Another Very Grand Canyon

The most well known train ride in Mexico is the Copper Canyon, a giant cleft in the mountains in the northern part of the country. There is a hair raising hairpin drive down on a single track dirt road but winters at high altitude are not for us. It’ll be there when we have an opening for a drive in Spring in moderate weather.   

From last year we remembered Highway 135 a mountain freeway from Puebla to Oaxaca, a long empty stretch of sinuous asphalt, much of it in good condition. It was as we remembered. 

Dry desert slopes, saguaro cactus, with hardly a sign of human interference. Miles and miles of arid brown hillsides gashed by granite cliffs. 

It was a great drive and we took it slow and steady, mostly half on the shoulder to allow people with appointments to fly past us.

The views are magnificent but the pull outs are few. We found a dirt area to pause to get rid of some used tea and drink some more. In the US this would be a national park with rest stops, picnic areas, scenic overlooks and all that good stuff. In Mexico no one seems to notice except for the lone gringo couple mooching along dragging their lower jaw on the floor. 

Directo Highways in the mountains are two lane affairs and that’s how you find 135D but this is Mexico so two lanes are not necessarily a restriction. Even when the government is maintaining the  highway for your safety. 

Slow trucks can be extremely slow on the uphills grinding as slowly as 15 mph pulling two fifty three foot trailers…paying attention is mandatory! Losing patience isn’t. Look closely below! The slow truck with the flatbed trailers is being passed by a box truck and a van but the third truck just said screw it and took over the rest of the road. On a blind curve uphill into a hump with no sight line. I hung back and took a bunch of shots with my Panasonic GX85 and held my breath. Nothing happened. I passed later on the downhill with a long view ahead feeling if not virtuous at least a little cowardly! 

Or this below. This obviously is the normal magic third lane in action  just hoping the uphill traffic around the curve isn’t doing the same thing!  My position is behind the slower truck with two wheels on the shoulder. Should anything go wrong I’d have had plenty of time to stop and pull out the first  aid supplies.

Aside from the vagaries of passing which never affected us the drive was magnificent winding around mountainsides with scenic vista after panoramic canyons opening up just beyond the guard rails.  

A cell signal might have been nice had we broken down but the motorcyclist we saw was one of four who had stopped and was waiting for his companions to catch up. We saw one in the classic pose making his liquid offering to the mountain gods. This drive takes a few hours and only has a couple of Pemexes. In between gas stations there are no facilities anywhere. It is desolate and lovely. 

I got up to 60 mph on the long straightaways but mostly we were tooling along at 50 or less on the uphills admiring the scenery. The air conditioning was blowing and we had a Longmire novel on the Libby app playing through the speakers. I enjoy Mexican banda music from time to time, lamentations to lost love supported by trumpets in a polka style, full of drama but after a bit…well you know.  Longmire. 

A bit more magic third lane where I stood aside to let the impatient pull ahead. 

And here below, you see an example of high loading on a pick up valiantly planning to take on the hills toward Puebla. If you look closely you’ll see they have roof racks built specifically to take tall loads. If you want the freedom to do it your way come to Mexico. If it works you’re good and if you fail there’s no one to sue.  A libertarian’s paradise you’d think! But usually the love of freedom falls short of taking a chance in Mexico! “There should be a law against that,” say the freedom lovers appalled, and there probably is. I like Mexico the way it is. 

Directo highways are privately operated and the tolls add up. We just drive and pay though I believe there is a website that lists the toll amounts everywhere in Mexico. One very long day Layne added up $72 US in tolls. The peso is getting stronger as I write. Last year it was 21 to the dollar but this year it’s gone down to 18. 

I was hungry and I prevailed on Layne who was anxious to get to the campground, to stop and have some oatmeal. We found a crappy stretch of dirt with no ditches thus easily accessed from the freeway and we pulled over. 

Rusty and I hopped the fence and went for a walk. It was hot desert air in the upper 80s so we were definitely in southern Mexico. A motorcycle bumped past on some agricultural mission. Layne sounded the horn summoning us to lunch. 

Father and son home from school or off to the fields?

As we walked back I spotted another high top pick up truck: 

A not scenic lunch stop in the hot dry desert air. 

“Has a family member disappeared?” A startling public service message near the entrance to the city of Oaxaca. 

And finally our destination, at one of the best campgrounds in Mexico. Here we shall rest and regroup for our final weeks in Mexico’s Yucatán  Peninsula such that after Laynes’s teeth are finished and her implants installed in her jaw we shall advance quickly on Central America starting with Belize in mid April. 

