, traffic lights, dim at best, were impossible to make out in the glare of the sun so that I inadvertently ran a few, sudden potholes assaulting you from below, unannounced topes surprising you (you know, these topes REALLY get on your nerves after a while!). Humans of less robust constitutions would be screaming nervous wrecks within minutes. We asked a few people where we could, and finally made our way out of this maze. Shortly afterwards, we found ourselves in the outskirts of Mexico City. We didn’t find a new, direct connection between the
western and northern approaches, so again we had to battle our way through a place called Lechería. Once a quiet village
I finally succumbed to the local style of driving and plunged headlong into the mess, darting hither and thither across the road with total disregard for lane discipline. Had to, since a slow and considerate driver just gets pushed aside.
Many miles later I started to recognise the area, and then traffic signs to “Pirámides” finally appeared, and we had made it back. The road around Mexico City took us past vast areas which looked like slums, or at least as though they were built with total ignorance of building regulations. This went on and on – well, these 22 million people have to live somewhere. Friday, 3.3.06We used this day to recover from yesterday’s shocking experience. Reclined by the pool, had a relaxed dinner – just what the doctor ordered. Saturday, 4.3.06I had assumed that the airport would be sign-posted well enough. Well – never assume. We found ourselves once again immersed in some of the worst traffic ever, basically a repeat from before. However, by asking around, we did find the airport , and had no trouble leaving MEX or passing through US immigration in Phoenix. It was only when we were waiting for the connecting flight to Tucson that it turned out that the passengers were there, the plane was there, the luggage was there, but – the crew wasn’t. It seems that the crew was stuck in Oregon (bad weather) and couldn’t make it back in time. That cost us another hour, but arrival in Tucson late at night was like a good old homecoming! Summing up, we think that this trip was too long for what there was to see. It was highly educational, and we now know what ‘colonial’ Mexico is all about. But to be honest, the churches begin to look like each other after a while, and most of these ‘charming’ little towns turned out not to be, plus the traffic can be a real nightmare.
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Next we drove to Acolman
, where they have a nicely preserved Convento. This is what this trip is going to be mostly about - 'Spanish Colonial'. Amazing how these same people who
so brutally conquered this land were also capable of charming and tasteful buildings. 
the traffic problem they turned the old mining shafts into roads!
So you plunge deep into the mountain, scraping the car’s outside mirrors right and left, and, much later, reemerge God-knows-where. It’s all one-way streets, too, so you can never
turn back anywhere. Take this set-up, throw in thousands of cars and pedestrians, and it becomes clear why you need 90 minutes to cover 5kms of town. You couldn’t even stop at the
hotel in the centre of town without blocking up all traffic. Exhausted, we fled.
his work was finished. Oddly, that church needed work until the
chap died of a natural death...
We did find a couple of place where we could sit in peace and
quiet and enjoy the scenery. In retrospect, these were among the nicest places we found on this trip.
Policía Transito, Policía Camión, and God knows what else). The
town is a centre of ceramic production: a multitude of saints, animals, and gracious ballerinas in tasteful, garishly coloured
china. After an hour there, engulfed in dust, exhaust, and engines without ‘mofles’, we fled. I must admit, I’m slowly
getting tired of traffic in those “quaint, colonial, historic” towns.
After the first 100km we breathe a figurative sigh of relief when
we reach open country, and we finally hit the toll motorway. Bliss! Empty, smooth roads lead us through Tequila country.
Tequila is actually both a town and a county by the same name. The “agave” cactus which this spirit is made of is planted right
and left, and leave the hills shimmering in a bluish hue.
The road passes Manzanillo (both a major port and a major resort town), does a bit more shore-line with lush vegetation,
banana groves and palm trees, and then turns inland, rising steadily. 
miles away from the town, it has now become engulfed by that
colossus. Again, traffic was a total logjam most of the times, the narrow roads packed with cars, everyone pushing in from all
sides, even reversing onto the road from a courtyard, and to top it all, an unsecured railroad crossing which had freight trains
suddenly appearing, announced only by the hooting of the engine. I fully expect a heap of cars-crushed-by-locomotive by
the side of the road. But there isn’t one; the locals must have memorised the schedule. 
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