2007 Mexico & Central America

 

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Final, from Moab

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Zacatecas, Mexico

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Report 6 - Zacatecas, Mexico

Mexico 2007 email report 6
Countries, Ruins, Mexico City & Zacatecas.

The last time you heard from us we were leaving Copan, Honduras. Today we are in Zacatecas, Mexico for the Semana Santa week. And things in between have been less than boring.

We left Copan and headed to the Caribbean side of Honduras and the small beach town of Omoa. The day started cool, which was nice after all the heat. We had a bit of rain in the morning but later in the day we had a steady light drizzle but just enough to keep us cool. One of our fellow students had told us, Omoa was a delightfully dirty beach town. In our estimation, she understated the condition. It was a noisy, dirty small beach town and I wouldn't recommend visiting it, but it was just a quick stopover.

The next day was our border crossing from Honduras into Guatemala. Now we knew the fun could start since we didn't have any paperwork for Honduras. We get to the immigration at the border and try to explain where we came into Honduras and why we don't have papers. The guy made a couple of phone calls and told us we would have to pay a $250 fine to get out of Honduras plus we weren't carrying this amount of money. This went on for a few minutes and then our next angel showed up. Cyril Thompson is a retired Canadian farmer, who has lived in Omoa for 10 years and owns the local wireless internet service. He was taking some friends into Guatemala for the day. We told him our situation and he spoke with the Immigration man. After a few minutes, Cyril asked us to go talk to his friends. I have no idea what kind of conversation Cyril was having but in a few minutes, we left Honduras and we paid $40.

We followed Cyril into Guatemala and he helped us get our paperwork going at the border and then he was gone. Thank you Cyril. It took the usual 3 hours getting all of our paperwork processed in Guatemala and then we were off to Rio Dulce to visit Trish & Bob Meredith. The hills of Guatemala were the greenest we had seen in weeks. It is definitely a different type of jungle than where we had been. The riding was fun.

We got to Rio Dulce in the middle of the afternoon. To get there, we had to go over a big bridge, said to be the longest span in Central America and it was tall. The view up river looked at the Lago do Izabal, the view down river looked at the Rio Dulce. We are talking about big water with jungle to the water's edge. It was beautiful.

Bob and Trish live at a marina, on their boat, that is water locked. So we had to go to a nearby marina and call on the radio to get them. This is a new mode of communication for us. They came to shore and retrieved us. After a little bit of shuffling, our motobikes were parked in a secure spot for the next 4 nights. And off we went in their little 16' runabout boat to Mario's Marina, their home.

Guess what, over the next 4 nights we ate and drank as usual. There was a potluck dinner with Mario's residents one night, karaoke another and just general good times. They took us 30 miles down river (on the river) to Livingston, through beautiful lush jungle, and this is the dry season. They drove us to some hot water falls that fall into a cool water pool and we swam. . They gave us a short trip into the lake and around an old Spanish fort.

We slept in the marina's guest house, a thatched roof and slab wood palapa. It did rain but mostly at night. Sleeping in thatched roof with rain falling, is a very interesting new sound to us. If you have ever been invited to visit Trish & Bob, I'm not sure what you are waiting for. This is quite a spot they have nested themselves in.

I will say we did mess up their schedule a bit. On the river, they go by river time. I asked Bob what he did during the day, Bob said he wasn't sure but there was never enough time to get it all done. They have work to do on their sailboat but they can't find enough time to get around to it. I'm sure it will take them a couple of weeks after we leave for them to get back into their regular schedule.

From Rio Dulce we headed to Tikal. Tikal is one of the major sites of the Mayan civilization. We stayed two nights at Flores, which is a small island on a lake, about 35 miles from the ruins. To get to Tikal, we took a bus right from our hotel. It's about an hour ride. We got there just after the park opened and it was still somewhat cool. Tikal's ruins are very big(massive) and very tall. Again the setting is in the jungle with howler monkeys screaming in the background and directly overhead. When you see how thick the jungle really is, you can begin to understand how all of these ruins were lost for some many years. Mayan ruins are still being uncovered throughout the region. These days, tourists are not allowed to climb up the old stairs of most of the ruins. But there are wood steps to get up. These steps are so steep, we were exhausted by the time we got to the top. I'm talking 100'- 150' of almost ladder-like climbing. We climbed a few of the pyramids and left the rest of the climbing to the younger generation.

The next day we were going to ride in 3 countries: Guatemala, Belize and Mexico. Always the unknown is the border crossings but leaving Guatemala, entering Belize, leaving Belize and entering Mexico, probably took all of 2 hours. Belize only requires we buy vehicle insurance, which is done in about 10 minutes. I don't have anything to tell of Belize since it was quick trip through. It was green and pretty and we did see the ocean. Our goal was to get into Chetumal, Mexico for the night and the simple border crossings made this possible.

For the past few days, I had been looking at the maps on where we could get to for Semana Santa. Zacatecas, Mexico always kept coming up on the radar. Plus reading in our book, it looked like a really fun city to be in. We had contemplated going to Tulum to see the ruins on the ocean but cancelled that plan and decided getting to Zacatecas would be our short-term goal. But we had one stop on the way, the ruins of Palenque.

