Transporte en Mexico…

My wife and I returned last Wednesday from a week-long adventure to San Miguel de Allende in central Mexico. It was a wonderful experience (except for an unpleasant incident at the border when we crossed back into the United States.)

But for now, we remember the trip as something memorable and educational, thanks to two very good friends who invited us to visit that colorful and artistic city that many Americans may never have heard about. I’ll provide more comment with pictures about our adventure there in future blogs.

Getting there and getting around San Miguel involved “Planes, Shuttle Buses (no Trains) and Automobiles,” all of which gave me a unique insight into how different transportation is there vs. here in the U.S.

We flew out of the airport in Juarez, Mexico, because it was cheaper and it had a direct flight to the city nearest city with a commercial airport to San Miguel . Rather than drive ourselves to the airport in Juarez, we hired a young woman who has a side business of shuttling people to and from Las Cruces to the airport. Unless you’re proficient with the tangle of roads and traffic in Juarez, I’d recommend that you not try to the get to the airport yourself and leave the job to a recommended expert.

We got to the airport on time, then because we were flying on Viva AeroBus, the Mexican equivalent of Southwest Airlines, we had to board the plane with portable steep stairstep ramps. Planes flown by the more expensive airlines (Aero-Mexico) got the full jetway treatment and passengers didn’t have to stand outside in in the hot sun.

On board the aircraft, it looked like any other Airbus 320, except the seats were a bit cheaper and uncomfortable and we were not offered any in-flight beverages or snacks since we had not signed up to get them. We were able to communicate fairly easily with the flight attendants, who knew enough English to get by.

Our flight was to take us to Leon, but when we pulled up to the ramp at the airport where we landed, the terminal was emblazoned with a sign welcoming us to “Guanajuato,” which it turns out is the state in which Leon and San Miguel are located. We were a bit panicked for a few minutes, worrying that we had boarded the wrong plane, but were able to quickly figure it out.

Our next adventure was on a shuttle bus, which arrived about 15 minutes late because of a driving thunderstorm that had flooded roads and the airport’s parking lot (and luckily hit only moments after we had landed.) The shuttle bus took us through the urban areas of Leon (including passing by the huge General Motors plant where my GMC pickup was made), then headed out to a winding country road. On the way, our driver seemed to pay no attention to speed limits, lane markings or the physics of hurtling a large clumsy van along a winding road that would be best suited for a Porsche at speed. It was a bit of a white knuckle ride.

Our next adventure involved local cab and Uber trips. The streets in San MIguel are mostly paved with middle-age cobblestones and any ride on them is a jarring experience. I have no idea how vehicles can hold together after even a few months of traveling these roads, but one taxi driver told me that most cabs (usually Nissan Sentras painted bright green and white) can last for about 10 years.

The other issue you face are immense speed bumps, not only on local streets, but on rural roads. Some of these speed humps are more like “speed mountains,” daring you to test the limits of your vehicle’s ground clearance.

All of our drivers in cabs, Uber and vans were very friendly and helpful and knew enough English (along with my fractured Spanish) to get us where we needed to go. Our best trip was when a young driver had his three or four year old son with him on a ride back to where we were staying. He was very cute, engaged with his dad and at the end of the ride gave me a thumbs up and said “bye bye” in English.

Our van trip back to the airport was fine (except that I asked at one point if we were going the right direction). Our flight back was on time and uneventful, in another Airbus 320 that we had to board through steep portable stairs.

The flight reminded me of a trip to Mexico my family and I took back when I was in elementary school. The local airport operator in Ruidoso owed my father some money for advertising in our family-owned newspaper, and as a trade-out, the airport operator agree to fly our family of four in his Cessna 180 directly to Guaymas, on the Gulf of California. The trip down was uneventful. When we got to the airport — basically just a dirt landing strip — we took a cab to our beach hotel. The next day, that same cab driver came to the hotel and announced that one of tires had gone flat and offered to help our pilot fix it. Our pilot rode with him to the dirt airstrip, pumped up the tire with air and injected some kind of “Fix-A-Flat” goo into the tire, which then seemed to hold air. I later figured out that the taxi driver had staged a scam to get a big tip by merely letting air out of the airplane tire, then warning us about the problem and earning a second cab fare.

We flew from Guaymas to Hermosillo, Mexico, the next day and I was terrified as we began our landing sequence that the tire would have gone flat once we touched the runway. I envisioned us flipping over, crashing and bursting in to a ball of flame. But fortunately there was no drama on our landing.

After landing, we had to refuel before continuing on to Ruidoso. While waiting for the fuel, we observed a blue and black Mexicana DC6 airliner getting ready to depart the airport. The pilot had managed to start three of its four engines, but one was being stubborn and would not fire up after several minutes of cranking. Finally, an airport attendant walked out with a 10 or 12-foot 2×4 piece of lumber and began pounding mercilessly on the cowling of the recalcitrant engine. The pilot began the start-up procedure again, and the Pratt & Whitney radial engine sputtered to life, belching both black and white smoke before it finally achieving a regular rhythm of a spinning propeller. I suspect there was a stuck float in the engine’s fuel delivery system, but I’ll never know.

The plane then taxied to the end of the runway and turned to take off. Its four working engines roared as it gained enough airspeed to escape the bonds of gravity and flew off to some other location in Mexico.

Fortunately when we were getting ready to leave Leon, no one had to bang on the cowling of our Airbus 320 to get one of its two turbofan engines started. And the fact that a nun was sitting in our row of seats made us feel even more confident that we would make it home okay.