day 7

day 7 - february 1, 2014

noon:

the most important part of the day!

our campsite at the balnearos de gogorron

 

wild (ish) life!

we slept until 10 am, it was amazing. i feel so much more ready to deal with life after such a good sleep. we had coffee and smoothies for breakfast, and tidied the camper up a bit.
we walked around the balnearos de gogorron before we left, and it was really spectacular - i wish we had about a week to spend here. maybe on the way back, anyway :) but for now we chose sleep over exploration, and it was the right choice. there are a bunch of pools (i saw at least 4, though 1 was closed for maintenance), and at least 4 water slides, one of which was HUGE. there were maybe 50 people there today (y'know those crazies who are out swimming in the winter. it was about 25 degrees when we woke up, and the temperature is still climbing), and of course i got ogled/whistled at by a group of men hanging out around the pool. this is pretty standard latin american attitude in my experience, so i just ignored it.
however, i was thinking about last night, and when we were trying to clarify where to camp with the security guard, he kept talking to mike, despite the fact that i clearly understood more of what he was saying, and was the one doing the talking. this obviously annoys me, because while i can handle being whistled at, i have a harder time with being ignored. really, the guy was nice, and we got what we needed, but it's interesting to see how subtly different it is from canada. and i suppose sometimes the same, however i don't know enough spanish to go on a feminist tirade at this guy, so i guess i'm more willing to accept that sort of behaviour here. 

i've seen plants like these before in cuba - i believe they live off the poisture in the air. can anyone verify?

 

giant water slide, and a herd of sheep!

at the balnearos

we're headed to a small town east of mexico city, we'll be camping tonight near the town of puebla. it appears to be a national park. gina has agreed to lead us there, and estimates it will take almost 7 hours. hopefully that's not the case, as we'll end up driving in the dark again... however sleep = totally worth it, so whatever. we'll live. 

villa de reyes, after leaving gogorron

this has seriously been the adventure of a lifetime so far, and we're only a week into it! we are happy and healthy and having a blast. i hope i can get to a place with internet soon so that i can upload all these posts. i talked to my mom on the phone yesterday, but i'm sure everyone else is wondering, since i posted "headed to mexico" then dropped off the face of the earth. lol. don't worry friends, we are bueno! 

update: 

i just worked out our costs so far (this is ON the trip, not including stuff like vaccines, $200 trailer, pre-trip truck maintenence, etc). these are approximate and in CAD

tolls $71
gas $750
eating out $145 (but they don't seem to have starbucks here, so that will go way down from here on out!)
groceries $88
truck deposit to bring it into mexico $300
hotels $131 (two nights in the USA where it was too cold to camp)
camping $25
parking $.50!!
misc $400 (this includes random stuff like socks and lights for the trailer and an extra car battery, scanner/printer, etc)
insurance for mexico $112
phones $42

total $2064

this seems pretty reasonable, all things considered, and most of the big non-gas costs were in the states, and were one-time only costs. whereas the defiant costs about $175 to fill up with diesel in toronto, here it's just over $100, which is pretty damn sweet. 

4 pm update:

still 200 km to go to our camping destination for tonight. however, since we got a solid sleep we're in WAY better shape today than we were yesterday. we're on the toll highway between queretaro and mexico city (only $140 pesos, not bad - actually got worse, there were tons more tolls) and by the end of the day will have done about 550 km today. 

i have looked up fun things to do near puebla, and there is an "african lion safari" type thing where you can drive in to where all the animals are kept, which sounds cool. also, (and even more exciting, in my nerdy opinion) there is a zona arquelogica with pyramids (landing platforms for gou'uld ships?!?!) and a museum. you can hike to the top of the largest pyramid, and everything is free on sundays! i'm hoping we have enough time to spend the morning climbing pyramids and the afternoon driving to oaxaca. 

we still have not been pulled over or asked for bribes, unless you consider obscenely expensive highway tolls bribery. i also paid a guy $3 pesos to use a bathroom yesterday. i'm not sure if it was legitimately his right to ask me to pay, however that's like 25 cents canadian, and i always have the "they probably need it more than i do" attitude about such things. 

