Category Archives: Mexico

The remain­ing 13km of my time in Mex­ico passed quickly & with­out inci­dent. I headed back along High­way 186 to the turnoff that would take me to Belize. My last pic­ture of Mex­ico before reach­ing cus­toms aptly proved to a loaded local cyclist. I passed the short line of vehi­cles at the bor­der, got off the bike, […]

You may remem­ber that Natxo & Idoia & I had reached the point where would go our sep­a­rate ways. After a good­bye photo in front of Sabancuy’s church with their bot­tle of Alaskan water, Natxo & Idoia headed north up the Yucatán Penin­sula, while I headed east towards the Caribbean side of the coun­try. I had […]

The day started well enough – do you get the impres­sion that some­thing went wrong? We were at the ADO first-class bus sta­tion just after 6.30am to buy our tick­ets for the 7am bus. Fif­teen min­utes later, the queue had hardly moved. There was only one lady work­ing the sev­eral ticket win­dows — not a […]

We had reached the flat­test area of the coun­try. In the next 10 days we climbed less than 2000m, com­pared with my close to 7000m in 3.5 days up the Sierra Madre ear­lier on in Mex­ico. Hur­ray, yes? No, def­i­nitely not. Plough­ing across the flat day after day for 10 days is noth­ing but boring. […]

My way out of Ver­acruz took me south along the seafront past a num­ber of tourist devel­op­ments, where I stopped to take a photo. An old man cycled over towards me & asked about my jour­ney. After about 2 sen­tences, he gave me a mono­logue about his forth­com­ing cycle trip from Ver­acruz down to San Crístobal […]

I turned on the TV & stum­bled across the New Year Eng­lish foot­ball pro­gramme. With that excuse I stayed in bed for the rest of the morn­ing, think­ing that I couldn’t have much more than about 10km to get to Ver­acruz, could I? I went down to the bike & saw that the back tyre […]

Get­ting out of Puebla was sim­plic­ity itself. I was soon back on High­way 150D head­ing towards Ver­acruz & the Caribbean Coast. I’d decided that Ver­acruz could be a nice place to see in the New Year – I expected at least a fire­works dis­play. As I had decided to head through Belize from Mex­ico, rather […]

Mex­ico City had been a rev­e­la­tion. I hadn’t arrived expect­ing the worst, but I was totally thrown by how live­able & vibrant the city was. I’ve been in far more pol­luted cities with much small pop­u­la­tions; smaller cities with worse traf­fic con­ges­tion prob­lems; and just plenty of cities that were much more dan­ger­ous than the […]

One of the main attrac­tions in Mex­ico City is the Teotihuacán-equivalent for the Aztecs, Tenochti­tlán. If it was any­thing like Tula or Teotihuacán, Tenochtitlán would be well worth the time & effort. First, there was the lit­tle mat­ter of cycling into a city of 22 mil­lion peo­ple. I delib­er­ately chose Sun­day morn­ing as it would be the quietest […]

Sat­ur­day morn­ing has become Eng­lish foot­ball day. The first match starts about 7am & the rest kick off at 9am so I often set out late. I left for Teoti­huacán, place where the Gods were made, about 11am with no real idea of the route or the dis­tance. My map wasn’t detailed enough & via […]