Advertisement
Published: June 19th 2015
Edit Blog Post
Distance driven today: 194 miles / 312 km
Cumulative distance driven: 5,928 miles / 9,540km
Today’s trip: Veracruz to Coatzacoalcos, Mexico
Speed bumps driven over: insanely many
Yesterday evening I picked up Zoe from the airport in Veracruz J I thought we should take it easy on our first riding day together, so I decided to start with a short trip of around 200 miles, which was supposed to only take 3,5 hours. What could possibly go wrong? Over 7,5 hours later, I was on the border of driving myself insane – yes the pun is intended! Instead of taking the highway from Veracruz to Coatzacoalcos, I decided to take the scenic sea-side road. The scenic route turned out to take 4 hours longer than the highway because it took us through all 147 villages (now I may be exaggerating a tiny bit here…). It wasn’t the number of towns a villages we drove through that were the issue, but rather the fact that each of those villages and towns had at least a couple of dozen topes on average as you enter and exit them. I will let you do the math on how many
topes we drove over today. Suffice to say that we drove over so many, that I will have nightmares about topes for many weeks to come.
Topes in Spanish simply mean speed bump, i.e. an element on the road which is intended to slow down vehicles. Speed bumps are perfectly normal occurrences on most roads and we are all used to them in one way or the other. After all, speed bumps are there to ensure the safety of our children and pedestrians on the roads, and to prevent accidents due to excessive speed in urban areas. Enter Mexican topemania.
Every tiny village and town, and I mean *every *each and one of them has lots of topes on the main road going through it, to ensure that motorists don’t go too fast. But when I say a lot, that means about a billion (give or take a few) topes for every inhabited place in the country. It is therefore only worthy to account for the anatomy of this national treasure (!?!).
Topes come in all kinds of shapes, but most often they consist of a hastily put together asphalt lump laid down perpendicular to
the road. Topes often have a semicircle shape, rather than an elongated and flatter curvature that follows the road surface. What this means in other words is that, when you drive over a typical tope, it feels like you are driving straight into a sidewalk. The blow to the front wheel and steering column is hard and instant. And that is probably the intended effect, because as a driver you definitely want to slow down completely after the initial topes you hit. To be honest, it often feels that you are slowing down not because you want to protect the pedestrians, dogs and children on the road, but because the impact on the front wheel was so hard that you need to look for the closest tire shop to re-balance your wheels!
Then there is the small matter of marking the topes to make them visible. You guessed it; 9 out of 10 topes are completely unmarked. There are very rarely any road sings alerting you that your vehicle’s front wheel is about to be hit with a sledgehammer from a tope. There is certainly no warning sings before you hit the topes. At best (and we are talking
about rare instances now) there is a small road sing, next to the tope. Needless to say that, by the time you see the sign you barely have any time to react, no matter how slow you are going. Also, the tope itself is usually the same color as the tarmac, literally blending in with the road, thus making it physically impossible to see even if you knew exactly where it is.
Speaking of the placement of topes along the road in a town, it is instantly obvious that there is no pattern. Some towns have one giant tope when entering it, and then nothing else. Some towns have5 consecutive topes as you enter, all of various shapes, materials and height, then a bit further down, one tiny one, and then 3 more. You get the picture, i.e. there is no predictable pattern.
Topes did literally
drove me insane today; pun intended.
PS I looks like a manage to forget my satellite tracking devices on the ground, next to the motorcycle yesterday evening, as we were parking in front of our hotel here in Coatzacoalcos. When I returned an hour later to retrieve it, it
was gone L I guess that I will have to create our future daily map tracks manually by pasting a pin icon onto a Google map.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.112s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 9; qc: 53; dbt: 0.0662s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb