Coast to coast across central Mexico

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For this section of the trip we wanted to cross overland from the Gulf of Mexico, on the East coast, to the Pacific Ocean, on the West coast.

As the crow flies this would take us through Mexico City but I wanted to avoid that so I devised a route looping around the central highlands through a selection of interesting looking cities.

I was not able to verify that there were bus routes between all the these stops before we left, but I needn't have worried as there turned out to be something available on each occasion.

I had already reached the conclusion that Mexico is not really suitable for intensive travelling as transportation is disproportionately expensive to the general cost of living.

The country has pretty much been carved up by various bus companies so there is hardly any competition resulting in monopolistic pricing.


Veracruz was founded in 1598 and became Mexico’s most important port for the next 400 years, currently handling around 70% of the countries exports.

There are a number of old buildings around the zocalo, but not enough to generate any olde-worldy atmosphere.

It is only a short walk to the seafront where you can see the container ships being loaded in the distance.

Although an important tourist destination, the town feels industrial, is fairly grubby and was also the first place where we have really noticed any litter.

On the plus side, the state symphony orchestra gave a free concert in the port while we were there which was good, and on Saturday night the city centre was buzzing with tourists, locals, stalls and mariachis creating a great atmosphere.


We were happy enough to move on to Xalapa, a breezy highland town and the state capital.

This was a much more laid back and pleasant place, set on the side of a hill with views across to the surrounding mountains.

It is famous for its anthropology museum which houses exhibits of craftwork recovered from archeological sites around the country, in particular seven giant carved heads from the Olmec era (the earliest known civilization in Mexico, dating from about 1200 BC).

These heads are about 9ft tall, have wide flat noses and generally grumpy expressions.
These had survived the last 3000 years pretty well.

We had heard that the museum also has nice gardens, so we ate our banana sandwiches in the grounds.

Xalapa was a pleasant town for hanging out in, having a picturesque central area which blended into a lakeside park, a nice change from other Mexican towns.


There is a town in central Mexico known for its Cornish pasties.

Also credited with introducing football to Mexico, Cornish miners arrived in Pachuca in the 19th century when the area was producing prodigious amounts of silver.

Nowadays pasty shops are dotted throughout the town and, of course, it would have been amiss not to try them. In fact they were very good. We didn't get past the meat and potato staples, but there were a variety of more exotic, but less immediately appetizing, concoctions available.

The town itself was not very interesting, but it was conveniently located for a visit to another important archeological site ("Last one - I promise", I told Linda).


Forty minutes on the bus towards Mexico City is Teotihuacan, more simply called Los Pirimides by the locals.

This is a large hot and dusty site, dominated by two large pyramids built in the first century AD.

The Piramide del Sol is the worlds third largest after Egypt’s' Cheops and Mexico’s' pyramid of Chalula, though unlike Chalula it actually looks like a proper pyramid.

It dominates the landscape long before you arrive, rising 70m above the surrounding scrub.

It is linked to the smaller Piramide de la Luna by the city's main street, handily called the Avenue of the Dead.

Having climbed these two pyramids and strolled along the avenue we wandered around the rest of the site under a blazing sun trying to visualise the lives of the 125,000 classical inhabitants.

Just to confuse things, the civilisation embodied by these ruins arose during the Olmec period and fell during Maya period, but is not of either.


Back in Pachuca we happened to have a hotel room populated by a hoard of invisible scratchy things, many of which hitched a ride to the next town of Queretaro.

Over a few nights we reduced their numbers with the liberal application of insecticide but it might have been a week before we were free of them.

It is difficult to tell if they are gone because your mind plays tricks, summoning up itches on its own. I suspected that it was fleas, but we never saw one and were not being bitten, but could sense the crawling movement across our extremities, so the jury remains out.


There were two outstanding colonial gems on this section of the trip, and Queretaro was the first.

The city centre is deservedly a world heritage site, comprised almost exclusively of buildings constructed in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

There are numerous churches and plazas in a relatively compact area.

Well maintained streets creating a sense of living history as the buildings are put to modern uses.

