Before reaching the McAllen/Reynosa border crossing, you have to drive across the Pharr International bridge. I’m not sure whether the truck and car lanes before the Pharr bridge divert to different crossings, but we took the truck entrance as the car lanes looked uncomfortably narrow. We paid our $11 and set off for Mexico. Halfway down the bridge, we came across a huge queue of trucks, crazily large considering it was 15 minutes after opening on a Sunday. We played ignorant and drove down the side of the truck queue; this turned out to be the correct procedure anyway as the trucks queue for the ‘goods to declare’ lane while recreational and passenger vehicles use the queue free ‘nothing to declare’ entrance. At the border there were no checks at all, and it would be easy and possible to drive into Mexico without having completed the necessary visa and importation procedures at the Migracion and Banjercito offices.
I won’t explain the procedure here as it is explained in great detail in the Church book, but getting a 6 month tourist visa for Naomi and me, and a ten year temporary import license for Jim was straightforward and relatively cheap, despite our Spanish being terrible and the office staff speaking little English. Without a computer system problem we would have undoubtedly been out of the border in less than 15 minutes, however even the hour and a half that we spent there was nothing to moan about. I would highly recommend the Pharr Bridge crossing to anyone planning to drive into Mexico from west Texas; the Migracion, Banjercito, and photocopier are all in the same modern building, the staff know exactly what they are doing and will direct you from one desk to the next, and in addition we were the only people using the office. In the hour an half we spent at the border, not a single person came into the office behind us.
We were soon on the road in Mexico, and were immediately confronted with the magnitude of changes that we’d have to get used to.
The toll roads that cross Mexico are generally in reasonable condition, albeit extremely expensive; however the free roads can vary from perfect, to diabolical. I had expected that in a bid to show tourists the scale of development in Mexico the local authorities would have ensured a smooth transition from the snooker table asphalt of the American highways; however this in not at all the case. The roads immediately out of the border have huge ruts and potholes and I’m sure are enough to scare some people into turning straight round. Our day’s destination was Saltillo, and we were soon resting against Jim’s 55mph limiter on the smooth and modern highway 40, heading southwest.
The combination of the GPS card built into my ThinkPad laptop, and our copy of Microsoft Streets and Trips, has been generally fantastic for navigating us around America. The software has detailed and accurate maps of every corner of America and Canada and has good coverage of Mexico too; it is the modern alternative to having a huge box full of local scale maps. Not only can you use it to navigate around towns and cities, but you can put in route points, and get the software to plot you a route. You can specify how fast you tend to drive on each kind of road, and what your preference is for each type of road, and the software will plot you a route which best suits you. In addition the software marks a huge number of restaurants, banks, shops, museums, libraries, etc. which not only help you to find what you need but also help to better judge the nature of each part of a city. We have had good success in choosing nice areas to park in, based on the proximity to green spaces, bike shops, book shops and other amenities which indicate that you won’t be parked outside a K-mart on the edge of the projects. The thing which really makes Streets and Trips better than a paper map is it’s ability to acts as a GPS/satnav; with the ThinkPad’s GPS card activated, the software marks your location with a red dot, and can navigate you like a Satnav. The navigation interface and instructions are not as good as a modern Garmin type satnav, but the software’s versatility in other areas make it better as a general tool for long distance drives. On the whole the GPS element has worked well, sometimes taking a while to find us, and sometimes dropping out of signal for short periods but generally functioning well.
Unlike a satnav unit, my old fashioned ThinkPad does not come with a suction pad to mount it the windscreen, and so in a rare moment of foresight I mounted a combination of Ram Mount components to position the laptop in front of the passenger seat. The mounts works well and holds the laptop steady and secure on even the worst roads; the laptop can be adjusted to get it out of the way and allow access to the (tiny) glove compartment. Having the laptop in a place where I can’t see it sounds like a stupid idea but it works best for us, allowing Naomi to plan the route as we drive, and shout out instructions as navigators did in a time before satnavs made monumental navigational cockups possible.
I guess a combination of the laptop being positioned slightly away from the near vertical windscreen, the GPS card being built into the laptop (as opposed to an external USB dongle), Mexico being lower priority for geostationary satellite network operators, and sods law being operational on a Sunday, all combined to mean that as we approached Monterrey – one of the largest cities in Mexico – the navigating software lost our position. Consequently we missed the perifico, and drove through the middle of Monterrey in rush-hour. The city is in a beautiful location, nestled between to huge mountain ridges, but in a bid to avoid having a panic attack, I drove straight through, not stopping even for a photo.
On the other side of the city, the next challenge of the day presented itself, the long steep climb 1,100m upwards to Saltillo; I was soon down to 4th gear, chugging along at 30mph. One of the mercies of Mexico’s roads, is the abundance of older, slower vehicles, when compared with America. In America I would have had every vehicle on the road hurtling past me, and queues forming behind me, however heading towards Saltillo I had the rare joy of overtaking a number of trucks. Jim behaved well, despite the most arduous drive that I’ve subjected him to, and even with temperatures at 34C outside, I never saw the engine climb above 91C. The video below is actually recorded leaving Saltillo heading south but the scenery is pretty similar.
Many people that we've met would have us believe that being beheaded whilst in Mexico was a near certainty, and so not wishing to prove them right on our first night, once in Saltillo we drove straight into one of the two RV parks listed in the Church book, and booked ourselves in for two nights stay. As was the case in America I expect that as we become accustomed to the country we will learn when we can free camp/boondock/dry camp and when we need to pay for parking. The trailer park of the Imperial Hotel in Saltillo is essentially an overpriced car park, there is little landscaping, the plots are all in a small walled asphalt parking lot, and the showers have no hot water. On the other hand, the water, sewage and electrical connections work, and the trailer park has 24h security and good Wi-Fi in the hotel lobby; if it were priced a little cheaper, I wouldn’t have felt so hard done by.
Saltillo is a reasonable place to head for from the border, it is not a long day’s drive and is considerably safer than the border towns, and even Monterrey to the east. However anyone trying to cover good distances should not feel guilty about leaving the next morning without visiting the city centre. The cathedral and surrounding streets are a 2.5 mile walk from Hotel Imperial, and are reasonably picturesque, but Saltillo is not an untouched colonial masterpiece and from what we saw the city does not have enough to warrant a long stay.
We felt confident leaving after a days spent in town that were not missing a lot, on leaving Saltillo we headed south on the 57 to the working ghost town of Real de Catorce, high in the Mountains.
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