Guanajuato

Once we were on the road, the route to Guanajuato was pretty uneventful. A fair stretch of the 45 is a toll road and so it is fast and in reasonable condition, a description which cannot be used to describe the ring road that skirts Aguascalientes. Like Zacatecas, the centre of Aguascalientes is off limits to heavy vehicles, and so we were forced onto a ring road which is in an unbelievably bad condition, parts of the road made the cobblestone route up to Real de Catorce seem like a billiards table, and by the time we were back on the toll road I felt like I’d been in a washing machine on spin cycle. Once off the 45, we followed the 110 towards Guanajuato.

It is difficult to imagine a more awkward place to put a city then Guanajuato. Coming from Europe, I am used to cities being sited in strategic transport locations, either on major rivers or on historic trade routes, and so almost always being in places which are easy to reach. In this part of Mexico, the major cities are often sited on the location of an old silver or gold mine, and consequently they are rarely flat or easily accessible. There is not a single significant area of flat land in Guanajuato; the main roads run through the valley bottoms and as soon as you leave them the valley sides rise steeply, often so steeply that there is only pedestrian access to the houses on the slopes. With this in mind I could see immediately that Guanajuato was not an easy city to navigate in a large vehicle; I followed the directions given in Church & Church to the Morrill Trailer Park exactly, aware that deviating at all could result in getting wedged under a low tunnel entrance, or getting stuck down a road that I couldn’t reverse out of. Following the instructions took a fair bit of good faith, there are a number of tunnels on the Hidalgo highway running North through Guanajuato and none of them have signs indicating the minimum height. All of the tunnels going north are one way, and are two lanes wide, and so to minimise the risk of reconfiguring the bikes and solar panels, I was able to straddle both lanes and use the highest section in the middle of the tunnels. Once out of the centre of town and onto the hillside above, we followed the eastern section of the Panoramica highway which runs in an extraordinarily circuitous route around the edge of the city.

As instructed in Church & Church, we parked on the Panoramica and walked down to the trailer park to check the access. The Morrill trailer park is remarkably close to the centre of Guanajuato, in what has to be one of the only slopes accessible to large traffic, nevertheless the access to the trailer park is extremely tight and necessitates driving 200m the wrong way down a one way street to avoid an absurdly tight bend in the opposite direction. The book identifies a 24 foot motorhome as the maximum length that could access Morrill and I would wholeheartedly verify this claim. Jim is 24 foot long, but I would hazard a guess that he is wider, taller and heavier than the kind of 24 foot RV that Church & Church had in mind when writing the book. The gate at the entrance to the trailer park is probably the limiting factor on the longest RV which could gain access, but height should also be considered. At 3.55m, Jim’s awning was rubbing against the tensioning cable running underneath the power lines; anything taller would be likely to cut power to a small corner of Guanajuato. I would recommend that anyone else wishing to stay at Morrill uses a pair of walkie-talkies or mobile phones so that whoever has blocked traffic coming up the road can communicate that the road is now clear. Not having two working mobile phones we used a whistle which was not very effective over the noise of Jim’s engine.

Evening was drawing in when we arrived in Guanjuato and the chorus of dogs barking was in full effect. Most Mexican cities can only be experienced through the background noise of traffic and dogs barking, but the soundscape at Morrill trailer park is quite shocking. A single dog bark is enough to set dogs (and chickens and ducks!) off on the other side of the valley, and before long the whole area is reverberating with barking; it is pretty surreal, and if I didn’t sleep like I’ve been anaesthetised it would have been enough to drive me crazy.

I’ve no doubt that the busses into Guanajuato are as cheap and efficient as those in Zacatecas, but I enjoyed the luxury of being able to walk down the hill into the centre of town in less than ten minutes, albeit knowing that the walk back up to the trailer park is less fun. Guanajuato is a great town to explore, there are numerous small picturesque plazas with fountains and neat landscaping, and the steep narrow streets make it interesting to walk around. The inaccessibility of any area more than a few metres from the main roads means that it is easy to explore the whole centre without getting lost.

In our two days in Guanajuato we were not really in the mood for sightseeing, although we couldn’t resist the lure of the local mummy museum. Mexico has a strange way of celebrating death and the Museo de las Momias is a perfect representation. In the mid 19th century, the local cemetery began clearing out crypts to make way for new bodies and instead of finding skeletons or corpses, they found perfectly preserved mummies; apparently the humidity and temperature combined to prevent decay. It is strange, but understandable in the context of Mexico, that they would chose to display the bodies rather than rebury them elsewhere, but the really disturbing aspect is how fresh some of the remains were. The bodies are not like Egyptian mummies that have lain peacefully for millennia, some of the mummies on display at the museum had been in the ground for less than a decade when they were unearthed, and so instead of feeling like you are looking at a historical artefact, the museum feels very much like wandering around a morgue.

When it came time to leave Guanajuato and the Morrill trailer park, the problems with Jim’s inadequate gearing showed up again. The ramp up from the parking area to the road is extremely steep, although the gradient on its own was not the problem. Jim has enough power that in first gear we can go up any road that we’d feasibly want to, and the ramp out of Morrill is certainly within his capability. On flat ground Jim can crawl around at 3 or 4 mph, which is perfect for weaving through narrow obstacles, however at that speed the engine is barely turning over. To generate enough power to climb out of the Morrill trailer park I had to rev the engine to around 2200 rpm where peak power is generated; the problem is that first gear is ratioed that at 2200 rpm the road speed is too fast for careful manoeuvring. Getting Jim out of the campground was a careful balance of keeping the speed as low as I could to avoid demolishing the adjacent houses, whilst driving fast enough to avoid stalling the engine. The 1:2 crawler ratio fitted in the transfer box of the 4x4 version of the Mercedes 1823 would certainly have been useful on this occasion, halving the road speed at any given engine speed; I guess that’s my next project sorted for when we return to the UK.

Thankfully, the fun of leaving Guanajuato had only just begun as we crawled out of the trailer park. Given the success of following the instructions in the guide book we tried to follow the same route on the way back out; this worked until we got to the point on the Hidalgo highway where the tunnels start. Unlike the tunnels in the opposite direction, the first tunnel we approached was bidirectional, and so this made straddling the two lanes impossible. Furthermore the tunnel had a posted height restriction of 3.7m; at 3.55m this would put Jim dangerously close to the tunnel walls. It’s not that I don’t trust Mexicans to measure that the tunnel accurately, it’s more that I fear they would be using inaccurate tape measures. Either way we decided to avoid the tunnel and had to turn around, as all alternative routes out of town would have taken us through the network of tiny tunnels passing through the town centre. This forced us to retrace our steps up to the Panoramica, and wind our way around the western perimeter of the city. Anyone else driving a large vehicle into Morrill trailer park, should turn right onto Hidalgo highway when they leave the site, and turn left onto the western portion of the Panoramica, being careful to follow the small diversion for heavy (pesado) vehicles. The end of Panormica brought us out past the tunnels through the centre, and we were soon back on the 110.

Our original plan had been to take the 45d all the way down to Mexico City, and skirt around to Teotihuacan on the east side of the city. At the last minute we changed our mind and turned off after Queretaro, heading north east on Mex 120, deep into the mountainous Sierra Gorda biosphere (national park).