Memory Lane Monday

Okay, I'll jump on the blogwagon...



As the brickwife posted last week, we spent a few weeks in the town of Monclova, Coahuila, Mexico. It was a very interesting, exciting and fun experience and I'll write about a few of the more exciting things we did while there.

For three weeks, we lived in a pretty nice three bedroom house in a decent neighborhood. We still had a wrought iron gate around our house, but so did everyone, so it didn't feel dangerous there. I mean, you don't go walking around alone at night, but you really shouldn't do that a lot anywhere. Around the corner from our house, on Blvd. Harold Pape (long story, but the town was basically founded by an American of that name) was a convenience store that sold 10-cent Coronas, as long as you brought the bottles back for the deposit. We frequented that store often. Another great place right around the corner was the firehouse. Every night, a van would pull up, unload some meat and cooking gear and cook up a whole lotta tacos. Tacos Bomberos, the locals called them. I don't know what the meat was, but let me tell you, those street-side tacos were some of the best tacos I've ever had. All they consisted of was meat, cebolla and cilantro and they were 50 cents each. I loved it.

But I don't have any pictures of all that stuff, so on to what I do have pictures of: Cuatrocienegas. Okay, okay, I know that this is what Maggie posted on last week, but hey, I've got more pictures! Okay, I've got pictures of the other stuff, too, I just haven't scanned them yet, so maybe next week...

So, we left Monclova, Maggie, Hozumi, and I, in the morning. We were driving a Chevy Monza, the equivalent of a Geo Metro. It may be small, but it was a real trooper. More on that later. It was a beautiful drive, as long as you looked at the scenery (rocky mountains, tall bluffs, rolling hills) and not at the abject poverty that lay among the hills. In the several towns we drove through, there were speed bumps on the main road. The whole point of these bumps was to slow you down so that the road-side bread vendors could peddle their wares. It was quite strange. After about one-and-a-half hours, we reached the town of Cuatrocienegas, went to the tourist info office and picked up a map, ate lunch at a restaurant on the town square and headed out to see the pozas (small lakes).

The first stop was Poza Azul. As you can see in the picture, it is an almost shockingly blue little thing. But don't be fooled by it's size. That middle, dark blue patch is about 75 meters deep. Hard to believe, I know. There's also supposed to be some rare, indiginous turtle that lives only near Cuatrocienegas but we couldn't get a good glimpse of one. Actually, there are hundreds of species of plants and animals that ONLY live in this weird ecosystem of natual desert lakes. Maybe the best thing about visiting Poza Azul was that we really got to try out the Monza's offroading capabilities.

There was a giant mud puddle of unknown depth across the road to the pond, so, after asking the girls to get out of the car, I went for it. Honestly, I thought we were going to get stuck, but that little Monza plowed right through it. Sweet.




After doing a little swimming at Poza De La Becerra (the little calf) we headed for the granddaddy of them all: Las Playitas. It was startlingly beautiful. That's Maggie standing in the water, looking out over the lake and the mountains. The only problem with this place is that it's hard to get to. It's about 10 miles of dirt "road" with no signs to get there. I feel kind of lucky that we found it. We even got to see some wild horses on the way in. It was cool. And the Monza handled it admirably. So admirably that I even created an advertisement for Chevy, see?