Mexican Road Trip: To the Yucatan and Back

[Rick Quinn]

SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS

We entered the maze of narrow, mostly one-way streets, with rain falling steadily, and no clue where we were, or where we were going. I’d reserved us a hotel room through Expedia.Mx, a place called the Hotel Hacienda Don Juan. It sounded terrific on the website, but it was NOT in the center of town with the rest of the hotels, so finding it proved quite a challenge. We programmed the address into Mike’s phone and started following the turn-by-turn instructions. If we’d used the GPS from the beginning, it would have been easy, but starting where we did, Google had us driving down narrow alleys and over tiny one-way bridges intended for horse carts and pedestrians. I assumed the GPS had malfunctioned, because there was no way in the world the route we’d just followed was going to lead us anywhere but lost. We popped out of another alley and onto a main street, and, much to my surprise, there it was!



The grounds of the hotel were surrounded by a wall, so all you could see from the street was a long cobblestone drive through a tunnel of trees, leading back to a lushly landscaped courtyard. Still not quite believing that this was really the right spot, we drove in, and checked in, to what was probably the coolest hotel of our whole trip.









We didn’t have a lot of time in San Cristobal de las Casas. We arrived in late afternoon, and we were going to have to leave first thing the next morning. Our whole visit was compressed into a single quite wonderful evening, wandering the cobblestone streets between storefronts of buildings that were hundreds of years old. Many were restored and newly painted, mostly earth tones, rather than the muted pastels we’d so admired in Campeche. The local folk were mostly indigenous, with roots in this region going back countless generations, but it’s important to note that most of the people we saw on the street that night didn’t appear to be locals. They were visitors, just like us, most of them Chilangos, a disparaging term for people from the D.F. (Mexico City). There were college kids in jeans and jackets, on holiday from their studies, as well as backpacker types from Europe and Asia, all checking out the scene. Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared San Cristobal de las Casas to be “Lo mas Magico de los Pueblos Magicos!” (“The most Magical of the Magical Towns!”) That’s quite a distinctive honor, when you consider the fact that there are no less than 177 cities and towns in Mexico that have earned the designation of Pueblo Magico, an honor bestowed by the Mexican Government, for the purpose of preserving cultural heritage–and promoting tourism.









An evening spent in one of Mexico’s Colonial Cities always seems to include some sort of celebration in the main plaza. In San Cristobal de las Casas, they put on a concert, featuring a local orchestra playing both classical and contemporary instrumentals. The conductor was–let’s just say he was enthusiastic, and his musicians, of varying skill levels, did their best to keep up with him. The night was crisp and cool, the crowd respectful, applauding in all the right places. Colored spotlights lit the stage, and photo-luminescent plastic necklaces lit the faces in the audience with a ghostly blue glow.





Like every Spanish Colonial City in Mexico, San Cristobal de las Casas has a centuries-old cathedral that fronts on the main plaza, in this case, the Cathedral of San Cristobal Martir. Construction started in 1528, making it one of the oldest churches in Mexico. There’s a simple elegance to the building’s facade, painted pale yellow (and in need of a fresh coat)!





Mike was constantly shooting video with his GoPro camera, so I made a project out of reviewing those clips and capturing screen shots of anything interesting. The resulting images are a little blurry, and often at strange angles, but they’re fun to see. Here are a few from our evening in San Cristobal de las Casas:

San Cristobal de las Casas in 1971

Original Photographs by Carl Duisberg

My good friend Carl Duisberg has been a world traveler almost as long as I’ve known him, and I’ve known him since we were both kids in school. I recently helped Carl resurrect two dozen rolls of black and white film from some of his early travels, negatives that had been packed away for half a century and essentially forgotten. No prints were made when the film was processed, all those years ago, so when I scanned and edited the images, I brought wonderful photos to life that had never been seen before.

One of those rolls of film was shot in San Cristobal de las Casas, more than fifty years ago, and Carl has graciously agreed to share them here. Viewing these old photos, it’s apparent how much has changed in what was, at that time, a primarily indigenous community. In 1971, the modern world has barely intruded on this charming Colonial City in the mountains of Chiapas.



















