The crumbling, earthquake ravaged churches of Antigua are a photographer’s dream (and quite possibly a civil engineer’s nightmare). I wouldn’t go as far as calling myself a photographer, but I can categorically state I am not a civil engineer.
This post is about some things that people from our home town of Christchurch are sick of hearing about. Earthquakes. Rebuilding. And crumbling stone churches. It seems appropriate to be writing about the crumbling earthquake-ravaged churches of Antigua today. Just as our home country was yet again thrown into turmoil by one of Mother Nature’s tantrums.
Overland travel is all about staying in the roughest, most unforgiving environments. Ignoring personal comfort. Shunning the trappings of a tourism. Seeking out discomfort and… no! Wait! Screw it. Today it is all about luxury.
Oh no!—We’re approaching the event horizon of Overlander Oasis. It’s too late to escape. Deploy the rooftop tent. Crack a beer and open up the deck chairs. We may be some time.
Biblioteca Palafoxiana is quite possibly the oldest public library in North America. It looks like something out of Harry Potter. Located in Puebla, it was only by luck that we happened to stumble across this impressive collection.
There comes a time in every traveller’s life when they feel the need to camp at the foot of an active volcano. Right? Well, we did anyway.
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.
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.