Driving in Mexico City is a doddle any time… any time that is, provided it’s a Sunday. After our drive up to central Mexico from Acapulco, we shuffled our schedule to drive in on a Sunday, mooch around the capital and see the legendary Lucha Libre fight-night. Then we went to see where a man tried to plug an erupting volcano – how do we think that worked out, eh? We saw a few ‘Magic Mining Towns’ and… oh yes… we also got lost underground!
Mexico City
Most large towns, and certainly capital cities, can be a challenge for campertrucks. So far, in all our travels we haven’t yet been persuaded to abandon Cuthbert for a centrally located hotel/Airbnb, and we don’t intend Mexico City to be the first. In Buenos Aires, Quito, Cayenne, Santiago, Georgetown, Tegucigalpa (to name a few) we found reasonable park-up spots in top-notch central locations. In Mexico City it’s the marvellous Chapultepec Park: acres and acres of inner-city recreational green space with trees, lakes. It’s peaceful, near a metro station and good restaurants, and is safe/secure. What more could we want?
Our two whole weeks probably wasn’t strictly necessary to see what the city has to offer, but remember that ‘Sunday’ thing that I mentioned? Sunday is the only day of the week we can use the roads without a permit. They’ve got some kind of pollution-reduction shenanigans, only allowing certain number-pates on the roads on certain days. It’s generally regarded as a load of old nonsense because most locals just buy another car (or fit another number plate) for the days they can’t drive. But it at least persuaded us to drive only on a Sunday and to stay for two whole weeks.
Lucha Libre!
We spent our two weeks mooching around museums, churches, street-cafes and all the usual touristy city-stuff, but one of our favourite and most bizarre attractions was the wacky Mexican wrestling spectacle – the Lucha Libre fight night! What can we say???? It’s like a pantomime, a circus, a fancy-dress party, a 70s disco and a lower-league sporting event all rolled into one. It’s loud, it’s brash, it’s camp, and it’s a shamelessly staged performance falling little short of comedy slap-stick. But there’s nothing fake about the entertainment value and the frenzy that is whipped-up amongst the local crowd.
Picture the scene: a huge indoor arena-stadium, the lights dim, theatrical smoke clouds the space, thumping pop-music shakes the seats and a few almost-dressed dancing girls wiggle around the stage in a style not witnessed publicly in the UK since 1976. The announcer booms out at a volume defeating even the music and the screaming crowds. Then… emerging out of the blue smoke, the first contender descends the stairs in his glittery cape, shiny metallic costume and traditional Lucha Libre head-mask. He struts in, punching the air with his fist and literally launches himself headfirst, forward rolling into the ring and bouncing off the opposite side-wall. More contenders strut their stuff, then eventually… Ding, Ding… combat commences with four of them in the ring pitted against each other.
In the first round, the absence of coordination and skill in delivering the blatantly staged stunts smacks of small-town circus clowning. They throw each other around, giving an incompetently concealed thump of the deck with their fist to create a dramatic ‘bang’ on landing. They arrest each other in body-locks with mock cries of pain, anger and frustration as they concede a round to a dramatically victorious opponent. These guys clearly never went to RADA or the RSC. But gradually, after a few rounds, the quality of the slap-stick (err… sorry… ‘sport’) improved. The stunt throwing became more skilled and more finely timed. If pushed, we might even go so far as to say that by the final bout, the stunt-work was almost impressive. These guys are the stars of Lucha Libre!!
It’s all of course, a huge game. And a lucrative one at that. But what really makes the evening is the atmosphere and the crowds. The local crowds really enter into the spirit in a way rather alien to us traditionally more reserved Brits. They wear the masks and leap around screaming with excitement at the tops of their lungs, shouting the names of their heroes and hugging each other with delight when their champion serves the ‘knock-out blow’. It’s fun and fabulously fake, but a great side of a unique Mexican culture that we’re really glad we took the time to see.
Making Ash Clouds
Volcanos might still be erupting occasionally to tragic headlines around the globe, but they’re all ancient geological phenomenon originating before the diplydooplysaurus era, right? Well, no. Not this one. Volcan Paricutín to the north-west of Mexico City is one of the planet’s newest volcanos and some guys tried to just plug it! This… is Mexico’s version of the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dam 😊.
It all started in 1943, a farmer (let’s call him Jose) was tending his crops and minding his own business when ‘stuff’ started bubbling up from the ground. He thought he’d try to plug the hole to stop the flow. With our good fortune of a first-world education, I think most of us can reasonably predict the outcome here, but Jose thought it seemed like a good idea at the time.
