Off with the panama, on with the cowboy hat

Our time in Mexico was running out and Uncle Sam was calling. It was time to start the long journey back up north.

Goodbye to Campeche and the Yucatan. Goodbye to heat, humidity and hungry mosquitoes

We gleefully turfed out items from our overloaded backpacks, kit for the tropics we no longer needed: worn-out swimming trunks, sandals and sun cream, insect repellents and panama.

Our bus took us through the night through the states of Tabasco and Veracruz, sticky, flat and dotted with stubby palms, and back up into the dry, mountainous spine of the country.

Through the thin morning air we passed Mexico's tallest peak, Citlaltepetl (‘Star Mountain’), 5611 metres high, its summit crowned with snow, before sweeping down into Puebla, a city of 1.9 million.

We lunched in the zocalo, a bargain comida corida in one of the many grand old colonial buildings gracing the centre of this city with a reputation as the most conservative, Catholic and ‘Spanish’ city in the country.

In the shade of the square below shoe shiners perched on their high chairs, balloon sellers touted for business and large coaches passed by, the large banners hung on their radiators indicating their passengers were members of Alcoholics Anonymous, clearly gathered here from all over for a convention. Hardly anonymous.

I consulted the map and immediately wished I hadn’t: sixteen hours on a bus and yet we were now even further south and east than when we’d left.

Thanks to the enormous coastline of the Gulf of Mexico we had to head in the opposite direction, skirting around it, before we could head north and west.

We soon got to correct this, heading again further north before quickly becoming sucked into the massive urban vortex that is Mexico City.

It seemed to take hours to cross, battling through thick traffic and choking smog before finally the air cleared as we rose up onto a dry high plateau where the traffic thinned out and parched yellow fields and pale green cacti replaced the dense concrete jungle.

We sped past a long high ridges of rock dusted with snow and blocks of small houses, identical and compact. Each roof was equipped with a squat plastic water tanks, like rows of black wheelie bins.

The scenery became wilder as we climbed up higher. Pine trees grew in the cool mountain air and houses perched precariously on craggy slopes.

The rocks all around us looked hard and unyielding, their sharp edges defying the efforts of man to bend nature to his will.

It seemed an unwise place to build a city but that’s exactly what we found as rounded yet another bend in the road and Guanajuato lay stretched out below us.

Soon we were plunging through the subterranean streets, amazing roads carved out of the rocks under the picturesque city through skills acquired by plundering the rich silver seams in the mountains nearby.

Songs of praise greeted us through the walls of our hostel as the faithful gathered at the church next door, a suitably cleansing soundtrack to my morning ablutions, before we headed up a hill for views over the town.

As the sun set evening shadows crept up over the hillside, gobbling up the little concrete houses, a riot of colours against the dry brown earth.

The road called again and we headed further north, changing at Leon, a city seemingly composed of car showrooms, Pemex stations and American fast food restaurants.

On and on, up onto the bone-dry high plateau of the central highlands, a land of rocky mesas and bluffs where black vultures patrolled the clear skies and the sun beat down relentlessly on the low scrubby bushes.

Aguascalientes hoves into view and our tubby driver stopped to change a tyre and take on some more cargo. A pick-up backed up and three beefy looking blokes hopped out, one of them sporting a splendid, cascading mullet, shining with grease in the bright sunshine.

They unloaded several crates of an undefined product into the bowels of our bus, the driver looking on a little apprehensively. We were back in drug-running country, and checkpoints were becoming more frequent.

At one the heavily armoured soldiers broke with their customary laid-back approach and boarded our bus, insisting on searching all our bags, promptly yours truly to indignantly mutter under his breath about the Magna Carta, the infringement of civil liberties and besides quite what would this skinny English chap be carrying.

I stayed tight-lipped as the soldiers alighted only to be replaced by a gaggle of vendors. They swarmed on board, hawking refrescos and sugary snacks, a poor old-timer in tow, holding out his plastic cowboy hat and begging for change.

This particularly millinery curiosity, is very much back in evidence now we’re back in the north. Though they crop up all over the country, making for ceaselessly tempting photo opportunities they only really come out in numbers where the air is cooler.

There were seven of them last night in our restaurant in Zacatecas, crowded round a table, their owners brooding beneath them, fingering their moustaches and talking earnestly in low voices. It looked an important meeting, perhaps about corn prices.

Or perhaps, as Lara suggested, they were revolutionaries, following in the tradition of Zapata and Villa.

Zacatecas, our last stop in Mexico, is a city which welcomes you, as our guide at the local silver mine put it: ‘with open arms and a heart of silver’.

It seemed to live up to its promise; we found ourselves being frequently greeted politely by complete strangers in the street and cars always seemed to stop for us to cross the road.

It’s a city of grand buildings, great thick slabs of stone with a pinkish hue, many ornately decorated by silver barons who made their fortunes in the surrounding hills.

Again it feels different to further south. There’s no grid-pattered streets of colourful low buildings here - instead it looks a little more like home, with winding streets and tall, elegant buildings where shop names are framed rather than painted on.

More importantly for us we’re back in the land of gorditas (’little fatties‘), delicious little tortillas sliced in the middle and stuffed with cheese, beans and cactus.

Up north once more we are back on high-protein diets and we bid a fond farewell to the tropical fruits which we gorged ourselves on further south.

People up here seem to be bigger; it is uncanny how they seem to increase in bulk the closer we get to the US border, walking manifestations of the strong links we have seen throughout our trip between diet and topography.

Glowing away in our bellies the gorditas warmed us up nicely as we beat a path back to our hostel, shivering in the cold night air, the altitude (the city standing at some 2500 metres) and latitude leaving us struggling to reacclimatise.

It’s only going to get colder from now on as we head further north. Time to break out that nice warm cowboy hat once more...