Zacatecas

The road to Zacatecas took us through some of the sparsest terrain that we’d encountered so far. The 200 mile journey was almost entirely through flat semi-desert, with gentle hills and mountains in the distance; the long straight sections could just as easily been in the American mid-west. It wasn’t until we were on the doorstep of Zacatecas that we encountered any serious grades again. We headed straight for the more central of the two Hotel de Bosque RV parks listed in the Church and Church book. Both of the hotels are well signposted from a long way out of town, but anyone else looking for them should note that they have changed their name to Hotel Baruk.

The site that we headed for is located on the high road that bounds the northern edge of the town centre; the hotel is in an extremely central location, and given how well presented it is, it is a miracle that they still have any space for RVs. When we arrived we immediately knew that there would be trouble. The entrance forks in two, with the left route passing under a structure which shades the entrance and concierge, and the right route leading directly into the parking area. The right route had been dug up to fix the paving, leaving only the left route which has less headroom than we need, and has an abrupt turn to avoid hitting a tree. The hotel staff did not want us to drive over the section being repaved and so we had no choice but to turn around and head to the other branch, three miles or so out of town. Unfortunately the drive down to the hotel is extremely steep, and not being able to access the car park to turn around, we were forced to reverse up the drive until a point at which we could turn around.

With only 6 forward gears, Jim is not the best geared truck in the world, but on the whole the ratios work well; Jim was originally designed as an urban and trunking truck and was not specified with options for heavy haulage or extreme grades. The problem I discovered on the access road down to Hotel Baruk, was that Mercedes had chosen to gear reverse higher than 1st. This wouldn’t have been a problem if I could have turned around, but without this option I was forced to reverse up the drive in the equivalent of 2nd gear. The only way I could make any progress was to rev the engine until the red line with the clutch down, and let the clutch out quickly, at which point I would jump backwards and start slowing immediately as Jim ran out of power to maintain the revs. I had to do this three times until I could turn around and crawl upwards in a more suitably ratioed first gear. Not a kind manoeuvre on the clutch but I had no alternative.

The Hacienda Baruk branch of the hotel, slightly further out of town, is a nice building and grounds, and is not a huge way out of town by RV park standards, but since it was built it has been penned in by a huge freeway and off ramp, and is now just an island in a sea of tarmac and railway. It’s a loud and ugly vista from the parking lot, and if it wasn’t for the swimming pool, and regular bus service into town we probably would only have stayed one night. The parking lot is less than 10 metres from a six lane road and is probably less than 20 metres from a well-used railway, light sleepers (a bracket which certainly doesn’t include me) will struggle at this site.

On our first day in Zacatecas we walked into town, and I honestly would not recommend any other travellers do the same. We walk pretty much everywhere that we can, and three miles is not a great distance, but the walk is completely miserable, along the hard shoulder of a six lane road, and then up a steep dusty road through an industrial area. The highlights of the walk were a cement works, several tyre repair yards, and a dead dog. The bus runs from just behind the hotel (under the bridge and on the other side of the railway), runs several times per hour, costs 6.5 Pesos, and takes ten minutes, I would suggest others staying at Hacienda Baruk use the bus rather than walk! We didn’t try with Boris, but we saw a passenger with a dog on the bus so I expect dogs are allowed at the drivers discretion.

Incidentally, taking the bus in Zacatecas is the perfect medicine for anyone worrying about annoying rattles or vibrations in their motorhome. We took several busses, and beyond 30mph all of them vibrated so badly that you’d swear that the wheels had been replaced with litter bins.

Jim the Truck

I have updated a few details on the Jim the Truck page indexed on the menu bar at the top of this page. I have only included a few key details but if anyone wants to know anything else (lighting, furniture, plumbing, wiring, etc) please let me know in a comment and I would be happy to add it.

The JimTheTruck page can be found here

Real de Catorce

Almost as soon as we left Saltillo the upwards climb continued. The road is astonishingly beautiful and even in the Alps I can’t say that I’ve ever been on a road like it. The Mountains on either side of the road are huge, but are gently folded and carpeted in vegetation, giving them a softer appearance than the sharp, craggy rock faces you normally find in mountain passes. Thankfully only the short stretch of the 57 through the steep ascents is a toll road, and the more gentle section beyond is free and in reasonable condition. In a number places the smooth tarmac degenerates, but attempts to smooth over the cracks and dips leave areas of darker tarmac which enable you to change lane well in advance and avoid the worst patches.

