The road home...taking a chance with luck

Valle de Bravo isn't really that far from Zihuatanejo by Canadian standards...it's a good drive on nice highways by most people's reckoning, so when we came to the day of our departure, we had studied carefully the 3 options for our route home.  The GPS selected route would have us retracing our arrival route and heading back on toll highways via Morelia once again past our familiar highway in Michoacan and back to Zihuatanejo.   Raul, our condominium director and many others had suggested we should try to find our way over to the big freeway, the Autopista del Sol, that connects Mexico City with the Guerrero Coast at Acapulco.   We had driven that route last year from Cuernavaca and knew that the bypass of Acapulco and then the long winding way up Hwy. 200 is not fun.  So that left us with the shortest, most direct and the one route we have always wanted to drive....the highway through Ciudad Altamirano.   This notorious drive is considered by many to be the most beautiful highway around but at the same time it has had the notoriety of being very dangerous and full of robbers and drug cartel activity.   So we did our "due diligence" - we asked everyone we could what they thought and it came out 50/50 as to would you do it or not.  So consulting Punto a Punto, and finding that this route  was in fact 200 kms. shorter than the others, although with similar driving time involved, and no tolls, we made a game time decision.   I was awake most of the night wondering whether we would be safe driving from  Valle de Bravo to Ciudad Altamirano and down through the state of Guerrero from inland to our chosen destination of Troncones. 

Saying goodbye to Valle, I realized that I had not seen the whole city.  On my final morning dog walk, I discovered perhaps the best, most attractive neighborhood of all, signs about yoga classes and fun shops all tightly closed in the early morning hours.   I will have to return, now that I know my way around.   The owners of our hotel, themselves owners of 10 dogs, bid us a warm farewell and left me feeling that Valle is indeed a lovely destination for a return visit.   Cori had been a challenge but in the end, his cunning ways won the hearts of everyone we encountered who called him "preciosa"....

Our drive began slowly as Sunday morning of Dia del Bandera was bringing crowds into El centro of Valle.   Eventually winding our way through the pine tree lined high mountain roads away from town, we began to see the beauty of the countryside.  Each small town had signs showing the route to Ciudad Altamirano and in fact we soon saw that the Ruta 2010 had elected this highway as a tourist route...this must be safe right??  

Leaving Mexico state the highways in Guerrero began to improve and as we neared Ciudad Altamirano, which I had imagined as a ghost town in a desolate mountainous area, I was surprised to see large scale farms, with lush crops and expensive houses and equipment.   The city was bustling.  We enjoyed a federal police escort onto Coyuca de Catalan and began to imagine that like the "sacred cows" of India we were indeed being rewarded for our Canadian pioneering spirit of taking this highway.    Soon the cars became few and far between and we began the long climb up into the final mountain range.  The road became more challenging with tight curves and areas where rock slides had partially extended onto the lanes, but luckily the traffic was very light, so it was easy to move from one side of the road to the other as the need arose.   Our most frequent encounters were the herds of goats that were grazing unattended on the high mountain grasses. 


We began to congratulate ourselves that in fact, this route was our new favorite for inland travel as we continued the long winding route downward to Hwy. 200.   We somehow managed to pass what should have been Mesas de Bravo and the waterfalls that are protected from development...but gazing ahead on the highway we knew we were soon to meet up with the main coastal highway...and then it happened.  

Rounding a curve, with a vehicle ahead of us, we saw 6-8 armed young men on one side of the road carrying semi-automatic weapons and a woman and man with the same guns on the other side of the road. The woman was screaming something and the men sheepishly waved us through...and then we were bye and was it a dream?  Why was I not more terrified...hadn't we just driven through a group of heavily armed bandidos...what had just happened?  Were they going to rob us, was she shouting to do it, and they wanted to avoid dealing with gringos....  we will never know.   It made me angry that once again my perception of Mexico the beautiful was shattered...so today as we drove into Zihuatanejo and made our stop at the Commercial Mexicana, Gene was glad to go over and tell the Marine's about our experience.  They seemed to care and asked enough information that they made  gene feel they will do somethng about the gang of guntoting youth that we had seen.  

We are glad to be home...to get back into our routine, see friends, eat home cooking and swim and do yoga and bike ride.  We are grateful that luck was on our side on our annual adventure in Mexico.   And Cori's little smile on his first beach walk at Troncones says it all....life is indeed good along the seashore!