Machiavelli, Eat Your Heart Out
I woke up knowing I wanted to do something and that, of course, meant a road trip. I sat down with a map and realized that Mary and I had covered an awful lot of the area around Guadalajara. I remembered how Mary and I had first driven to Guadalajara down highway 54 and how beautiful the area north of Guadalajara had been, so I decided to take 54 north until I reached a little town called Ixtlahuacan del Rio. Then I’d break off from 54 and take an unnamed paved road through the towns of Cuquio and Manlisco until I reached highway 71 and take 71 south until I hit highway 80 which would take me back to Guadalajara. It was a plan.
I followed the periferico around Guadalajara until I hit highway 54 without any problem. For some reason it was well marked. I followed 54 north through Guadalajara’s northern suburbs. I do not like that part of Guadalajara. The road was lined with trash and the whole area has a squalid feel. When I finally broke free of the city, though, that changed in a hurry. The scenery was magnificent. Towering mountains and deep valleys were everywhere. It is extremely rugged and extremely beautiful countryside.
I was tooling down the highway enjoying the view when I came upon an army checkpoint. According to some legal professor in the newspaper these checkpoints are supposedly illegal, but even he says not to argue with a hot sweaty soldier with a gun.
This time I was lucky and they just waved me through. A couple of hundred yards past the checkpoint, on the right side of the road, I noticed what appeared to be a mirador (a scenic lookout) road, but I was past it before I could decide whether or not to take it. About a mile further down the road I came upon a place where I could pull over and stop the car. I wanted to fully enjoy the view without being distracted by driving.
I don’t know what it is about some Mexicans, but any place where cars can stop is a prime dumping ground. It doesn’t matter how beautiful the view is, that’s where they dump their garbage. And I’m not talking about car litter like soda cans and food wrappers, either. The first thing I saw was a dead sheep that someone had apparently sprinkled with lime to cut down on the smell. Then there were the black bags of garbage that had been tossed on the side of the road. It’s a damn shame what some people will do.
I tried to ignore the garbage and enjoy the view. It was great. The road was hugging the side of a mountain. The ground dropped straight down into a vast valley ringed with mountains. Shadows from the clouds drifted across the landscape. What the heck I thought, I’m going back and check out that mirador road.
I backtracked to the gate guarding the entrance to the mirador and turned in. When I did, I saw that the mirador was actually a small park. I also saw a small sign saying the entrance fee was four pesos. A small girl, actually a child, came up to the car with a pad of receipts, so I gave her four pesos. Her father was sitting under an awning just a few feet away.
I parked the car and followed a brick path into the park. The path led to a platform that jutted out over a cliff. I cautiously went out onto the platform. I’m not sure if Mexico even has any building codes or if anybody cares if they do.
The platform provided a view of a small waterfall that fell for what looked like several hundred feet. The water was just a heavy mist by the time it crashed to the rocks below. The stream at the base of the waterfall was quite a bit smaller than the flow at the top. I figured that about half the water was lost to evaporation because we were in the tail end of the dry season in Mexico.
I followed the path to another platform. This one even had a restaurant attached, but it was closed. I looked at the waterfall from this new angle and looked at the huge valley it was falling into. The park is definitely worth a stop.
As I started to return to my car, a stray dog approached me. It was rail thin. In fact the dog looked like it was starving to death. The dog approached me in the friendliest way possible, but I didn’t pet it because who knew what diseases it had. I looked in my car to feed it something, but I didn’t have anything edible at all. I really regretted that.
As I left the park, I wrote down the inscription above the arch, ' Parq e Mir dor Muni ipal Dr. Atl'. Some letters were missing from ' Parque Mirador Municipal Dr. Atl'. There’s a big Pepsi or Coke sign near the arch.
Highway 54 is in pretty good condition. In fact I had to wait in line to get past a road crew that was resurfacing a stretch of the road. Guardrails appear in some places, but the road really needs a lot more of them. The road has lots of switchbacks. At one point I was driving south even though the general trend of the road was north. The scenery is great, but you need to concentrate on your driving. The shoulder drops off so steeply that I really think that if you drove off the road, you and your car might never be found. You would most certainly die.
