The Cactus Trip Diaries

HOORAY, it’s official : Final score: Cactus Explorers 3 – corrupt Mexican Police 1!!! For Cactus Explorers read Alain Buffel who again performed magic by weaving our car safely through the mad Mexico City traffic, safely back to the Europ Car depot. Yes, you’re right; we’re a day early! While we hugely enjoyed the hotel and some rest in Tehuacán, Alain suggested that if we went back a day early, we could spend the day (tomorrow) at the floating gardens of Mexico City, built by the Aztecs hundreds of years ago. Monty Don did a BBC TV documentary on the subject. Tomorrow it is our turn.

Today we dropped the car off at 13:00 and by 13:30 were at a cheap(er) hotel at the airport, stuck between the expensive hotels where we can use the ATM machine and the pedestrian footbridge to Terminal 1 from where we leave on Wednesday. The first part of the walk to the airport is along a narrow, uneven pavement – no joke with 7 weeks of luggage + souvenirs, so we may pay a few pesos for a taxi.

Faced with an afternoon of doing nothing, we asked the reception desk if they could recommend a good reliable taxi – they could, so that by 15:00 we found ourselves on the Zócalo, the common name for the Plaza de la Constitución, the main square in Mexico City.

I spotted the Mexican equivalent of the London City bus, an open double decker from where you can see the town at your leisure and hop on and off, if time permits. It didn’t. We made it back to the pre-arranged taxi pick up point exactly one minute before our man arrived, exactly on time. So he has been hired as our driver for tomorrow’s trip – if it doesn’t rain! We had a few spats while sitting on the open top deck of the tour bus.

The commentary on the bus claimed that the Zócalo is one of the largest squares in the world, but a search on the internet reveals that it was ‘only’ the 70th largest.

Not long to go now!!