About 140 miles from Saltillo, we saw the signed turnoff from the 57 for Real de Catorce; the turnoff is approximately 10km north of the road marked on Streets and Trips but rejoins the marked road 17km later at Cedral. The 62, running between the 57 to the east, and the 54 to the west (San Tiburcio-Matehuala) passing Cedral and Vanegas is well paved and in good condition throughout, and so travellers coming from Zacatecas could use this road to get to Real de Catorce. I expect that the road will be signed to Matehuala for travellers on the 54. The map on Streets and Trips showed two roads off of San Tiburcio-Matehuala leading to Real de Catorce; the east most road is the road signposted well, and that given in our guidebook, I could find no information on the other road and so we took the signposted route.

The route that we took goes through a tunnel just before it reaches the town of Real de Catorce, large vehicles, including Jim, have to park at the east entrance of the tunnel and get on a local bus (15 Pesos/person when we visited) to visit the town. Looking at the map I had considered using the alternative route to the west, to enable us to get closer to the town, but used my better judgement given that the guide book did not mention it and the signs point towards the route with the tunnel. As we later found out on a walk out of Real de Catorce, this was the correct decision. The western route marked on some maps is the old road, passing through Vanegas and Estacion de Catorce and used before the tunnel was made; it is impassable except for small 4x4 vehicles. The old road is extremely steep, very narrow in places, and with precipitous drops; I can say with 100% certainty that this route cannot be used as means of getting larger vehicles into the town. Nor would you want to, Real de Catorce is full of very narrow and very steep roads, and even if you could get a large truck or RV up there, you would not be able to navigate the streets. Rugged motorbikes, and Land Cruiser or Land Rover sized vehicle may like to use the road to add some adventure into their journey, but I would not recommend it in anything larger.

Real de Catorce is a great place, but you have to be keen and dedicated to endure the 26km road up into the mountains. The road that we used is reputed to be the longest cobblestone road in the world, and is an unrelenting pummelling the entire way. One blog that I read suggested that the only difference between driving slowly and driving fast, is that the punishment lasts longer if you drive slowly; to some extent this is correct. Driving at about 25mph turned out to be least uncomfortable for us, the vibrations did not get considerably worse at this speed and the journey took less than 45 minutes. Driving faster became increasingly uncomfortable and at any rate there are some extremely steep sections which do not permit greater speeds in a heavy vehicle anyway.

The road is actually in good condition, being fairly level and wide for most of its length, and I would suggest that almost any sensible vehicle could travel on this road (I wouldn’t try it in your Lamborghini), even large and tall RVs with poor ground clearance should be fine, however the vibrations are fairly gruelling and flimsier motorhomes may suffer if driven at speed. I had 45 minutes to ponder which kinds of vehicles would be least uncomfortable on this kind of road, but had the satisfaction of noting that none of the vehicle we passed looked to be suffering any less. Jim’s big tyres and air sprung seats no doubt put us in better stead than the lightly loaded pickups with stiff old fashioned leaf springs.

Crossing the Border into Mexico

Sadly the following blog post is very short on photos, largely because there was very little worth taking a photograph of, and partly because taking photos at a border is a good way to ensure that you, your vehicle and all your possessions get a thorough going over by the police.

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.

Jim se repara, y estamos en camino a México

Jim has now been fitted with a new air chamber and replacement brake pads at American Equipment at Pflugerville. Not only were they willing to work on him when many garages weren't interested, but the work was done at an extremely reasonable price and we were seen at a days notice each time we visited. The work was straightforward, although I am glad that I and the mechanic had access to the Mercedes service manual. The replacement of the air chamber was very simple, and replacing the brake pads was like most other brake callipers, but the automatic adjuster on the Mercedes/Knorr callipers needs to be reset when the brake pads are replaced, using a tool that comes in the kit of parts. Whacking a spanner on the adjuster can easily ruin the calliper through over torque. The only complication was finding two M16 locknuts to replace the damaged nuts from the old chamber, it turned into a bit of a saga in a country still working with archaic units.

