Mexico 2020

Today we did something quite atypical to us: Bought tickets to an hop-on city tour bus and did two of their routes. The second route we had to leave half way though and rush to the airport with taxi to not miss our flight to Cancun. Not much to say about the experience, but it was a good way to see a bit around the huge city in just one day.

The Mexican domestic airline Interjet managed to be an hour or two late like usual, so after (slowly) picking up a rental car we finally spent the night in a suspicious roadside motel instead of our nice booked hotel. Wouldn't have been safe to drive 200km at that time so tired and neither the hotel staff would have been happy to wait for us.

Today the start in the morning was a bit slow, as we spent some hours considering what we should do during the next days. Finally ended up booking flights to Cancun for tomorrow evening and decide tomorrow what do actually do around there.

In the afternoon we went to Xochimilco, the river channel area south of the city. Those rivers are all that is left of the lake on which Mexico City was originally built and nowadays they serve as some kind of recreational area for both tourists and locals. You basically hire a boat and float along the rivers with Mariachi bands offering their services from their boats, food and beverages being sold from other ones.

Some haggling in Spanish was needed to get the price to tolerable level, but in general it was a relaxing and nice experience. Would have been perfect for yesterday afternoon instead of the long museum walk.

Early in the morning we arrived Mexico, left our bags at the hotel and headed to Teotihuacan. One Finnish guy named Matti I know happened to be in Mexico at the same time, so he also joined us there.

I visited Teotihuacan last time with Timo around midday and it was horribly crowded and hot at that time. Now we reached the site around eight in the morning, an hour before the official opening time but the gates were already open. This was definitely better time to visit: The site was basically empty with pleasant, even a bit chilly temperature. Hot air balloons were flying over the pyramids and it was calm and peaceful. Way better experience. Around 10 the tourist buses started arriving and the site was getting crowded again, but we were already leaving.

We returned to the city by a public bus, had lunch in a small seafood taco place and planned to spend the afternoon in the National Museum of Anthropology. Matti had already got enough walking for a day and left to hotel to sleep his jetlag, which maybe wasn't that bad idea at all.

We anyway choose to walk through the big Bosque de Chapultepec park to the museum and noticed we are dead tired before even entering the museum. Three hours and 10000 clay pots later we resemble zombies and returned to the hotel. Too tired for any photo editing today, so will post them later on.

Time to enjoy 12h of long haul flight.

Due to the flight schedules we had a day to spend in Madrid. Accommodation prices in downtown Madrid were kind of horrible, so we decide to rent a car and drive outside the city for the day. That was also a more interesting option, as Madrid we have shortly visited many times already.

The city choices for the day were Avila and Segovia, both old cities with some interesting landmarks.