The Nomads

Day 11 Sunday April 20

Left San Luis Potosi, Mexico at 12:30

Temp: 31 degrees C

Winds light & Sunny

Instead of heading to Mexico City we decided we wanted to get off the beaten path and away from the obnoxious tourists who look down their noses at the locals and treat them with disdain or indifference so we headed east to the coast and Tampico.

We’ve found that the locals and country folk we have met so far were very friendly, helpful, hard working and honest. In spite of all the fear mongering we came across on the web and in the travel literature, at no time have we felt unsafe or threathened! Have I got a Pollyanna complex….?

We did stop in at a local orange grower who was selling 15 kilo bags at roadside in front of his place. We asked to buy a few oranges instead of a whole bag, but he insisted on washing, cutting in half and feeding us free oranges as fast as we could eat them and wouldn’t take anything for them.

Sweetest oranges ever!!!

I forgot to mention that we spent a bit of time in Matahuala on the way to San Luis Potosi and found it to be quite picturesque, living up to it’s claim to be “la Perle del altiplano”, the pearl of the high plateau.

The road from San Luis Potosi to Tampico is a small secondary road with no shoulder (a treacherous drop off), a descent of 3000 meters with more twists, switchbacks and sharp curves, speed bumps (topes), cows, donkeys, chickens, dogs and people along it everywhere than you can shake a stick at; and to top it all off, a plague of the heaviest and fastest semis and tour buses, all speeding twice the limit and pushing us down the mountains for six hours straight! No place to pass and no place to pull over!

The heat hit us just as we left the plateau heading down through the mountains, At 80 km it was like rushing headlong into the tube of a hairdryer on high!

Yahooooo! What a scary, crazy, wicked fun, scary, wild, fun, ( oh, and did I mention “scary”) ride !!!!! I was taking horribly frightening curves and turns at times so fast, and with the bike layed over so far I was literally running on the sidewalls and Sue’s foot-pegs which are one and a half feet off the ground and three inches wide were skating on the pavement on the inside of the turn. I was grinning (through clenched teeth) like a maniac with Sue in back leaning this way and that clicking pictures. Hilarious craziness that had me in fits of fear whenever I was into a curve. (had to keep grinning to keep from getting sick, like when you’re on a bad circus ride, you know you can’t get off till the ride’s over, but as long as you keep laughing you won’t woof your cookies!)

I know I could have cut a ten-penny nail in half with my sphincter a good twenty, thirty times!

The views, ‘tho, when I could catch them were the best yet!

Everyone and his dog says”Whatever you do, DO NOT DRIVE AT NIGHT IN MEXICO”. So we had to check that out too ….the last two hours of the run into Tampico were in black darkness with really broken bad pavement, construction detours through gravel pits and gullies and pothole nightmares….constantly trying to discern the next obstacle and avoid disaster.

Though this all may sound pretty bad, we still unanimously felt when we finally pulled in for the night in Tampico that, unequivocally, this has been the best, most exciting day we’ve had in Mexico!

A day chock full of hyperbole, fer shure!

Kilometers - Daytrip: 480 total: 5682

Gas: $31.02 Lodging: Comfort Inn $69.61