Real de Catorce

This past weekend I finally made it to Real de Catorce, a small, old mining town in the middle of the desert in the state of San Luis Potosi (about 11.5 hours from Puebla). The town was abandoned in the past, but is making a come back as a tourist destination and has been re-settled by Italians. We went there via Matehuala which means you have to enter through the Ogarrio Tunnel. The bus doesn’t actually fit in the tunnel, so you take some bus to the entrance of the tunnel and then switch over to a smaller bus to get through.

The main church in town is the church of San Francisco and inside is one of the best collections of retables, which are pictoral representations giving thanks for various things like the birth of a child or overcoming an illness.

That day we wandered up to the “Pueblo Fantasmo” which is an old abandoned mining site about 4km outside of town up in the hills. In addition to being able to climb all over old mining buildings and look down mine shafts, there were great views of Real.

The view from the terrace of our hotel the next morning….

We decided to just follow a road that headed out of town on Sunday and see what could be found. We first found a dog, a blonde German Shepard, that decided to accompany us for the rest of the morning and all the way back into Real later. We found 2 more abandoned mines with open access to parts of their tunnels. The access points to the mine shafts were also easily accessible, but in a kinda scary way. It took about 10 seconds for a thrown rock to hit the bottom of the dark shaft.

Who knows.....

Huichol crafts...

Then we tried a second visit to the church of the virgin Guadalupe and attached cemetery and luckily it was open this time.

On the way back to Puebla, we stayed at another vol’s house in San Luis Potosi. Her newly adopted dog had recently had 7 puppies…..

Huasteca Potosina: Puente de Dios, Tamasopo

On Saturday before heading back to Puebla (an short 12 hour bus ride), we went to the town of Tamasopo and then walked out to a place called Puente de Dios (God’s Bridge). If anyone is paying attention, we were also at a place called Puente de Dios last weekend while rafting, turns out there’s 2 in the Huasteca. So anyway, this Puente de Dio is also a big, rock formation that creates a bridge. There is an almost crater-like opening on one side that has several water falls pouring in. Then all the water is funneled under the “bridge” into a cavern/cave thing that you can swim into and that has the bluest water I have ever seen.

Huasteca Potosina: Cascada de Tamul

I am currently in Ciudad Valles, San Luis Potosi for the next two weeks to do a macroinvertebrate sampling project in a wetland where other volunteers are working on projects. Ciudad Valles is located in the Huasteca Region of the country that includes a part of the states of Veracruz, Hidalgo, San Luis Potosi (and a tiny piece of the northern part of Puebla). It is a very hot, humid area (gets up to 50°C in the summer), but is known for it’s amazing waterfalls and turquoise blue water.

So this weekend, before starting the project, a group of us took a trip to the waterfall called Tamul. It’s a canoe trip that includes a stop to swim in a cenote (basically a cave) and obviously the waterfall of Tamul.

The boats.....

The nuns (that were on a different boat)

The cave....

Cascada de Tamul

Our boat: The prettiest ugly one (La fea mas bella)

Weekend in San Luis Potosi

After the conference, I continued my trend of hitching rides with other offices, and this time returned with the delegation in San Luis Potosi to the city of San Luis Potosi (about 2.5 hours north of Queretaro, and an 8 hour drive from Cd. Guzman).

Route: Puebla to Metztitlan to Ciudad Guzman to San Luis Potosi to Puebla......

The road up to SLP had been flooded the whole week and there were still some portions under a significant amount of water as well as a bunch of over turned trucks. At some point too, we got sandwiched in the middle of a long line of about 25 pick-up trucks, each one with about 5 men all carrying large guns. We’re gonna just hope that they were police officers out of uniform, but it was a tense 20 min until they had all passed us.

SLP is a cute colonial city that has a bunch of nice plazas, parks, churches, and museums. So Saturday was the normal wander around and see the city, the train station, candy store…. followed by a sushi dinner with some fellow vols (1st time for sushi in a very very long time….).

Sunday morning, there were old cars on display outside the regional museum. As we were looking at all of them, we started chatting with the owner of one of the cars and a few minutes later were seated in a 1929 Ford and leaving on a small parade through the downtown area. Turns out the guy we talked to was the president of the antique car association in SLP and the organizer of the event. According to him there are only 3 things that really matter in life: women, old cars, and beautiful buildings (can you guess what his profession is??). I have never really been that into old cars, but riding in the front seat of one, definitely gives you a different view of the hobby and the cars.

View of the main plaza from inside the car.

Inside of the car.

This was the oldest (and most expensive $300,000 USD) car in the parade.

Sunday afternoon I headed back to Puebla (about 7ish hours) and this time instead of a hot dog truck, a candy truck had fallen off a cliff on the highway, but before it went all the way to the ravine, part of its cargo of candy had been deposited and so of course most of the traffic jam was caused by traffic stopped to collect boxes of candy.