Mercedes migrated away from paper service manuals many years ago, and now all of the maintenance and repair instructions for all Mercedes vehicles are accessed via the WIS (workshop information system) portion of the larger Mercedes Xentry system. In some ways it’s a pain as you can no longer buy a cheap copy of the book issued to authorised Mercedes mechanics, but in most other ways it is fantastic. On a laptop equipped with the Xentry software, I have access the service manuals and parts catalogues of every Mercedes vehicle made for at least three decades, and with the addition of the Multiplexer gizmo, I can plug the laptop into the truck to identify fault codes, monitor engine and drivetrain sensors in real time, and reprogramme various features. At £750, the laptop was a lot more expensive than a scanned copy of a ropey old service manual bought from eBay, but it does a lot more stuff, and can probably be resold for the price I paid for it. To be clear, £750 gets you a dodgy copy of the Mercedes software, on a second hand laptop, with a Chinese knockoff of the multiplexer; the authentic Mercedes kit is only issued to authorised service centres and probably costs 100 times what I paid.

We had been in Austin for two weeks by the time the repairs had been completed and so we were keen to get back on the road and cover some distance. The more time we spent in Austin, the more great stuff we found to do, but we were getting itchy to get moving and head into Mexico. This plan started well, we left Austin the same day that the repairs were completed, and we got on the interstate (something we don’t do too often). As dark was approaching we arrived in San Antonio, approximately 100 miles south of Austin, and found a spot to park for the night on a residential street about 3 miles north of downtown.

From Austin.... to Austin

When the time came to leave Austin we headed west on the 290, loosely following a scenic drive recommended in a book we’d been given as a gift before we left, passing through some of the Texas Hill Country. I’m not exaggerating when I say that the biggest inclines and the greatest rises in altitude that we’ve encountered so far on our 3000 mile drive through Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, have all been on bridges crossing the many rivers and lakes we’ve passed by. The coastal areas of the US deep south are beautiful in many ways, but they are no blessed with exciting topography. This quickly changed as we left Austin, as the swamps and beaches of Georgia and Florida, and the river delta of Mississippi and Louisiana make way for the hilly scrub and woodland of the Hill Country.


The scenery changes gradually as you leave Austin, but by the time we had reached our first stop at Pedernales Falls State Park, the hills are gentle but continuous and Jim had probably spent more time out of 6^th gear than in all the miles completed so far. The scenery on the whole is not dramatic in the sense of the Rockies or Appalachians, but is beautiful in the same way that encourages so many Europeans to holiday in Tuscany and Umbria in preference to the Alps and Dolomites. Pedernales Fall are pretty beautiful by any benchmark, and Austinites are blessed to have such a park so close to their city. The waterfalls drop a considerable distance, however they don’t do it in a single dramatic freefall, rather they drop over a series of steps in the tilted layers of hard rock. The falls themselves are the highlight of the park, although there are some decent hikes to be had in the surrounding area.

For $26 we got two days in the park, and an overnight parking spot with water, electric and a waste water dump station, and got to give Boris a proper run around after a few weeks of gentle city walks. The sun came out long enough for us to enjoy dining al fresco after a period of unusually cold weather for this part of Texas.

From Pedernales we continued west to Fredericksburg, a historic town worth a visit for anyone travelling through Texas. It has a large war museum, but for those not terribly interested in the glorification of organised killing, there remains plenty to do. The town has a German heritage, and for a state that is so unwaveringly patriotic, I was surprised at how much the town embraces its Germanic past. There are wineries producing Rieslings and Gewürztraminers, microbreweries making Pilsners and Weis beers, and restaurants selling wiener schnitzels and sauerkraut. We spent a great night in Hondo’s listening to swing and country played by Harry and the Hightones, and drinking a local bourbon. The next morning we made an early start for the Enchanted Rock State Park, a park surrounding a huge lump of granite rising out of the countryside, joined by two smaller siblings.

We visited on a sunny Saturday, and the park’s proximity to Austin and San Antonio meant that by lunchtime the park was at capacity. The car park was full, the adjacent campsites were full, and the short amble from the car parks to the top of the rock had a solid stream of people; however all of the trails longer than a half a mile, and all of the campsites which required a walk from the car park were almost entirely empty. We walked up the biggest of the batholiths at about 8.30am and ate breakfast in complete solitude at the top, if we’d done it a few hours later we would have undoubtedly shared the vista with a throng of wheezing visitors. We spent the rest of the day walking the various trails around and between the rocks, and using the offices’ excellent Wi-Fi connection.

