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...

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Pirates, discos and bagels: The joy of budget accommodation

We’ve covered a lot of Mexico in the last three days - 915 miles to be precise. We’ve moved from the sweltering flat lands of the Yucatan to the mountainous silver towns of the north. Spending so many hours (27 to be precise) watching dubbed films on buses is tiring business. We have therefore been lucky to find some gems of places to rest our weary heads.

We started in Campeche, a pastel crayon coastal town of blistering heat (too hot even for me to sunbathe), where the Maya traded before the Spanish invaded and pirates pilfered. We were staying in the Hostal de Pirata (I won’t translate). We were greeted by a skeleton in complete pirate costume, a chest of skulls with googly stuck-on eyes and two empty rocking chairs eerily rocking. How very apt. The owner was, however, not a pirate (he merely extorted 270 pesos (£13.50) for a night’s accommodation) but an architect. It was therefore a little unexpected to find ourselves stepping over one another in a tiny box room only a metre larger than a double bed with just a sliding screen separating our ’living’ space and the bathroom. The room was hot, and having the windows open only made it hotter. So we closed them and turned on the fan, which creaked like a pirate’s plank.

The hostel was creatively designed, albeit not with space for backpacks in mind, with a wonderful roof terrace. The views across the city to the sea were incredible, although it was too hot to even stand at look at them. To take refuge from the heat we would hide underneath the palm leaf shelter on the roof or stand in the street. It was too hot to be inside. Even though most windows in Campeche don’t have glass, only bars, even the locals found it too hot to be inside. So instead we all stood outside our respective pastel coloured doorway watching each other trying not to move for fear of breaking out in a sweat.

It was a relief to get on our air-conditioned bus and bed for the night. Bedtime viewing was Are We Done Yet? featuring Ice Cube building a house. If an ex-gangster rapper DIY film dubbed into Spanish isn’t enough to send you to sleep nothing will. I slept surprisingly well waking outside a restaurant near Veracruz where I stood watching forlorn cows (the ones with droopy ears) chew maize stalks before getting back on the bus and watching a film about Italians going to the New World to swim in milk with jumbo carrots. Or was I still dreaming?

We got off in Puebla, delirious and not looking forward to, but desperately needing, our next bed, which was in the only hotel with rooms available from the ‘basic’ range touting ‘dingy, dungeon like rooms’. Puebla doesn’t do hostels - the guide book descriptions led us to believe that you either get hell holes or the Hilton. We were therefore rather impressed by the Hotel San Miguel. It wasn’t a dingy dungeon at all, but instead a decorous disco palace. It was a time warp and we had just walked into the 1970s. The Hotel San Miguel had a lot of brown, a lot of Formica and a lot of gold trim. It was a treat. The lobby and lift played the Bee Gees and similar disco hits around the clock, moustachioed Mexican men lounged around on faux leather sofas smoking cigarettes and the lift had large clunking buttons that popped out when you arrived on your floor. I had one of my best night’s sleep of the whole trip here - the room was quiet and the floor length, brown curtains blocked out all light, we even had a (brown) reading lamp. For World in Slow Motion, this was hotel luxury.

Hotel San Miguel is not representative of Puebla. We shimmied out of the door and into a very sophisticated city. Puebla held onto Spanish tradition longer than most Mexican cities and you can see it in the buildings. They are tall and grand, many with ornate and tiled facades and wonderful arched colonnades. Scattered around the streets are seventy Catholic churches and the tallest cathedral in Mexico. With the highland altitude this city definitely felt cool in attitude and clime.
We were up and out early the next morning on a Primera Plus bus to Guanajuato. By choosing a different bus company we were hoping for a different selection of films (I’d actually seen the milk and giant carrots one before with ADO) and weren’t disappointed. Following a BBC wildlife documentary (oh yes!) we were treated to an Indian film - The Namesake. Irritatingly the bus arrived before we found out how the film ended. Such are the hazards of bus travel.

Guanajuato, as we discovered on arrival, is also known as the City of Kisses. No wonder then we had had such difficulty in booking a room on Valentine’s Day. So that is how we came to stay in a bagel bar, well not actually in it, but above it.

Again, slight trepidation upon arrival - there was no hostel entrance, just the bagel bar. Were we going to stay in the store room amongst sacks of flour? Was the hostel heated by boiling bagels? Such was our joy then when we were shown to our room, or should I say apartment. We were the only people staying in a grand old building with floor length windows and wooden shutters with a choice of three showers and a kitchen.

Bagel Cafetin is a gem of a place at only 250 pesos (£12.50) a night. It is stuck on the side of the Templo San Francisco - that’s it glowing on the right in the picture. We awoke in the morning to the sound of congregational hymn singing and the chiming of church bells. Very Sunday.

Luckily we hadn’t gone to bed late the night before, too tired from Digital Video Bus movies (DVB for short) and needing to escape the romance of the City of Kisses. Guanajuato is the most beautiful town we have visited in Mexico, with narrow streets, overhanging balconies and immaculate plazas it feels positively European. A very suitable setting for our romantic Valentine’s dinner of chorizo tacos on a bench. We did steal a kiss in Kiss Alley though, along with the other hundred or more couples queuing to get their picture taken (we refrained). Kiss Alley is so called due to two forbidden lovers who took rooms on either side of this street which is so narrow that their balconies nearly touched and they could sneak furtive kisses. They got caught of course.

The other alley way excitement in Guanajuato is the callejoneadas, which literally translates as alley-men but is nearer in meaning to wandering minstrels. This merry band of velvet bedecked musicians wander through the streets playing instruments (including a double bass) like Pied Pipers, with a merry band of tourists following behind. We tagged along until the point when they asked for tickets, then we scarpered. We wouldn’t be able to understand the stories and jokes anyway, and besides we wanted to get back to our bagel beds.

All three towns have been picturesque, all three accommodations quirky and accommodating and all three showers the best in Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. We’re off early again tomorrow to sample Omnibus de Mexico’s film selection on the way to Zacatecas where I have high hopes for the Hostal Villa Colonial.
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