The Mexican constitution enshrines the right of people to move freely throughout the country. To this end, a vast network of toll-free roads connect every village, town and city in the country. A roughly parallel network of toll roads, or cuotas, also covers the country. The toll roads are generally wider and straighter than the free highways, or carreteras libres, and tend to be in a better state of repair, although this is certainly not always the case.
You can really rack up a tab traveling across the country on the toll roads. For this reason, we decided to take the carretera libre between Oaxaca and Puerto Escondido. Although it was roughly 100km shorter than the cuota, Google maps estimated a time difference of only a few minutes, which gave us some idea of what we were getting ourselves into.
Feeling time-rich, though, and wanting more interesting views than those offered by the cuotas, we turned onto the carretera libre and began a long, winding and bumpy drive toward the coast.
Thanks to a relentless combination of topes (speed bumps), curves and elevation changes, we kept a pretty slow pace over the whole drive. Despite this pace, there was never a dull moment.
The adventure began with the refusal of our GPS to accept the carretera libre as a legitimate road. While I drove, Jordan struggled to make the device accept our route. Despite all efforts, it simply kept advising us to turn off and go back to the cuota. Finally, it stopped showing any road at all. The display consisted of nothing more than our car on a featureless, pale green field. We turned it off and hoped that we would see just enough street signs to keep us on track. As a backup, we also used maps.me, a smartphone app that uses GPS rather than data to track your progress over a pre-downloaded map.
The mountains of the Sierra Madre Occidental pull the land into a jumbled carpet of steep and rugged features, all carpeted in thick, green foliage. From what we saw, there was hardly a solitary stretch of flat terrain anywhere. The road clung to mountainsides like a climber clings to a cliff face. Each curve that brought us round a fold on a mountainside or over a ridge delivered us momentary glimpses of the sea of green mountains that we found ourselves in the midst of.
We didn’t have a lot of time to enjoy views, even when they were more than fleeting. Driving the free road meant staying focused on the road. The carretera consisted of only one lane per direction of travel, but we frequently had to drive into the oncoming lane to avoid the constant potholes, sudden breaks between road repair jobs and a few instances where parts of the road had simply slipped away down the mountainsides. Both driver and passenger played active roles in guiding the car around each obstacle. The traffic wasn’t bad at all, but we had one scary moment when a full-on semi truck came barreling around a curve, using both lanes. We slowed and pulled over as far to our side as we could. The semi pulled only just far enough out of our lane to avoid the collision. That was the only semi that we saw on the carretera libre and I am pretty sure that semis are not allowed on it. Given the respect displayed for road rules by some other drivers we’ve seen, I’m glad that we only saw the one semi.
The final 50km of the drive felt a bit long. For nearly 20km, our straight-line distance to Puerto Escondido didn’t change. We zig-zagged along mountainsides for nearly 45 minutes, staying 20 miles distant from Puerto Escondido the whole time.
The road rose to cross over the top of a ridge and on the other side, everything changed. With one curve, we went from hot and dry to cool and wet. In seconds, the sun was obscured by thick clouds and water cascaded down the mountainsides, running between ferns and over mossy rock faces. The temperature dropped by 10F/5C in about 2 minutes.
The road conditions decayed in direct proportion to the amount of water flowing over them and these last few kilometers of the drive required the most focus of the entire trip. Jordan had volunteered for this section of the drive, thinking that she would get the easiest stretch of road, as we left the middle-of-nowhere mountains and descended towards civilization. The joke was on her. Sections of road had washed out, including a rather sizable chunk of one bridge.
In what is fast becoming a theme along this voyage, we arrived at our destination later than expected and mentally exhausted. Liz, our host at Casa Losodeli greeted us with a welcoming smile and showed us to our room. In short order, we found ourselves at a Spanish restaurant (one of the few open restaurants on a Sunday evening), enjoying a refreshing and well-deserved bottle of wine and some paella.
Epilogue: We decided to treat ourselves to the cuota highway on our return to Oaxaca. It turns out that this road is not a cuota after all, but rather a federally-funded carretera libre, whereas the one we took to Puerto Escondido was state-funded. While possibly even windier than the state highway, the federal highway had significantly fewer potholes. 🙂