I hope.

Pasty History

When we went to the pasty museum I wasn’t sure what to expect. Layne said we had to make a pasty. That notion freaked me out. But I do enjoy these pasties so I figured how bad could the museum be? Pretty bad.

I parked the van and walked Rusty a minute while Layne bought tickets. She told the ticket taker she’d be back as she was going to get her camera. We left Rusty aboard GANNET2 and climbed the stairs into the central plaza of the magnificent museum. 

No photos our guide admonished us as I got ready to document our efforts at party making. What? No photos? And were told only after we bought our tickets? I got pretty mad. Pedro our guide let me grumble and shrugged his shoulders saying that was the bosses decision to protect the integrity of pasty making. I thought that was bloody stupid and said so. Secrecy surrounding pasties when your towns tourism is dedicated to them? What idiots run this town? He didn’t disagree and  I wanted to quit, but my wife was made of sterner stuff. Check Pedro out, himself a former miner and a superb human being it turns out. He made my day eventually. 

An early model kitchen from the 18th century Spanish era roughly. It had room for wood underneath in the arched portion and a one dish oven. Pretty beautiful eh? 

So how did I get pictures? First let me say I have not posted them anywhere else because they posted signs asking us not to take photos but let me also say I showed real interest in and appreciation of the museum and it’s displays and Pedro came to understand that. This is a later kitchen with three burners and a similar design to the earlier one also with room to store dry wood.  At this altitude you have to store wood in dry season to burn it effectively in the cold wet misty rainy season. A big consideration in a wood fired kitchen. Take a picture Pedro ordered me when I demurred saying I didn’t want to get him in trouble. Ha, said the ex-miner. I did as I was told. 

The Cornish era brought in more modern iron stoves and cookware in a design much more similar to modern stove design. Well, within reason of course but you can see ovens and warming drawers and so forth. Mid 19th century. By now Pedro and I were fast friends and he urged me to make pictures but I was reluctant telling him I still didn’t want him to get into trouble. He ignored my protestations and pushed me. 

The Prince of Wales paid a visit and Pedro met him, the memories of a decade ago carefully stored on his phone. 

The man who maintained the Cornish cemetery (photos of our visit there further down this page) was made a member of the British Empire for his 45 years service. The connection through mining runs surprisingly deep. 

It took a few years for the tight Corn ish community to connect with the locals as the story goes but once they did the binds never let go. Football of course was one glue but civilized treatment of the workers, double time pay on Saturdays and triple time on Sundays for voluntary overtime was treatment unheard of in the Spanish colonial era. Oh and lunch breaks! For those pasties! Pedro pointed out the better spiced Mexican version is about half the size of the foot long Cornish pasty. 

Mr and Mrs Rule led the Cornish community and we saw their graves in the cemetery. 

Pedro made me try on the safety gear of the modern miners. He ended up taking my grumpiness and instead let me see inside the world  he  had lived in as a miner. I was quite honored he understood my desire to understand. We parted on a tight tight handshake. 

Oh and my pasty I wasn’t allowed to photograph in the making? It didn’t actually look bad when it was baked by the end of the tour. I thought the bean filling was delicious.  They use proper pastry too, rolled out by me in this case. I woofed it. 

On our way to the English Cemetery Layne stopped to get some bread at the ubiquitous pasty shops. She bought some of the vitamin enhanced bread preferred by the miners called pan de pulque which to me tasted like soft sweet Hawaiian rolls. 

It was a winding narrow series of alleys that we followed on Google maps to the English Cemetery (“Panteon Ingles”) hidden in the shade on a tree covered hilltop. 

Don Chenchon the eternal sentinel was the man honored with the OBE mentioned above. His replacement is a thoroughly unpleasant woman who yelled at me to put Rusty on a leash as we came up the road and her two dogs charged him yapping and growling. Sure I said I can put him his leash but what about yours? Nice way to greet visitors I added and turned my back on her. I think I surprised her. I certainly surprised myself but I had run out of patience with the touron attitude of Real Del Monte residents. 

We met a young Cornish couple drawn to the town on their hitch hiking travels around the world and we gave them a ride back to town. They too got yelled at by the lady in the cemetery. Weirdly enough a local came by and asked if we had visited it and I said yes but the woman was really mean. He shook his head laughing and said yup she really is special, before going on his way. The cemetery is still very much worth it despite the gorgon guarding it. 

They had a plane to catch to New Zealand that night. Busy people and quite charming. 

Real del Monte traffic jam. Getting out wasn’t going to be easy. 

Next stop: Oaxaca.