Mexico City For the second straight year, we were stranded by Mexican domestic airlines. This year it was Aeromexico, who canceled our early morning flight out of Puerto Escondido, so that we would miss our United connection to Houston and then home. Whether travel for work or a hybrid worcation or whatever, you have to adapt and keep moving, so we rented a car for the twelve-hours to drive all night.
It’s a bummer, but don’t tell my family, because I really didn’t mind. I was curious about what we might see, even in the dark, running up the west coast of Mexico between the Pacific and the mountains. Twenty-five years ago, we had made an epic run from Puebla in central Mexico all the way home, so mi hija would be there for New Year’s Eve. That was almost a 24-hour roll and introduced me to topes, the little mountainous speed bumps that sometimes rise up out of nowhere in the dark every 20 meters or so in Mexican villages. Generally, tope means top in Spanish, so I guess the fact that these “dead men,” as they are sometimes called in the US, are two and three times the size of puny US speed humps has earned them the name. This trip would only be about half that with two drivers and one keep-you-up navigator, so vamanos!
Highway 200 running from Puerto Escondido to the sprawling suburbs of Acapulco isn’t a goat trail, but much of it is an up and down, round and round, two-lane highway connecting small agricultural towns and villages like beads in a necklace. One change is that many of the topes no longer have that sign, but instead have a big warning saying REDUCTOR, demanding an immediate decrease in speed, if you don’t want to lose the under carriage of your vehicle. 200 is enduring an upgrade in the last 100 kilometers or more before Acapulco. The road is being widened. Pieces that were finished were grand, though it was a bit unsettling to suddenly go from concrete or asphalt to dirt within minutes. Pavement even covered up some of the topes and only the sign remained.
Then there’s the toll road between Acapulco and Mexico City. I remembered reading about the road when it was built in a wave of neoliberalism. Initially, as I recall, it was a concession to a private company on a long lease where they would collect the tolls, if they financed and built the road. In the beginning, the early stretches could cost as much as $6 USD, meaning it was great for tourists and the rich, but the average Mexican couldn’t afford it. Coming off of HWY200 now, it’s a great road, and there are no tolls on the early stretches until you go between Cuernavaca and the DF, which would still add up between $7 and $8. Sure enough some passenger cars passed us by, but mostly between 230 am and 530 am when we hit the city, it was all buses, trucks, and us. As near as I could research, the federales have taken it over and do the maintenance. They also forced the tolls off the highway near Acapulco because they needed those segments to be evacuation routes after hurricanes. There’s still a story here.
Making a jornada de morto like this isn’t for everyone, but you see more of the “real” Mexico. We passed a huge hill and fields bathed in smoke and fire, where slash-and-burn is still the rule. One town, past 10pm, had every chair and table filled in a half-dozen restaurants. Something was happening big there. Everywhere, people were sitting or standing, working, visiting, eating, or just trying to stay cool. There might be a sign for a beach or park, but these were poor communities with subsistence farmers and a few larger rancheros.
We made the best of it. We have stories to tell. I’m not saying go do likewise, but I’m glad I made the trip, and making our plane home seems like lagniappe.