All in all, we sincerely enjoyed our brief visit to San Cristobal de las Casas. During my years in South America (back in the early 1970’s) I spent quite a lot of time in cities and towns surrounded by tropical mountains much like these, with cool climate, predominantly Indian populations, and Spanish Colonial buildings. Walking those streets felt like deja vu, even though I knew perfectly well I’d never been there before. It was the atmosphere, and the chilly evening, and the scenery, all of it together stirring fond memories dating back many decades.

Tomorrow, we’d push it a bit, as far as Oaxaca, and the next day to Puebla, or possibly Queretaro. From there, it was a short drive to San Miguel de Allende for a three day fiesta focused on the Dia de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. That was going to be the icing on the cake of our Mexican Road Trip. But first we had to get there, and it’s a long danged drive from San Cristobal de las Casas to San Miguel de Allende!

Next up: Day 21: San Cristobal to Tuxtla Guttierez

[Rick Quinn]

Day 21! We’d been on the road in Mexico for three very full weeks, and for most of that time, we had no fixed itinerary, and no set schedule. We never planned more than a day or two ahead, so the route that we were following evolved as we drove along. I prefer that style of travel, personally, because it affords maximum flexibility, but now that we were closing in on the last phase of our road trip, all that flexibility went right out the window. We wanted to experience Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead celebration, and we’d concluded that the best place for us to do that would be in San Miguel de Allende, the charming Pueblo Magico and UNESCO World Heritage site, five hours north of Mexico City. We’d passed through there far too briefly on our drive south, and we’d vowed to return for a proper visit on our way back north. The three day fiesta was going to be our last hurrah before our final push back to the border, the cherry on the top of our Mexican Road Trip, and timing was suddenly critical. It was going to take us two full days of driving, just to get there in time for the start of the holiday. We’d spend three days and nights in San Miguel, and that would leave us exactly two days for the drive to the border and on to Austin, where we’d be arriving just in time for Mike to catch his flight back home. It was all perfectly doable, and perfectly timed, but there was ZERO room for any deviation or delay.

San Miguel de Allende is one of the most popular destinations in Mexico during the Day of the Dead holiday; we’d been warned about that, so we’d used Expedia.Mx to find a hotel with availability (the Hotel San Ramon), and we’d made our reservations weeks in advance. Knowing that we had our lodging squared away for the necessary dates was a good feeling, but this two-day drive we were facing wasn’t going to be like crossing Kansas on the Interstate. There were at least a bazillion things that could go wrong and prevent us from getting to San Miguel on schedule. We had just two days to cover most of the length of the country, much of that considerable distance over dangerously beautiful mountain roads…

San Cristobal de las Casas to San Miguel de Allende

Today, we’d be driving as far as the city of Oaxaca, 380 miles of curves, switchbacks, and rolling hills that would require at least ten hours of our full attention, crossing the Sierra Madre de Chiapas, traversing the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and entering the rugged, agave-studded landscape of the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca. If you’d like to know what that was like, read on!

CROSSING THE SIERRA MADRE on MX 190

San Cristobal de las Casas is an old city that was laid out long before the advent of automobiles, so most of the roads are narrow one-way streets, and those few that are not tend to be jam-packed with more traffic than they can handle. In order to get out of town, we had to join that slow-and-go herd, dodging taxis, trucks, and pedestrians through the business district, until we finally spied a sign pointing toward the Toll Road to Tuxtla Guttierez.

Scenes along the road leaving San Cristobal de las Casas

Scenes along MX 190 from San Cristobal de las Casas to Tuxtla Guttierez

This portion of MX 190 is designated MX 190 D, because it is a “Cuota,” a toll road. What that means, in practical terms, is that there’s funding available for proper maintenance. Sometimes the cuotas are limited access divided highways, much like the modern expressways in the U.S. and Europe. More commonly, they are simply in better shape than the “libre,” (free) alternatives, with fewer potholes and topes (speed bumps), as well as less livestock, and fewer pedestrians, because they bypass the small towns.

