With apprehension we hit the highway. We knew we had a long road ahead of us, what we didn't realize was that we were going to be subjected to extreme altitude changes ranging from sea level to ten thousand feet. With high air temperature and road temps that were melting the tires on the truck (I swear I lost a quarter inch of tread) it made for an interesting three day drive. The truck didn't perform as expected, it would lose power going up the steep hills because of the high altitude. We would have to pull over to the side of the road, turn on the heater, let it cool down and then idle up the hill in first gear at about ten km/hr.
We finally broke away from the grip the pacific coast had on us, said good-bye to the palm trees and hello to high altitude forests, farmland, volcanoes and deserts. We drove through giant cities (got lost once), tiny highland villages with markets in our path and goat trials with insane drop offs. Every morning we would program the gps, look at the estimated time of arrival and laugh. It would tell us four hours and it would actually take ten - no joke.
At one point, we were one kilometer away from a toll road we needed but the road was so steep (I drove in San Francisco and these were steeper) that we had to turn around and do a sixty kilometer detour - reason being, we had watched trucks coming down the hill with failed brakes and out of control speeds. The roads weren't all bad though, there were divided highways with huge shoulders, no gaping holes in the road, barely any topes and little traffic.
We covered six Mexican states in three days (about thirty hours of driving) and only covered about eleven hundred kilometers. We sound like we're complaining but we loved every minute of it. We have been looking forward to this part of the journey for so long and it didn't disappoint.
After this three day marathon, when we arrived into Puebla, we got to see this......
