In today’s installment, Emma rides a magical unicorn through a field of butterflies and some north going Kiwis meet some south going Kiwis for some classic Seussian confusion. More or less, anyway.
Not a lot can be said to enhance the awesomeness of a surrealist sculpture garden in the jungle. So we’ll just launch straight into some photos.
There isn’t much to report about our time in San Miguel de Allende. It was a place where we finally did get to stop, relax, set up the tent and stop moving for a bit. We even got a little work done—how productive of us! Luckily we took one or two photos and a video of some magical dancing birds to keep this blog post interesting.
We really needed to slow down. We had been travelling too fast and we were looking for somewhere to stop for a while. We hoped to not have to set up the tent every night. To know where we were going to sleep. To familiarise ourselves with a local food vendor. We also needed to save some money, because we’d budgeted for 18–24 months of travel and had used up over half of the minimum not long after arriving in the Mexican mainland. Our plan was that Guanajuato would be the place where all of this would happen.
In typical Flightless Kiwis style, we had made plans to be somewhere, faffed about and now had limited time to get to where we had planned to be by the time we had planned to be there. This time the place we wanted to be was Guanajuato, in the state of Guanajuato we had to get there from Zacatecas, in the state of Zacatecas, but we decided to take a quick detour to Guadalajara in the state of Jalisco and Tequila also in the state of Jalisco to save us having to head west after our time in Guanajuato, Guanajuato, since […]
After our time in Durango, we were craving a little outdoor time, some peace and quiet to enjoy the clear skies and solitude. Luckily, in Mexico, you are never far from a national park of some sort. The Sierra De Órganos National Park was a short drive south of Durango in the state of Zacatecas.
El Espinazo del Diablo (the Devil’s Backbone—a mountain pass along Mexico’s highway 40) is an infamously sinuous mountain road that joins the towns of Mazatlán, Sinaloa and Durango, Durango. The road has a bit of a reputation for punishing travellers with terrifying accident-inducing winding turns. Luckily travellers are also rewarded with spectacular views as the road runs along a mountain ridge, high in the Sierra Madre mountains. This seemed like exactly the kind of thing we should investigate further.
It isn’t often in this journey that we simply head south like we are supposed to. We tend to get distracted, make detours, head back north and hang around interesting places. We generally take our sweet time about actually heading towards Argentina. Making our way south from Álamos to Mazatlán was one of those few occasions where we did. We were, unbelievably, actually heading in the direction we promised to when we embarked on this trip.
After all the mapless back-road adventures in the Copper Canyon, we decided it was time to stick to the main roads. Until we realised how much shorter it was to drive between El Fuerte and Álamos on the back roads.
The Copper Canyon had provided its fair share of ups and downs. Both literally and figuratively.