Construction zone: a portion of the highway is being resurfaced, using equipment and techniques that are all too familiar to drivers from the United States.

There are few (if any) passing lanes on these mountain roads, so long lines of vehicles tend to stack up behind slow trucks and buses. An entitled idiot in a Suzuki SUV decided he just HAD to leapfrog his way to the front of the pack, so he whipped around me on the left, then cut back into my lane, forcing me to brake and veer onto the shoulder.



The horn on my Jeep is linked to my car alarm, with dual trumpets and a very loud siren. I gave him an extended blast, followed by two or three more. That didn’t change anything–but it made me feel better, and it most definitely got his attention!

Nobody likes being cut off; we stayed mad until the pendejo finally jumped every car in the line ahead of us and disappeared!

The area in between San Cristobal de las Casas and Tuxtla Guttierez is still the Chiapas Highlands, a mountainous plateau that forms the greater portion of the Sierra Madre de Chiapas. Tuxtla, with a population well in excess of half a million, is the capital of the State of Chiapas and the largest city in the region. The closer we got to it, the more level the terrain; since leaving San Cristobal, we’d dropped more than a mile in altitude, into a much warmer climate.

TUXTLA GUTTIEREZ

Tuxtla (pronounced tooks-tlah) Guttierez is not much of a town for tourists. There are no Mayan ruins, no beaches, no picturesque colonial architecture. It’s a contemporary era Mexican city with nothing special to set it apart. There’s no significant local industry, so the largest employer is the Chiapas state government. The city ‘s main claim to fame is as a transportation center, the hub where all the regional highways and bus lines come together, and the location of the largest regional airport.

Tuxtla Guttierez

For me and Michael, it was nothing but an unwelcome delay. We had no plans to stop for anything other than fuel; since there was no bypass route, we had to drive through the middle of town, and the traffic was tied in knots.

At one point we were stopped dead for at least ten minutes, nobody moving in any direction due to an accident in an intersection up ahead of us. Several of the sidewalk vendors took advantage of the situation to wander among the stalled vehicles, hawking snacks. I’d just recently recovered from a bout with the Turistas, so I wasn’t inclined to risk food from a questionable source, but Mike was hungry, so he called this guy over. Unfortunately, what he was selling wasn’t food. It was a unique local handicraft, a banana leaf, cleverly folded and trimmed to look like an oversized grasshopper.





Mike decided it would make a great gift for his granddaughter, so he bought one. I can’t honestly remember if he got it home in one piece, but it was definitely an interesting souvenir!

Next up: Crossing the Isthmus of Tehuantepec

[Rick Quinn]

Everything was fairly calm, as far as police and military action, but we did see an occasional reminder of tension behind the scenes:

A machine gun set up behind sandbags on the road out of town

After leaving Tuxtla Guttierez, we were back in the mountains once again.















This was the point when we crossed the narrowest section of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and entered the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca.

Prior to the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, the shortest overland route between the oceans was right here; mule trains, and, in later years, a standard gauge railroad ferried cargo from the Atlantic to the Pacific and vice versa. They still transport some cargo along that route, which is billed as a faster, less costly alternative to the Panama Canal, but the most important thing moving along that corridor today is the steady breeze, created by the temperature differential between the two oceans. There is a gap between the Cordilleras of the Sierra Madre, the Chivela Pass, which concentrates and accelerates the flow of air between massive walls of rock, creating a source of power with enormous potential. The level ground on either side of the highway is perfect for wind turbines, so in 2009, the Oaxaca Wind Power Complex was built. There are hundreds of turbines, lined up in rows for more than 30 km, producing hundreds of megawatts of clean energy, offsetting vast amounts of CO2 and other pollutants.



The Oaxaca Wind Power Complex is made up of hundreds of turbines installed alongside MX 190, beginning at about Kilometer 217 (as measured from Tuxtla Guttierez) and running west from there, all the way to Kilometer 250.

