Welcome to our Central Mexican Road Trip page, where you can find out everyone you need to know about our trip from Palenque up the backbone of the country to San Luis Potosi over a period of 12 weeks.
We’ll be starting off from our home base in Palenque and then heading straightaway up the mountains where we’ll spend one week in San Cristobal de las Casas, a week in Tuxtla, a week in Oaxaca, two weeks in Puebla, two weeks in Mexico City, a week in Valle de Bravo, one week in Toluca, one week in Guanajuato and then two weeks in San Luis Potsi.
We’ll be visiting a few of the more well-known tourist destinations along the way, but the plan is to fill the majority of the trip with destinations that most English-speaking tourists have never seen nor heard of…and which don’t even have English language content written around them for Google and the Internet. Places like El Bufalo Ranch and Restaurant in Tabasco where we sampled fresh cheese, mutton and beef, our day-trip to the Zona Arqueológica de Reforma y Las Cascadas where we enjoyed the secret Maya ruins and refreshing waters of the river, the Chacamax River on the outskirts of Palenque while exploring the grounds of Hotel Nututun, or the tiny pueblo of Chable on the mighty Usumasinta River.
We’ll be using each city as a base of operations since we need regular Internet access to cover the press for the trip. From there, everything is day-trips out into the surrounding mountains, jungles, ruins and beyond. We already have over 50 destinations planned, such as El Velo de la Novia, Las Pozas in Xilitla, La Biosfera de la Sepultura, the Malintzin Volcano, Iztaccihuatl, Popocatepetl, Nevada de Toluca, La Peña de Bernal, Sierra de Lobos and beyond. Then there are the plazas, parks, museums, restaurants and more that we will cover in each city where we will be staying.
Planned destinations will take place Monday – Friday with daily social media blasts going out. Saturdays we’ll be hunkered down putting together the video from the previous week + covering daily social media blasts, and Sunday is our day of rest; no social media, just sleep in + have a relaxing day and recharge for the next week ahead.
Long-term, we’ll also be writing individual reviews of specific places; for example, a hotel or restaurant might be mentioned briefly in a blog post with a photo + link + information, but after we finish the trip and have time to sift through all of the video + photo material we will be taking along the way, we’ll be writing stories for the picture book + more blog posts for the website covering specific locations in greater detail.
A hashtag campaign will accompany the trip, and we have a few other agendas while we are out there, not the least of which is to show English readers a hidden side of Central Mexico that many haven’t seen or experienced yet; for example, our day-trip to Emiliano Zapata, Tabasco in our piece on The Real Mexico. Read the comments and see people’s reactions to finding out first-hand information about a city which only exists in the Spanish Wikipedia.
Such as Phil’s where he says, “Today I learned (from eye-opening photos) that a random town deep in jungle Mexico, so small it only appears in the Spanish Wikipedia, can be cleaner, more manicured, with modern buildings and a museum, that it makes my northern California town look like a dump. I was expecting…well…dirt streets, impoverished wood buildings, stuff lying around, you know, a 3rd-world look. Thanks for correcting my ignorance!”
We also want to show people that while Mexico does have its pockets of violence and cartel-on-cartel issues, the vast majority of the country is completely safe, and the people and the culture of the country one of the most hospitable in the world. A place where any traveler from any country can come and immerse themselves in the Latin culture and the natural beauty that is Mexico.
