When I last left off
the report, we were spending time with some friends in Cuernavaca.
Our next target after leaving Cuernavaca
was making it to Toluca/Metepec early enough to pull into the Toluca Suzuki
shop and have they front sprocket replaced. It's a short distance, but it's all
either mountain roads or small libre
roads that go through many, many, many little towns. The initial climb out of
Cuernavaca,
going through the Lagunas de Zampoala
national park is a nice start to the day, climbing through forested areas and
getting short glimpses of some lakes nestled between the mountains. The road
conditions varied greatly (typical for Mexico),
and there were some sections under construction which made for slow progress.
Once out of the mountains, the landscape flattens and you start rolling through
small towns, their respective agricultural areas and mandatory topes every 5 meters. There is quite a
bit of traffic here, as the center of Mexico
is densely populated. Lizbeth kept complaining that in the 70's the government
had much more progressive (and aggressive) family planning campaigns that
helped keep population growth at more reasonable levels, and now those programs
no longer exist, if anything, the opposite is true, with church leaders vocally
opposing any attempts to create programs that encourage smaller families.
Despite the traffic we made it to Metepec (and then Toluca)
right around noon, just in time to
find Roberto and show him the small counter shaft sprocket. Sure enough, it was
a smaller sprocket (I hadn't actually seen it, it's a pain to remove the cover
and clutch slave cylinder without a full tool kit, but I was sure it was
because of the way the bike ran), so he went off to source one (you didn't
actually think that he'd have one in stock, did you? ;-) and I waited, trying
all sort of scooters and small "work" bikes on for size while I did.
A couple of hours later, the sprocket was installed, everything back together
and I was ready to continue our trip.
We wanted to go visit Myrna and Juan in Guadalajara.
There are several route options, but it's a significant distance, and like
other parts of central Mexico, it's highly populated, so taking the libre roads makes for a very long day of
riding (or two day trip if you do not want to travel at night with a very
convenient stop over in Morelia, which would have been very interesting to
visit), but we decided we wanted to get to Guadalajara in a single day, and
preferably early in the day. So I plotted a course using toll roads and we left
Metepec with that as a plan. Of course, we had to cross Toluca
first, and the exit towards the highway to Guadalajara
(and other destinations north of Toluca)
was under construction. This made a real chaos, as the heavy traffic that uses
this route to get out of Mexico City
was diverted to several side streets trying to get around the construction
area. Luckily, we were on a bike, so long lines of cars and trucks didn't slow
us much, and we lanesplit our way to the front of every traffic light until we
got to the highway. It still took us 40 minutes to get to the highway,
something I am guessing would be less than 20 under normal conditions. No idea
how long it took those who had to wait for all the busses and trucks to make
those tight turns on the side streets.
In order to avoid the Veracruz
adventure, where I ran out of gas, I made sure I had a full tank before getting
on what I thought was a highway. It was a toll road, but it was only one lane
in each direction, the only advantages over the libre road was not going through every little town along the way
(did I mention central Mexico
is a crowded place?) and the pavement quality was as good as it gets. In a car,
this could have been a slow road, on a bike, we hardly had to slow down before
a passing opportunity arose. After about an hour of this, we got to the
"real" highway (as in 2-3 lanes in each direction) and soon I was
relegated to the right lane, as traffic was going by us at 150 and 160 KM/H. As
in past trips, the highways leading to Guadalajara turned out to be the only
ones with regular (and real, as opposed to a cop sleeping in his car that is
parked by the highway) speed traps. They were actually using the some sort of
radar device and pulling cars over. Luckily, the fine honed speed trap detection
skills one develops in the US
still worked after weeks of being dormant, and I immediately recognized the two
parked police cars for what they were. Rolling off the throttle was enough to
divert any attention from us to other traffic on the highway, and we didn't
have to find out how high speeding fines in Mexico
are.
After miles and miles of not seeing a gas station on the highway, I started to
think that maybe the highway to Veracruz
was not that unique. Except this time, when I saw a gas station sign next to a
toll plaza, I knew I had to be in the right tollbooth lane so I can pull off
the highway at the exit immediately after it and go to the gas station. If you
are not in the right lane, you can't use the exit and have to continue down the
highway.