TRAVELER’S ADVISORY (effective September, 2024):

The U.S. Department of State has issued a Level 4 (Do Not Travel) advisory for this region. The restrictions are mandatory for U.S. government employees, and strongly advised for all U.S. travelers, due to the high prevalence of violent crime, and recent increases in activity by the Mexican cartels.
• Isthmus region: U.S. government employees may not travel to the area of Oaxaca bounded by Federal Highway 185D to the west, Federal Highway 190 to the north, and the Oaxaca-Chiapas border to the east. This includes the cities of Juchitan de Zaragoza, Salina Cruz, and San Blas Atempa.
•
Please note that Highway 190 through the Isthmus region is considered the northern edge of the restricted area, but is not included in the restrictions. It’s still considered the safest route between Tuxtla Guttierez and Oaxaca, but if you’re driving this way, it’s important that you stay on Highway 190 until you’re past Tehuantepec. Don’t deviate toward the coast, and don’t stop along the way unless it’s absolutely necessary!

Scenes along MX 190, West of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec

The further we travelled into the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca, the more desert-like the terrain, complete with tall cactus such as this fine specimen.


They don’t need flat land for growing agave. Any bare patch of dirt will do.

A small mescal factory with a pulping mill powered by a cow in harness, walking in circles

Scenes along the Road to Oaxaca

Next up: Oaxaca!

[Rick Quinn]

OAXACA

Driving in from the east, the town comes up rather abruptly. One minute, you’re in the mountains, and the next minute, you’re navigating busy city streets.

The City of Oaxaca, © Google Maps

Hotel Cantera Real

When we finally arrived, it was already quite late in the afternoon. We’d booked a room through Expedia.Mx, the Mexican version of Expedia, and it’s a good thing we did, because the city was jam-packed, gearing up for their own very impressive Dia de los Muertos celebration, just two days away. Visitors were pouring in from all over, filling up every hotel, every bar, and every restaurant in a 30 mile radius. At just $52 for the night (at that time, back in 2015), the Cantera Real was a bargain, and considering the fact that we booked it blind, at the last minute, during the week of a major national holiday? It was far nicer than we had any right to expect. Located in an old colonial building with an interior courtyard, and an easy walk to the city’s main attractions. Our only regret? That we couldn’t stay longer!

I don’t know if it would still be the same good deal today, but at that time (2015), Expedia.Mx found us some excellent bargains, at rates that were actually cheaper than we could have gotten, walking in off the street and bargaining directly with the hotel. I’ve never been a big fan of booking services like Expedia. I always felt they increased costs by adding an extra layer to the booking process, charging extra fees to the traveler, while siphoning profit from hotels that are frequently operating on the narrowest of margins. My experience with Expedia.Mx changed my attitude, at least conditionally. The Mexican version of the service presented options that we never would have found on our own, and it helped the hotels by filling rooms that might otherwise have gone unsold. Of greatest interest to us were the independent properties that were not on the main drag, which tended to be not only cheaper, but far more interesting than the Marriotts and the Holiday Inns and the other business class chain hotels from the U.S. and Europe.

Oaxaca City

Oaxaca was one of the places I most wanted to see on this road trip, and we were actually there, but it was already getting dark, and after two long driving days back to back, we were both exhausted. We had dinner, somewhere near the hotel, and afterwards, instead of going out on the town, we went back to the room. The city was worth a few days, at minimum, and all we had was a few lousy hours? Unacceptable! I added Oaxaca to the growing list of places I was going to have to come back to, because this was just a tease, even worse than San Cristobal de las Casas, where we’d at least spent an afternoon and an evening exploring. Our visit to Oaxaca was so short, I barely remember having been there!



I would have loved to have had enough time to experience the city properly. Oaxaca is known for social and political activism, and a vibrant art scene. Student groups hold demonstrations, and indigenous activists organize protests. The Zapotecs, the largest indigenous group in the region, have roots here stretching back a thousand years or more. We saw a fair bit of graffiti, some of it wonderfully artistic, well executed and brightly colored, as well as some that came straight to the point: Turista Go Home (Tourist Go Home), Oaxaca AntiCapitalista.