I drove north for quite a while. Finally I came upon a town, but the sign had a different name than Ixtlahuacan del Rio. As I was about to leave the town, I pulled onto the side of the road to turn around. A car up ahead caught my eye because it was entering 54 from a side road. I looked at the sign next to the side road and saw the name Cuquio and an arrow on it. The town really was Ixtlahuacan del Rio and I had just found my road.
I followed the road into Ixtlahuacan del Rio. After a while the road ended in a T intersection. I wandered through the town until I finally came upon a sign with Cuquio on it. I followed the road out of town until I came upon Cuquio. It was just a wide spot in the road.
Then I drove to Manlisco and into the town where the road disappeared again. I followed a cement street until it turned into a maze of cobblestone streets, which I purely hate. I don’t care if they are cutesy-wootsy scenic. They rattle the heck out of a car.
I cast around in my usual random fashion back and forth from one side of the town to the other. There wasn’t one single street sign to be found. At one point I was following a cement street when it abruptly became a dirt one. I turned left onto a cobblestone street. A block further on I stopped for a stop sign and looked around. There seemed to be a road leaving town to the right, but an arrow on the side of a building indicated that I would have to turn left because the street was one-way.
I turned left and decided to change my search tactics. I would do a perimeter search. That involves circling the perimeter of a town. Certainly I would come across the road I wanted by using this method.
The only flaw in this theory is the fact that the further you get from the center of a small Mexican town, the worse the roads get. I was soon driving down potholed dirt streets with boulders in the middle of them. Not only boulders, but in the exact middle of one street a big dog was resting. A Bimbo bread truck just drove around the animal, so I did the same.
Finally I came back to the cement street that turned into a dirt one. There was a Mexican driver behind me, so I thought, "Why don’t I see what he does?"
I pulled to the side of the street and let him pass. He turned left onto the cobblestone street just like I had done. I followed behind him. He came to the stop sign. Ignoring the one-way arrow, he turned right!!! I was flabbergasted.
Here I was enticed into a maze disguised as a town. Then they rigged the maze so that there was no legal way out. I had rattled back and forth from one side of maze to the other searching for a way out when there was no way out. If the gods were watching, they must have been laughing their asses off.
I followed my unknowing guide out of town. There wasn’t a road sign anywhere. I was driving without knowing where I was going, but Manlisco was in my rearview mirror and that felt really, really good.
The road was narrow, but well surfaced. I came upon a beautiful ranch set a short distance off the road. The house and a gate were constructed of light brown stone with white cement. It really looked nice.
After a time, I came to another highway. According to the map it should have been labeled as highway 71, but a sign proclaimed it to be highway 80. Well, the mileage was about right and the angle of the intersection looked good, so I decided it was the right road. If President Fox wants a fairly cheap program to improve Mexico’s infrastructure, I’d suggest a program to install road and street signs all across Mexico.
There were lots of small potholes in this highway. I did some thinking about it as I drove and came to the conclusion that these potholes might be caused by an inadequate mixing of the asphalt materials. It’s just a guess.
Following the road, I drove down into a very deep river valley. There were lots of curves in the road, so I was happy zipping along through the sunlight that was streaming down. At the bottom of the valley I crossed an old-fashioned bridge over the river the kind with iron girders overhead to support the weight of the bridge. I noticed a small sign that said, 'Puente Angosto'. Ok, I thought it was the Angosto bridge.
The road climbed up the side of the valley, regaining all the height it had lost and then some. The view was terrific. The world to the right of the road appeared to be a giant cup ringed with mountains. I’ve been to almost every state in the US, and the US can’t hold a candle to Mexico for scenic beauty.
A little further on I crossed another bridge labeled 'Puente Angosto'. Strange. Then I came to yet another bridge. It too was labeled 'Puente Angosto'. "What the heck", I thought, "they can’t all cross the same river. What’s going on?" Then it hit me. The last two bridges had signs indicating that they were narrow. 'Puente Angosto' equals 'Narrow Bridge'. Duh.
After a while I came to the real highway 80 which would take me back to Guadalajara. I chose the free road instead of the cuota because I didn’t want to pay the heavy toll. The traffic was very heavy with slow moving trucks jamming everything up.
Suddenly, somehow, the road turned into a four-lane divided highway. The traffic crunch dissolved like a blood clot facing a blood thinner. I had my suspicions, and sure enough, there was a line of tollbooths ahead. The line must have been a quarter mile long. I finally got through that and followed Lazaro Cardenas home. What a trip.