Welcome to the Jungle
I’ve been waiting to bust out that title for a while now….that felt good! I’m doing my Axl Rose serpentine right now as I’m typing…
I’ll expand a little bit on what Cindy wrote earlier about the heat. The guidebooks will tell you that weather down here (in Central America) is less dependent on latitude and more dependent on altitude. I don’t think I really processed that phrase until we descended out of the mountains. After having been well above 1000 meters elevation for over a month (since leaving Tepic), we really noticed a marked increase in temperature as we descended back below 1000 meters—like all of the sudden somebody turned on a blast furnace in front of us as we were riding. We’ve been too cheap to spring for air conditioning in our hotels, so sleeping has been rough lately (although fans definitely help). We’ve also had to shift our riding schedule—we can’t afford to waste the cool hours before 9 AM anymore, so it’s up at 6 AM and on the road as soon as it gets light enough to ride (around 7 AM).
Our crossover into Chiapas was mostly uneventful (and uninteresting). As Cindy mentioned earlier, I was able to take a bus back to Mitla to get our tent poles from the little town we were staying in, San Jose de Gracia. This part of Oaxaca was very reminiscent of Baja California, both in landscape (lots of brush and cactus) and in having long stretches with nothing but road and very small towns inbetween. After leaving San Jose, we stayed in the town of Magdalena Tequisistlan. Although we knew there wasn’t a hotel there, we had already ridden almost 90 km and were too tapped out from the heat to ride the next 18 km to a town with a hotel. We asked some friendly policemen if there was a place to stay, and they suggested we go to the palacio municipal. Next to the palacio was a building that was a sort of civic center; they told us that there were some classes there (dancing, sewing), and after those we could have the place to ourselves. It was great that we found a free place to stay, but there wasn’t much airflow in the building, which meant that it stayed unbearably hot during the night. The civic center was right on the main plaza, which played host to a pick-up soccer match between a bunch of teenage boys until almost 9 PM.
The next day we limped into Tehuacan Tehuantepec. A couple of days back, I had had a low speed fall after spinning out on some gravel on a hill, and twisted my knee trying to get out of the pedals. Thankfully, our day from Magdalena to Tehuantepec was short and flat, but it was still enough to put my knee out of commission for a while. So in order to keep to our schedule and give my knee some rest, we’ve been doing some bussing. We spent a couple of forgettable days in Tehuantepec (mostly trying to stay cool) before heading to Tuxtla Gutierrez, capital of the state of Chiapas. It was on this bus ride that we really noticed the terrain change to the lush greenness of the jungle (cue GNR music here).
We arrived in Tuxtla in the middle of their Festival of San Marcos, which was much like Carnival in La Paz, with music, carnival rides, and lots of food. We also visited the excellent zoo in Tuxtla, which is in a jungle setting and focuses on the wildlife found natively in Chiapas (some species of which are endangered due to loss of habitat and being sold on the black market). But the highlight was definitely our boat tour of Sumidero Canyon. They take you on a 3 hr ride in a motorboat from the nearby town of Chiapa de Corzo down the length of the canyon (which has walls nearly 1 km in height in places) to where it ends at a reservoir for a hydroelectric dam. We saw lots of wildlife along the way, including a few crocodiles that seemed to be posing for pictures all day.
We are going to bus to San Cristobal de las Casas next, and use our extra days to head to several Mayan ruins, including the famous Palenque ruins. San Cristobal will take us back up into the mountains (2100 m elevation), and we are REALLY looking forward to a break from the heat.
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