There was an ofrenda in the hotel’s underground garage, an altar, festooned with marigolds; the traditional shrine created by family members to honor deceased relatives during the Day of the Dead celebration. If we hadn’t been committed to San Miguel de Allende, we would surely have stayed in Oaxaca, which ranks right alongside San Miguel as one of the best places to celebrate the holiday. Out on the street, there was a frenzy of decoration going on, with ofrendas on street corners, and strings of marigolds draped from light poles, street signs, and trees. I got the sense that if I’d stood too long in one spot, I would have ended up with a painted face, and marigolds in my hair!

A Los Muertos Ofrenda, and a warning on the wall of our hotel garage: They’re not responsible for damage due to fires, floods, and earthquakes.

I tried not to think about all we were missing, by not spending more time in Oaxaca. Their cuisine, heavy on the spicy sauce known as molé, is world famous, and so is the Mescal, a popular alcoholic beverage distilled from agave. Mescal did not originate in Oaxaca, but 90% of all the Mescal in Mexico is produced there, making it a major regional enterprise, and a source of pride for the locals. Personally, I’ve always been a bit turned off by that stuff. It’s a close relative to Tequila, which I’ve often enjoyed in the form of Margaritas, but, in my mind, at least, matching Mescal against good Tequila is like comparing moonshine to top-shelf sipping whiskey. Most of the Mescal sold in the United States has an “extra ingredient,” a little something that some of the distillers started adding to their product in hopes of attracting attention and boosting sales.

Each of the bottles contains a gusano, a dead maguey worm, (actually a type of caterpillar), preserved by the alcohol, like a lab specimen. The worm isn’t considered a contaminant, it’s an ingredient, said to impart a unique flavor, and it’s there in accordance with a tradition beloved by drunken fraternity brothers everywhere: when a bottle of Mescal is passed around at a party, whoever ends up with the last swig is honor bound to eat the worm.

Mescal, with a plump maguey worm in the bottle.

Paintings by local artists in Oaxaca

There are brilliant local painters whose work aligns with the “Oaxacan School,” a primitive style which draws inspiration from Native American themes, and features often bizarre depictions of “magical realism.” I would have loved to take in one or two of their good museums, or to browse in the art galleries. (See “The 6 Best Museums and Galleries in Oaxaca, Lonely Planet.com). Original paintings are beyond my means, even in Mexico, but it would have been cool to pick up a poster or two to frame on my wall at home. When it comes to art and traditional handicrafts, each of the different regions in Mexico has their own unique style, and Oaxaca has more to offer than most.



Shortly after dinner, as we were heading upstairs to our room, there was a bit of excitement in the lobby. A crew from one of the TV stations in Mexico City had just arrived in Oaxaca to cover the holiday, and they were apparently all staying at our hotel. The two reporters, a silver-haired man in a suit and tie, and an attractive woman in a dangerously short skirt, were apparently well-known celebrities, and their arrival created a minor uproar among the staff, setting off a flurry of selfie-taking and autograph signing. Mike and I watched all that from behind the railing on the second floor, then ducked into our room for some much needed sleep.



We were facing another long drive the next day, at least ten hours to Querétaro, where we planned to stay the night. From there, it was a hop and a skip to San Miguel de Allende, and if all went according to plan, we’d be arriving just in time for the beginning of the three day fiesta. We’d been looking forward to it for weeks. All we had to do now was get there!


Next up: Oaxaca to Puebla

[Mark Sedenquist]

Rick,

Great report--as always--and the photos are very cool.

when a bottle of Mescal is passed around at a party, whoever ends up with the last swig is honor bound to eat the worm.

I am not sure why this is, but for some peculiar reason this task has fallen on my plate several times over the years! Statistically, way, way beyond reasonable happenstance in my view!