Windmills, showers, bats and moths
Trip Start
Jul 01, 2011
1
45
155
Trip End
Jun 30, 2012
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San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico
Monday, August 29, 2011
A pleasant surprise along the way was : a large scale wind farm between Puerto and Salina Cruz. A good sign that Mexico's utility CFE is starting to invest in renewable energy. Thumbs up... though I haven't seen any solar farms so far, which is a pity in a country with so much sunshine.
On the next leg of the trip between Salina Cruz and Tuxtla Gutierrez all our navigation assistants (TomTom, iPhone and Bing) were kinda lost. Even our 2011 edition of the 'Guía Rojo' road atlas was not up-to-date. Fortunately a lady working at the toll booth near Salina Cruz enquired about our destination and offered an optimized itinerary through Arriaga which allowed us to stay on "cuotas" (toll-roads) most of the way for a faster and safer drive.
As usual with long drives we took turns, however this time it seems I had all the good weather while everytime Mai took the wheel a huge cloud appeared and torrential rains fell on us, to the point where several times we were completely surrounded by water and couldn't see the road or the cars / trucks around us. Fun times :)
We made it safely to San Cristóbal in about 9 hours and were glad to find shelter in a spacious apartment at Posada La Media Luna, a hotel located half a block from the Zócalo (town square). After a yummy dinner and a bottle of Argentinian wine at a local restaurant (Tuluc) we hit the sack and quickly fell asleep under the blankets. This was the first time in Mexico we needed blankets - because of higher elevation which bring cooler temperatures.
Despite the wine in my blood I woke up to the sound of something scurrying on the ceiling. At first I thought it was a gecko because of the high speed at which the sound traveled across the room. This was too loud and distracting for me to sleep so I opened my eyes. A small bat was stuck between the curtain and the skylight, desperately flapping to get out and bounding between the glass and the curtain, again and again and again... Bats are not the list of creatures that make me scream if found in my bedroom... but they are still kinda creepy and they often carry diseases... plus that flapping sound was driving me nuts: I woke Mai up and we moved to the other bedroom of the apartment (luckily we had a spare room).
The next morning after waking up at 7am to the sound of the bell churches I went to the bedroom to check whether I could find the bat, only to realize that the culprit was... a moth. To be more accurate: a jungle-size moth, about 6 inches / 15cm of wingspan. Right now he's probably boasting to his moth friends that he's so big and strong that a human took him for a bat.
