Writings By Location| Musings On Mexico | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
Driving in Mexico, on the other hand, is nothing but an amusement.
The roads come in different flavors. At the top of the chain, there's the one toll road that stretches from Cancun to Mèrida. It's one giant straight line, in perfect shape, but costs nearly $15 US just to drive halfway. Unsurprisingly, we saw maybe three cars in two hours. At first, we thought it was because of the massive downpours, but then we figured this is probably the only road in the state that wasn't flooding, so we may have actually seen it at rush hour.
Then there are what I call the "well maintained" roads. These are usually two lane highways with wide shoulders for easy passing. There's about three of these in the Yucatan peninsula, but they go for stretches of hundreds of kilometers. You turn off these onto any of the "standard roads", which were last maintained in the 1980s. This applies to most streets in the cities, too. They have no painted lines, are barely wide enough for two cars in some places, and have potholes big enough for whole families to live in. Some are so big, locals charge tourists 30 pesos to give tours at the bottom. All of the roads flood when it rains, making them passable at no more than ten kph. Plus the potholes fill up, so you think you're about to go over a small bump, and the next thing you know, you're in a cenote. Pothole slaloming would probably be a national sport, except that everybody around here drives VW Beetles, so probably one-third of the participants would disappear if they ever hit one after a good rainfall.
Lastly, there are the "unmaintained roads". These are really nothing more than a path through the jungle with a machete, and I'm happy to say we didn't see too many of these. It's good to know that a rental car can easily handle them, though. Keep that in mind the next time you think about buying your next car from Avis.
Finally, you have to learn to love your "topes", which are speed bumps. In Mexico, every road other than the highways uses speed bumps to control traffic. Most of the roads pass through a small village every few kilometers, and these towns have more speed bumps than residents. The result is that a 200-kilometer drive has you averaging 110 kph for half the time, and 30 kph for each of the 75 villages you hit along the way. It's highly frustrating. After a while, you realize you're in a rental car, so you stop slowing down for all of them, but these are serious speed bumps — sometimes several inches straight up — so not slowing down can easily cause you to lose a few dental fillings.
By the way, you may be getting annoyed by the fact that I keep saying distances in kilometers and speeds in kph. The fact is, the rest of the world is on the metric system, and the US is, I believe, the last holdout of the ancient and bizarrely senseless imperial system. So we're trying to train ourselves to think in metric to make lives easier for ourselves. Message to the US: get over yourselves already and stop holding the rest of the world back. Sorry, rant over.