We spent two nights in Palenque with a day at the ruins. Palenque's ruins are like none that we have seen. Where Tikal was big and tall, Palenque's ruins were smaller and shorter. But what stood out is the type of architecture and the detailing. Of the ruins we have seen, none of the roofs had overhangs. This caused more decay over the centuries with water splashing against the walls. Palenque's roof overhangs has kept more moisture away from the buildings and more of the ornate and elaborate stucco designs have survived.

It is hard to come up with a favorite ruins site but I would have to say Palenque is near the top. From Chetumal to Zacatecas is 1300 miles. And the most direct route is by autopista (toll road) through and around Mexico City.

So off we went in 4 days of riding, we spent around $200 for the toll roads and rode no less than 300 miles a day, the longest day was 370 miles. This was the most miles covered in the shortest amount of time on this trip. The one city I wanted to avoid on this trip was Mexico City. For all the good things that may be in the city, it also has a very bad reputation for dirty and corrupt. Plus the 18 million people don't help either.

But to get to Zacatecas, we had to switch autopistas in Mexico City. Before noon this day, we had ridden 200 miles(3 ½ hours) to the outskirts of the city. From here we had to get off the autopista and take a city road around to get back on the next autopista. The next 40-50 miles took us 4 hours.

Chris thought she had enough of the big city in San Salvador but San Salvador was only a training run compared to Mexico City. We had 6 lanes of bumper to bumper traffic for this adventure with the usual semis, buses, taxis and cars and big pollution. Plus with a little road work here and there, sometimes you just didn't move. Finally I asked her how she was doing and she said fine, so the easiest route forward was riding on the shoulder. It may have been a walking trail, it may have been a goat trail but we started riding offroad in the big city, so we could keep moving. Thank you Ken for teaching us how to be bulls riding in the city.

Here in Mexico City, we finally ran out of angels. Just after getting off the autopista, we went through the town of Ixtapaluca and there was a police stop and we got pulled over. No big deal, I get off the bike and ask if they want our boxes opened. No was the answer, one of our bikes was riding illegally in the State of Mexico this day based on the last number of the license plate. This was a stop that had about 7 cops. Our cop shows us a copy of the rule in English. What they wanted was $400 (4000 pesos) for us to keep going or we could go to the police station and pay $500. We don't travel with this much cash and told the cop we would have to go to a bank. Back and forth he went to his superior and they ended up getting $250 from us to keep going.

Yes there are things we may have done differently but we wanted to get out of this city and I can tell you corruption still exists here. I am going to report this to the Federal Tourism Office as Mexico is trying to put a halt to this. If this ends up being the only "bad" thing that happens to us on this trip, then Chris & I feel really lucky. Once we got out of Mexico City, we rode for another 75 miles to get farther north and stopped in San Juan del Rio.

One thing was happening, the tempurature was getting cooler. This was the first night in over 6 weeks, where we didn't have air-conditioning or a fan. In Palenque, it was so hot, they only had sheets on the bed. So here we are having to rethink our riding gear. Our cooler weather gear had been buried in the boxes since about the time we reached Mazatlan in late January. But we dug it out again and we're happy to have it. So now we ride with more gear in the morning and switch to our hot weather gear in the afternoon. And the elevation of Zacatecas is 8,068'.

Our daughter, Erica, assisted us in finding a place to stay in Zacatecas. The population here is 150,000 people. In the beginning, I didn't think finding a place would be easy but it turns out it was a piece of cake. Erica did internet research and found us a hostel. $31/night with a kitchen and internet wifi (even though our computer has suffered some indignities on this trip and we don't have that capability any more). We are literally right behind the catedral and the main plaza. We got here on Friday and will leave the day after Easter.

I have read enough to know the Easter processions are going to be something. I knew this town would be hopping with the tourism during Semana Santa. I knew there would be plenty to do or do nothing while we were here. What I didn't know, is Zacatecas has a huge Festival Cultural Zacatecas during the 9 days we are here. Huge means over 170 free events at 16 different venues ranging from classical music with orchestras in the Catedral, to rock concerts, jazz concerts, classical guitar concerts and theatre. The groups are from all over the world.

Yesterday, we listened to a bit of classical Spanish guitar, Mexican country western with 4 female singers and to top it off, a group from Venezuela, Oscar de Leon, did salsa for over two hours non stop at the main plaza. They are a 14 member group that hardly took time to get a breath. So we think, Zacatecas is going to be a fine city to spend 9 days in.

We'll leave here the day after Easter and start our trek to the border. We'll go to Durango and then ride the Devil's Backbone ( a ride I had mentioned months ago) to the Pacific Coast. We'll take a somewhat coastal route north and plan on crossing into Nogales, Arizona on April 15. We'll spend a couple days with my Dad and then head to Moab to open up our house, which has been closed down and shut off since last November.

So any of our Moab friends, we'll be there for 4 days or so including the weekend of April 21-22, so come visit, ski season will be over. We'll clean all the dirt, grim and cockroaches from our gear here.

The last and final report will be written from the U.S. Have a Happy Easter. Ciao.

Rick and Chris