From San Luis Potosi to Surrealism

Start as you mean to go on they say, which doesn’t bode well for this record of our travels as 4 weeks and 7 places on, we seem to have stalled at Monterrey. It's strange as without jobs or responsibilities much beyond remembering to eat, we should have plenty of time to write up fascinating accounts of our travels accompanied by equally fascinating photos but time seems to slip through our hands and the days are turning into weeks all to quickly.

From Monterrey we headed south 7 hours to the city of San Luis Potosi, a fairly prosperous, old colonial city where we spent two relaxed days wandering the cobbled streets and visiting some of its museums.

From there we bused east to Xilitla (unfortunately for the town it’s pronounced rather like ‘Heil Hitler’). We got chatting to a Mexican woman on the bus with a really tragic but all too common story: despite living in the U.S. for the past 18 years, working 2 low-paid jobs to support her U.S. born children, she had just been deported for some kind of traffic violation. Her youngest child was 6 and had been left in the care of the 2 elder children as the father wasn’t around and the eldest son was in prison. We were quite shocked and saddened for her but she was really nonplussed and told us it happened a lot.

We didn’t have time to dwell on her story though as the mountainous roads proved too much for our aged bus which died in some anonymous little town half way through the journey. Despite the best efforts of the bus driver who rolled up his shirt sleeves and started removing engine parts, it was a lost cause and eventually a passing bus was flagged down and we set off again with a slightly more road-worthy bus.

First impressions of Xilitla were somewhat intimidating. A small town nestled on a hilltop in the mountains, a long way from anywhere and a place where strangers stand out, we couldn’t help but be reminded of the film ‘Deliverance’. Without a map of the town we weren’t even able to find our hotel and the first couple of attempts to ask directions were met with indifference. Luckily Xander managed to endear himself to some local teenage girls by tripping over a speed bump and once they’d finished laughing, sent us in the right direction to our hotel which bizarrely seemed to be run by an ever-present teenage boy.

Our reason for travelling to Xilitla was to visit Las Pozas (The Pools), a surreal but beautiful array of concrete structures, sculptures and waterfalls which seem to have emerged organically with the dense jungle that surround it but are in fact down to the creativity and wealth of an Englishman, Edward James, and the labour of local workers in the 1960s and 70s.
[http://www.xilitla.org/visiting.php]

We spent a whole day exploring the huge site, clambering across bridges that went nowhere and a ‘bamboo’ palace that rose to an impressive 5 stories, before cooling off in 1 of several freshwater pools filled by the waterfalls sloping downhill.

We also had a couple of David Attenborough moments – firstly we nearly fell off the path in fright as 2 raccoon type creatures started swinging through the trees towards us and later we spotted a huge jumping spider (which itself was pretty scary) get attacked by a brightly coloured insect. We watched in awe as the much smaller insect eventually killed the spider and then dragged the corpse away.

Outside we met a lovely Dutch couple who were driving through South and Central America in their campervan which they’d shipped from Holland. We had real campervan envy until they told us about the various mechanical problems they’d experienced which involved them having to ship a brand new engine from Holland to Chile. We decided we’re safer with the bus!