 

We left the park in the afternoon and spent the next 18 miles educating some other visitors to the park on the differences in power and speed between an 18 tonne European truck and the light domestic vehicles they were driving; the lesson became quite frustrating for some as we dropped down to 25mph on some of the bigger hills.

At Fredericksburg we took the 16 south west; the hills slowly fade out, giving way to flatter, fertile farmland in the floodplain on the Guadalupe river. Despite its picturesque location on the banks of the Guadalupe, Kerrville is not a picturesque town, and its historic centre is lost in the sprawl of superstores and strip malls leading away from it in all directions. Thankfully we were not in town for sightseeing, the Sunday was the Superbowl and we were in town to learn something about American football in a traditional sports bar. We struck gold with the eight ball bar on Junction Highway, Sunday is happy hour all day ($1.50 pints!), the draft beer was great (Brooklyn lager, Shiner Bock, Blue Moon, etc), free pizza was available all evening, and we met a friendly local car salesman who insisted on buying us a whiskey. We drank  five pints and two whiskeys, ate half a pizza, played pool for a couple of hours, and met some great locals, spending only $14, if only all nights out were that cheap.

Our winning streak ended as we went to leave Kerrville, we were looking forward to the most dramatic part of the drive we’d planned through the Hill Country when the parking brake problem which had started in Florida, reared its head again.

From Nawlins to Austin

Not knowing New Orleans, we booked a few nights in a KOA campground about 12 miles out of the centre. The site provides a free shuttle bus into town and is just across the road from the Mississippi levee and the cycle path along it that runs from the centre of the city many miles out into the Louisiana countryside. The site is not far from the portion of the levee where the final scene of Easy Rider is shot, thankfully the locals have changed somewhat. As it turned out we needn’t have bothered with a paid-for site in New Orleans. A lot of people told us that the city can be dangerous, and that we shouldn’t stray far from the French Quarter, but our experience was the opposite.

We spent a few days walking as far as we could be bothered in most directions from the French Quarter, and found nothing but interesting neighbourhoods, great food, great art, and fantastic music. At no point did we feel threatened, and all neighbourhoods, rich and poor, felt welcoming. After our reservation at the KOA site was over, we moved to the east side of the Lower Garden District on Camp Street. Where we parked, we had a park on our doorstep, were a pleasant 2.5 mile walk to the French Quarter, had a choice of free wifi, and were in an area interesting in its own right for the antiques shops, cafes, and restaurants. It’s not always as easy as this to free park in a sizable city, but I’d recommend that anyone travelling as we are, drive around the garden district a little before paying $40 a night to park a $30 taxi fare from the town centre.

New Orleans is an easy city to enjoy; the central areas (The Warehouse District, The French Quarter, and Maringny) are all walking distance from each other, and all retain enough of their historic buildings to make them interesting and different. The French Quarter looks very much as it has since being rebuilt after a fire by the Spanish colonialists in the 19th century. The buildings are a mixture of grand brick two and three storey unit’s with ornate iron railings, balconies and verandas, and classic timber shotgun shacks, in various states of decoration.

We saw some great Art in New Orleans (in the Contemporary Art Centre, and in the small galleries on Royal Street), and ate some good food, but as you would expect, what make the city fantastic is the music. It is difficult to understand how much live music characterizes the city until you visit. There are wide areas, where every bar and restaurant has a live band, but what really surprised me was the awesome quality of the music, and the huge variation in musical styles. I had expected to hear (and did) washboard jazz, trad jazz, and swing, but hadn’t expected to hear bluegrass, rock’n’roll, thrash metal and even karaoke. The city lives and breathes music and makes me feel ashamed of London, where live music requires a license, venues invariably charge patrons for the experience, and musicians find it impossible to make a decent living from their skill. It’s impossible to spend an evening in New Orleans and not hear good music, but my recommendations would be for The Spotted Cat on Frenchman Street, for the traditional local jazz which takes precedence over everything else in the bar, and also for Siberia on St Claude, for the great Russian/American food (Kapusta in a burger!), and the massively varied music programme (we saw a good hardcore band).