The city of Antigua is a tapestry of colour. To save you from having to do very much reading, this post is simply a patchwork quilt. A collection of some of the colourful walls and fabrics found on the streets of this UNESCO world heritage centre. Pour a cuppa. Set your eyeballs to ‘relax’ and enjoy.
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.
Border crossings in Central America are famous for being chaotic and stressful. We had heard stories of ‘border helpers’ swarming vehicles on arrival, everyone trying to get their cut, bribes, fees, corrupt bureaucrats, confusing paperwork, people stuck camping on borders for days because of technicalities outside their control. It was with some trepidation that we rolled up to the border with Guatemala.
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.
While we were dilly-dallying about in Santa María del Tule we found plenty of opportunities to head into the ‘big smoke’, Oaxaca’s state capital—Oaxaca. Sometimes on our own for errands, sometimes with friends, but nearly always with a camera.
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.
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.
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.