11 pm update:

what a day!! first off, it was not short - we literally just got settled into our campsite for the night and it's toooo late. where to begin. 

we had our third encounter with the policia today. it was a bit nervewracking, but fine, really. they had a roadside checkpoint set up and waved us in. i was most worried because i was smoking a drum at the time, and was terrified they'd think it was a joint, so i was all sketchy hiding it. anyway, they asked for mike's driver's licence, and we gave them a photocopy. that wasn't good enough, so we retrieved the original from the camper. they said "s'ok michael" and sent us on our way. no bribes, no trouble. 

next, we experienced mexico city. we decided not to stop there for lunch since we slept until 10 am and didn't leave gogorron until 11. thank god we didn't stop there, because even driving constantly it took us FOUR HOURS to get through the city. we paid probably $40 in tolls just around mexico city, and didn't even drive through the center or anything, but it was insane. we were literally in stop and go traffic for 4 hours, and it's a weekend! mike was amazed and delighted to see the people standing on the dotted lines selling cigarettes, snacks, stuffed toys, you name it. 

outskirts of mexico city

 

our first mexican traffic jam!

mexico city is at 2240 meters above sea level, but after (finally) clearing the city, the highway climbed and climbed. it was dark by this point, sadly, because i think it would have been breathtaking in the daylight. we were climbing at about 55 m per km for at least half an hour (i'm guessing more), and topped out at 3200 m. the road was beautifully paved, and people were driving like maniacs - hard to blame them after 4 hours of gridlock. 

we were aiming for popocatepetl (an active volcano!!) and iztaccihuatl national park, where mike found information about camping. personally, i think we came at it from the wrong way (down the highway to puebla, as opposed to the highway to cuautla), but gina told us that was the right way to go, and we trusted her judgement (which, it turns out, is not always good. she's a bit of a pain in the ass sometimes, although mostly helpful. i think she has some sort of deal with the mexican government to take us through every toll road in existence). anyway, we ended up doing a bit more after-dark offroading, and decided to turn back when we hit an impassible little road on the outskirts of huejotzingo. at this point it was already 9 pm, and we were doing "that thing" we've been told not to again - driving well after dark in strange areas. anyways, it was fine. we stopped at a pemax (mexican gas station) and looked at the camping information i had printed out for the trip. we found a place in nearby cholula called "trailer park las americas", which was promised to be friendly and safe. 

well, it seems that GPS coordinates are not all made equal, and we have found a few times that gina doesn't understand/work in the same format as many other GPSs. regardless, we got totally lost and did a backalley tour of cholula. we almost busted somebody's sideview mirror off navigating the defiant down a narrow alley. when we passed "the place" with no las americas in sight, gina appeared to offer us an alternate way to get there... which turned out to be just her directing us in a huge circle back to the same place. argh. so, frustrated, at 10 pm, we pulled into a pemax to regroup. i was looking at web pages that i had saved as PDF 
documents on my tablet, and found a listing for "las americanos" in cholula, but the GPS coordinates were at 96 degrees, which is super far away. i thought "maybe they put 96 instead of 98 - they have the same town, and almost the same name of the place." so we tried it. i am not a religious person, but i was on the verge of prayer. WE FOUND IT. they posted the GPS coordinates with a mistake but we bloody well found it. SIGH. OF. RELIEF. so now, we're here drinking gas station beers and wondering why there are fireworks going off around us. 

mike is convinced he's developing a spidey-like tropes-sense to detect these awful, giant, concealed speedbumps. it's not that hard during the day, but at night those fuckers really sneak up on you. anyway, i have no reason to believe he's wrong about this, so i just hope it keeps up. we've had another round of tropes-based trouble... when we arrived here, the toaster and the kitchen table had both been banging about in the camper for hours. anyway, the table is propped back up and the toaster seems fine. at least the magic bullet wasn't damaged!! 

thanks, tropes.

we're planning on getting up bright and early tomorrow morning and going to shower and then explore the pyramids before heading to oaxaca (350 km). we just found a campsite called overlander oasis run by a canadian (!!!) couple just outside oaxaca. it sounds really promising. 

we're learning why these trips take people so long - we've been a bit overambitious in our goals, and have learned from the experience. i'm glad we'll be in oaxaca tomorrow where we can NOT DRIVE for a week or so, but once we hit the road again, we're going to take it a heck of a lot easier - hopefully made even more manageable by our newly-learned spanish! (however, i have to say that i've been quite impressed with my ability so far to get us by. speaking enough spanish to explain our needs, but not enough to be hassled because people just think we're lost tourists - which we MAY be. it's kind of ideal...)