Sorry for the Group Email

We drove from Acapulco to Mexico City, heaving our way out of eight lanes of stinking, near-stationary traffic in Acapulco before finding ourselves on a smooth, straight tollway to Mexico City. We covered more than four hundred kilometres in almost exactly four hours, and, congratulating ourselves on a job well done, set about finding our campsite for the night, located fifty kilometres north of Mexico City near the temples of Teotihuacan.

Well, I’m not sure we’d ever endured a worse three hours in the car. Having made light work of four hundred kilometres, we made exceedingly heavy work of the final hundred.

Mexico, generally, is on board with the concept of street and motorway signs. There are frequently signs beside the road giving you useful information, such as the distance to the next few major towns, impending restaurants and petrol stations, and where the next junction will take you. It’s good stuff.

But, without warning, the signs end abruptly in Mexico City. Sometimes you’ll go past multiple exits without a hint as to where they go: they swish pass like enigmatic possibilities while you scratch your head and go, “Now, I wonder if that was the road to Teotihuacan?”. When there are signs they’re often vandalised, or covered by trees that have grown since the sign was erected, or simply obscured by traffic, of which there is a satirical amount.

Whatever the reason, once you get past the southernmost edges of the Periferico, Mexico City’s gigantic ring road, navigation becomes rather tricky.

It becomes rather more tricky, by the way, if the only maps you have are large-scale country maps and the city centre map in the Lonely Planet, which is designed for pedestrians with the luxury of time, not for lost tourists moving at the speed of traffic and haphazardly flailing for the right road. In the end we determined the location of the airport and navigated for a while by the flightpaths of incoming aircraft. Then, when we did identify our location, and the steps necessary to get on the road to Teotihuacan, the only two exits we could have taken were undergoing simultaneous repairs.

After three hours we abruptly found ourselves beyond the northern reaches of the periferico. We were delighted to be out of the city, but were nonetheless on quite the wrong road: Teotihuacan, we noted unhappily, was thirty kilometres to the east.

With the sun heating the horizon, we turned off the highway and spent forty-five minutes bumping down secondary roads towards Teotihuacan. At one point the road vanished entirely, and we bumped down a dirt track after a weighed-down Volkswagon bus. Finally, seven hours after we left, we arrived in Teotihuacan. We had intended to camp; but some things simply aren’t within the realms of possibility when you’re tired and there are more immediate alternatives. We checked into the first hotel we came to (actually, the second. The first, predictably, was full), and ate a ludicrously expensive meal at a nearby hotel. Then, we settled gratefully into a real bed and fell asleep to moronic cable TV shows.

The next day we went to Teotihuacan. It’s famous, you see, for being some of Mexico’s oldest and most complete pre-Hispanic pyramids and, had it not been pushing forty degrees and approximately seventy million people, it would have been quite something, I’m sure. As it was we were still tired from the previous day’s drive, and the mid-Christmas/New Year’s rush wasn’t what we needed to relax.

That afternoon, incidentally, we found a beautiful, clean campsite just west of the center of Teotihuacan, with a friendly, relaxed owner and well within walking distance of the bus station.

We found our way into Mexico City eventually. The next morning we bought a pair of bus tickets for US$2 each, and after an hour of being serenaded by a pair of buskers with a guitar, we were spat out into Mexico’s Terminale de Norte.

Quite apart from anything else we were entirely underdressed. Mexico City gets cold in January, and if that comes as a surprise to you imagine how we felt, dressed in shorts, t-shirts and flipflops, shivering in the morning fumes.

We spent much of the day trying to be inside. We rode the Metro, Mexico City’s surprisingly-usable subway system, which costs just 20USc for a journey of any length. In rush hour the front carriages are reserved for women and children. At other times of the day, CD salespeople wander up and down the carriages, fifties American classics and Mexico pop tunes buzzing out from speakers hidden in their shoulder bags.

We attempted to find Frieda Kahlo’s house, now a museum south of central Mexico City, and with wearying predictability, found it closed. We comforted ourselves with cups of coffee and chocolate donuts at a nearby café, and reflected that the reality of Mexico City was nothing like we had imagined. Movies like Man on Fire had primed me for a kind of Hispanic war zone, all carjackings, automatic weapons and wealthy-looking women being lifted off the street for later ransoming. Instead the traffic was, more or less, ordered, and no-one looked morbidly afraid for their lives. People drove Mercedes and Hummers down the street without so much as the pop of semi-automatic gunfire.

Still, I reminded myself, there’s always the Lonely Planet, which contains the rather off-putting statistic that there were “four kidnappings, 70 car thefts and 55 muggings a day in 2006″. And that’s just an average day.

We went back the next day, and quite apart from simply being open to the public, the Frieda Kahlo museum was a sight. Whatever you think of her art, the house itself is stunning, all open courtyards and bold shades of blue on the outside walls. It also has a beautiful but photography-is-forbidden kitchen. When I buy myself a house with the money I’ve made on this blog, I thought, this is what it’ll look like.

We got back to the campsite after dark, and the next morning the woman in charge bade us a tearful farewell. After two days of early starts and late returns she had assumed the worst, and was preparing, the next morning, to call our respective embassies.

After two days of the biggest city in the world we were ready to move on. Next up was Oaxaca. It couldn’t be worse finding our way there than it was to Mexico City, could it?

Dave isn’t sure I’d go back to Mexico City, but as staggering metropolises go, well. Much, much more photography in the related Flickr set, by the way.