We made it to Guadalajara in good
time, Juan's directions were very good, and we found their place without a
problem. Guadalajara is the second
largest city in Mexico,
and as you may expect, it's a large, prosperous town. The old historical center
of the city is well kept (and still used as the seat of government) and is
still a major business center. I am not sure if this was due to it being the
days just before the New Year, but it was full of people out strolling, eating
and, of course, shopping everywhere you went.
Guadalajara is strategically
located next to several attraction, for Lizbeth, on of the major ones is
Tonala, a town that has a street market twice a week where you can find never
ending rows of stalls selling mostly house wares. One of the local specialties
is ceramics - you can find everything from simple tiles to hand painted decor.
Good thing we came on a bike...
The other visit we made was to Tequila, home to the original beverage by the
same name. There are numerous distilleries in town, but one of the better tours
is at Jose Cuervo. Not being big tequila fans, it was a very educational tour,
you get to see the whole process, converting a piña to 110 proof tequila (we got a small sample of that, man, does
this thing clear your sinuses) and later to something a bit less strong
(everything is relative...) that most people can actually drink. We also
happened to be in town when a wedding ceremony was ending in the main church,
they had mariachi playing for the
guests as the exited to the town's main plaza, and it was a very festive
atmosphere.
We had an invitation from Jose Luis (another of my Motoaventuras friends) to
spend New Year’s with him and his family in Puerto
Vallarta. He extended this invitation to all the
subscribers of that list. We knew that at least 4 of us would show up. Lizbeth
decided she needed more time in Guadalajara
with Myrna, and then wanted to spend some more time at home, so she sent me on
my way and was planning on returning to Chihuahua
by bus.
Technically, there is really only one road option between Guadalajara
and Puerto Vallarta, you have a
choice of toll highway or libre back
road (passes through Tequila), but on the map, there do not seem to be other
options. I remembered Jose Luis posting about a trip he took to a town called
Mascota in the mountains between Guadalajara
and PV, he said parts of the road aren't paved, and it seemed to coincide with
what my Guia Roji maps said. So I decided that a good Por la Libre trip requires me to explore this option to get to
Puerto
Vallarta. It didn't start out very promising. The road
to Ameca was very busy and mostly flat. There is a Coca Cola bottling plant in
Ameca, and there was a lot of truck traffic, plus, some road construction
(going from two lanes to four) didn't help. But, as soon as I passed Ameca the
road started climbing into the mountains towards Mascota and the fun began. I
am not sure if the road was that good or I had been really bored in the
previous couple of hours, but I really enjoyed the stretch to Mascota. Mascota
is a sleepy town (well, at least on December 31st) with cobble stone streets in
a deep valley. It would seem the major economic activity here is agriculture.
There is an old church that has seen better days, but makes for a nice visit on
the west end, before you leave town. That was the only time I stopped to take
pictures on this leg. I was too busy enjoying the ride the rest of the time.
The road out of Mascota was gorgeous, but this area gets heavy rains, and it
seems to suffer from some very serious mud slides when it rains. Many sections
of the road had been washed away or were covered with dirt from the slides.
There is a section that used to have a bridge that was completely washed away,
so you take a very steep one lane (controlled access, surprisingly but luckily,
it’s not wide enough for two cars to go side by side) detour down to a river,
do a river crossing (through roughly 30 cm or 1 ft this time of the year, but I
have heard about it being too deep to cross even in tall pickup trucks) of
running water and then climb steeply on the other bank to re-join the road. The
road was even better on the other side of the river, but it too suffered from
many slides. I named this road the best road in worst condition I had ever
ridden. Just when you start feeling comfortable and picking up some speed a
corner comes up with sand/dirt/ rocks/no pavement to keep you on your toes. I
had a blast. I made good time to Puerto Vallarta,
and got to Jose Luis' house just in time to have an excellent late lunch Noel
had prepared. When I got to Puerto Vallarta,
Noel and Johan were already there, but Ruben (aka El Guerro) wasn't there yet. He was still on his way from Cancun,
getting a late start to an already extremely optimistic riding plan. This set
in motion the events that would lead to a completely different adventure than I
had planned. More on that later.
YMexAdvMV,
Gustavo
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