Inland trip to Tapalpa, Jalisco, Mexico

Friday, March 8, 2013

019-56.700 N
103-45.540 W

Ahoy from the crew of the BlueJacket,

I'm way behind on my logs and need to get caught up describing some inland travel that we did while BlueJacket was in La Cruz. We've been looking at maps and trying to decide where the best place was to explore interior Mexico and based upon what we could see, plus the availability of rental cars, we decided that La Cruz was a pretty good spot. The boat was nice and secure in the La Cruz marina, so we decided to head inland.

We laid out a route which would take us to several cities/towns that looked quite interesting. The route, as shown to the right, was about 800 km (~500 miles) in length. I know that it's hard to see, but we basically started at the green dot on the far left hand side and proceeded counter-clockwise around the loop. Our first stop was Tapalpa, which is the green dot on the lower right hand side of the map. I chose Tapala because it's one about 80 "Magical Villages" which have been deemed by the Mexican government to provide a magical experience to their visitors. It looked quite interesting, so off we headed.

The first thing that you have to get used to is driving on the Mexican mainland. Driving on the Baja feels quite tame compared to the mainland, where it feels like you have cars coming at you from all directions. In many cities they have a traffic flow that I've never experienced before. Basically they have a 2 lanes in each direction which are the high speed lanes, from which you can't make any turns. On the outside of these they have 1-2 lanes that they call laterals, from which you can make right and left hand turns. To make left hand turn, you need to know in advance where the turn is, find a spot to merge onto the lateral, stay in the left hand lateral lane, go to a light and wait for a left hand turn arrow, hope that the high speed traffic has stopped and proceed across the high speed traffic lanes to the lateral on the other side. Once you get used to it, it works OK, but you just have to wonder how they came up with such a convoluted system. Oh, and while the roads actually have numbers, they rarely display them and you have to know which "To city-name" sign you need to follow. So, with our not-so-trusty Garmin, an iPad and an iPhone, we headed out on a cloudy, hazy day.

As soon as you head east from Banderas day you start climbing through the mountains on quite steep, winding roads. In general the roads are OK, but you have to be on the constant lookout for potholes and the occasional area where the road has collapsed down the mountainside and there's only a single lane (we only saw a few of those). The views were quite spectacular, but it was very difficult to find anywhere to pull off to photograph anything. I was very glad that we were driving during the dry season as I could only imagine how much debris must fall on the roads when it rains as we constantly reminded of falling rock zones. However, occasionally we would find someplace to grab an image of the valleys below which were filled with fields. I was very impressed by the amount of agriculture taking place.

At around noon time we drove though a small town named "Mascota" and decided to stop there for lunch and to explore it. As we wandered around, it became quite apparent that the locals were quite surprised to see us. A gentleman, who spoke quite good English, came up to us to welcome us and said that we were the first gringo visitors that he had seen in about 3 months. He told us that they had 3 museums that we needed to see, but due to a lack of time we didn't visit any of them. Later we found out that was quite a mistake as they actually have some world-class ancient gold pieces at one of them which are supposed to be spectacular. Oh well...we did have a very nice lunch and then got moving.

One of the things that surprised us was seeing large bands of people hiking along the roadside with bed rolls. There were hundreds and hundreds of people on foot and horseback. We later found out that they were on religious pilgrimages to a church that we think was in Mascota. All along the roadside there were temporary food and rest stations for the people who were walking. I was very impressed, as this was very hilly terrain and at high altitude.

In general our Garmin GPS did a pretty good job, but at one point we realized that it was taking us to the middle of nowhere and we had to back-track quite a few miles get on the road to Tapalpa. There are only a few ways to get to Tapalpa and what we didn't realize was the difference between a red and a yellow road when looking at the map. Red roads are primary highways and yellow roads are secondary roads. Well, when we got to the yellow road which took us to Tapalpa (that's where it makes a sharp right hand turn in the above map and crosses the light green shading), we quickly found that yellow roads probably aren't paved. This single lane road climbed up over a mountain range topping out at about 7400'! It was quite exciting when we'd meet other vehicles, especially trucks and had to back down to somewhere where the other vehicle could pass. I think that the floor on Sue's side is dented by her pushing her imaginary break pedal through it! We did make it in one piece and we were quite happy to pull into Tapalpa, although the GPS did take us up a very narrow road lined with cars on either side that dead-ended, so I had to back all of the way down. That was fun!

Tapalpa is a beautiful town which has very strong European influences. It's very clean and the entire town uses a common theme of white walls with a red stripe running along the bottom. It's really quite pretty and is very different from most towns where buildings use lots of different bright colors. As is usual, the town has a central square flanked by churches. Unlike most churches that we've visited, this one is very stark with the plain unpainted brick showing on both the exterior and the interior. It was quite fun to explore the town, but you really feel the 6700' altitude when hiking the hills.

We stayed at a very nice place named the Hotel La Casona. It has wonderful architecture, but is sparsely appointed with only a fireplace to provide heat for the chilly mountain mornings. We did find out that our room overlooked a chicken coop which has a rooster which started crowing at about 5 AM. There was also a turkey which would gobble every time that the rooster crowed. Believe me, we were ready to wring their necks by the time that we got up.

After a delicious breakfast at the hotel, we spent the morning exploring the town and then headed to a suburb of Guadalajara, which was several hours away, but that's a story for another log...

Oh, photos from the trip to Tapalpa are located here.

-- Geoff & Sue

Log ID: 2196