One street was being dug up to install new water pipes and we noticed how they saved all the old stones from the road to be re-laid upon completion.

On the edge of the city there is an impressive aquaduct built around 1730 which still brings water to the city today.

We got hold of a tourist brochure and traipsed around for a couple of days to make sure that we didn't miss anything.


San Miguel De Allende has a reputation for art, Americans, and cobblestones. It probably used to be a quaint highland town servicing the silver mines in the surrounding hills.

Ignacio Allende, a hero of the independence movement, was born here in 1779 and his name was addended to the original San Miguel in 1826, fifteen years after his execution.

The first art school was opened in 1938, followed by an art institute in 1951 which attracted arty Americans and so word began to spread about this charming hillside town.

The centre-piece of the town is a pink church bestowed with gothic spires added to the original 17th century church in the late 19th century. Apparently the stonemason got the idea from a postcard. It is beautiful, but incongruous to my eye.

The rest of the town is also pretty.

The streets, designed for horse and cart, work well as a one way system, but all those cobbles create plenty of traffic noise.

There are more coffee shops than you can shake a stick at, occupied more by American real estate retirees than arty types these days, it appears.


The second colonial gem was the town of Guanajuato.

I took a room in a new hostel which Linda disliked but I thought was OK, particularly once I'd killed the resident cockroaches. However, the hostel had a double life as an open-all-hours hostelry and two sleepless nights were all we could stand.

We moved into a nice hotel up the road for the same price and were happy to stay for a few more days.

That is good because Guanajuato is really worth the visit.

Nestled in a valley, the town expands sideways from its main road. Towards one end is a pedestrianised section of theatres and tree lined plazas.

Shops line the road for a couple of hundred metres until a few more picturesque plazas offer more opportunities for benched relaxation.

We walked between these two areas any number of times in a single day.

A funicular railway toddles up one side of the steep hillside to a viewpoint occupied by a large statue of a revolutionary hero.

There is a tradition, turned into a nightly tourist activity, in which finely dressed mariachi bands lead crowds of followers around the town with lots of stops for songs and dancing. We came upon one by chance and it was good fun, not realising that most of the participants had bought tickets for the experience.

We took a bus to the local silver mine which had contributed to the town’s wealth and, no doubt, provided the money for all the fine buildings over the previous centuries. The Valenciana mine produced 20% of the world’s silver for 250 years and is still being dug today, though not on Sundays as we discovered.

Closer to town is the Museum of the Mummies. Due to overcrowding in a local cemetery, bodies were removed after 5 years to make room for others, but it was found that many bodies had mummified rather than decomposed because of the mineral content of the soil and dry atmosphere.

Well, what are you gonna do?

Open a museum and put the best ones on display, of course.

It's a small museum but very interesting. The gaunt, brown cadavers are lined up in display cases, some with identity cards and short stories.

There is a man with a hole in his chest where he was stabbed to death, and a special section devoted to infant mortality.

The facial expressions of ordinary people buried in their ordinary clothes made this a rewarding excursion.


After the beauty of Queretaro and Guanajuato we found Guadalajara to be rather drab.

Mexico's second city has a grand cathedral at its centre, surrounded on each side by a separate plaza comprising of fountains or statuary.

The extent of redevelopment is clear though. Fifteenth and sixteenth century buildings stand side by side with modern construction.

Attempts have been made to blend these in, but not with great success in my opinion.

We followed a walking tour around the Centro Historico which only takes a couple of hours if you don't actually go into the museums.

The city centre shopping area takes the Mexican obsession with shoe shops to a new level (cheaper at home though). Apparently, there is even a whole mall devoted entirely to shoes.

We failed to develop the necessary enthusiasm for this excursion. Once we had seen the city we couldn't find a reason to stay longer and we knew that the seaside was only one more bus ride away.


We came down from the highlands of the Sierra Madre mountain range to the Pacific Ocean twenty days after leaving the country’s opposite coast.

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Photos

Xalapa
Olmec Head

Xalapa
Olmec Head