Unsurprisingly, Jose’s efforts failed but this isn’t quite the disaster story it could have been. Luckily for Jose and his neighbours, Paricutín turned out to be a remarkably lazy volcano. It took over a year to reach its height and over 10 years for the lava-field to spread to over 20sqkm. It destroyed the villages in its wake, but at least it gave the people plenty of time to evacuate. Today, it’s a fascinating scramble over the lava-field to reach the last part of the village that remains visible: the church spire.
I’m guessing maybe because it’s so new, Paricutin isn’t a very high volcano. It’s probably only around 300-400 metres to the crater-rim, so we thought we’d check-out the view from the top. Here’s our teeny piece of advice to anyone thinking of giving it a go… it might be not very high, but scaling a loose, crumbly lava-field is an exercise of ‘one step forward, three steps back’. It’s tougher than it looks 😊. Anyway… we made it up there, nice views and a bit of drone action made it worth our while.
Another great part of a trip to Paricutin with a 4×4 is to pop around to the south side of the volcano to the trails amongst the deep, soft ash and sharp lava rocks. It’s tough-going in places, but Cuthbert had a great time blasting around leaving ash-clouds in his wake.
Magic Mining Towns
Central Mexico, well… all of Mexico actually, is full of cute towns. The tourist board has a ‘Pueblo Magico’ (magical town) scheme, awarding Pueblo Magico status to places with historic significance and the quintessential ‘cuteness’ to attract tourism. There are well over 100 of them across the country and we’ve knocked a few off the list since heading north out of Mexico City: Morelia, Guanjuato, San Miguel de Allende, Zacatecas…
The colonial hey-day of several of these towns in central Mexico centred on mining. Wealth in those days was made from mining silver, gold, various minerals and ores. Wealth today is made from taking tourists down the mines to learn about the grotesque conditions in which thousands toiled and perished. Zacatecas in particular, has an interesting underground tour around the old mine-tunnels to explain an industry that continued until the mid-60s.
Lost in a Tunnel
When you’ve seen a few of these Pueblos Magicos, they can blend together in the memory a bit. But Guanajuato will stand the test of time for us. Not, as many would say, for its architecture, culture, ambience, blah, blah, blah… but more for its network of underground road tunnels into which we inadvertently wandered in Cuthbert (I say ‘inadvertently’… I could blame the confusing street layout, but it’s more down to my slack navigation really!). Guanajuato is built on steep mountainsides into several valleys, connected by a network of underground road tunnels. The tunnels vary in height around the town, but the height of each section isn’t signed. Having ‘inadvertently’ wandered into the first tunnel on a narrow one-way traffic system, we had no idea whether Cuthbert would fit into the second, or the third tunnel to come. There are underground junctions and turnings in various directions, but there aren’t many signs under there, it’s very poorly lit and guess what??? Sat-nav doesn’t work down there either! This could end quite badly.
After a bit of progress holding our breath, we got lucky finding a local bus around the same height as Cuthbert. We decided to wait behind it at an underground bus-stop, then follow it. Wherever. We didn’t really care where it went… it might have been to a depot, or some other random destination… sooner or later it had to emerge from the tunnels. And it did. Not, it turned out, where we wanted to be, but ‘phew’! A bit of open sky and a sat-nave link never looked so good 😊
Anyway… tunnel excitement aside… these Pueblos Magico places are each very ‘nice’ in their own way. They’re pleasant to wander around and always have quality cafes – but there’s only so much of this cutesie town stuff we want to do. Marcus in particular has a low threshold for this kind of thing. We’ll do them justice by adding a few photos so you get the idea, but it doesn’t take us long to head out to the wilds again.
San Miguel de Allende – a rare clear street 
San Miguel de Allende skyline 
Guanajuato 
Morelia
Plan Gone Wrong
So just to update those curious of mind… our plan. When we left Oaxaca at the end of April, we had a vague idea to zig-zag central Mexico for a few months, pop back to Oaxaca to collect new tyres, then blast up to the USA via the allegedly stunning Baja California isthmus (‘Baja’ to his mates) before our visas expire at the end of September. We were rather proud of this little piece of creative forward thinking, until we recently learned that September is peak hurricane and mega-rainy season in Baja. Bugger. We’ve said before and we’ll say it again… ‘flexibility’!! So the new, improved ‘Plan Mark-2’ is to head north to Baja now.
This won’t be without its challenges. Other overlanders like ‘This Big Road Trip’ James and Claire Young (having been there, seen it, done it, got the t-shirt this time last year) have helpfully warned how ridiculously, hideously hot it will be. Warning noted. But if we want to see Baja – which we do – it seems we have Hobson’s Choice: either fry in the June heat, or drown in the September hurricanes. The choice we may live to regret, is to fry in June.