Teotihuacan

Finally having escaped from the rain, I can actually do something with my day other than race the motorcycle as fast as possible against the impending storms. When I was originally planning where to go in Mexico, I'd marked a few things around Mexico City, but then nixed them after deciding to head down the coast and not go inland. Well Patricia forced me inland, so I resurrected one of the places I'd wanted to go: Teotihuacan.

Absolutely unbelievable, and I'm glad I ended up going that way.

I circled around the north side of Mexico city as I was finishing my escape from the hurricane, and found a little hotel within walking distance of the Teotihuacan ruins. I settled in for the night and rested after a long day of riding, so that I could get up early - I was heading to the ruins on a Saturday, and I knew it would end up busy.

One of the big disadvantages of the way I travel is security of my things. If my things aren't locked up somewhere - preferably in a hotel room or a hostel - then I'd like to keep them within sight as much as possible. It takes a bit of work to get things off my bike, but it's really not hard.

But that means that it's hard to go do activities during the day unless I'm staying somewhere two days and can leave all my stuff in a room. If I have to check out of the hotel, I'm pretty much stuck with my stuff until I check into the the next place. That hasn't been horrible - for the most part, the time between checkout and checkin is just riding anyway.

That leads to reason number two I wanted to get up early: checkout was noon, so I could get there, see everything, and get back before having to pack up the bike.

And the plan worked out perfectly, once I finally got moving about an hour and a half past my planned 7:00 departure from the hotel. I walked over to the pyramids and got in plenty early - so early, in fact, that there were only a handful of the usual vendors chasing you around trying to sell you bird call whistles or little glass pyramids.

Not to mention I was one of the only people up there.

That said, here's some pictures. As always, click for larger.

Temple of the Sun from the bottom. You can see a few shadows up on top from the 10 or so people who made it up there before me.

Made it to the top - I need to do more cardio though. My ankle survived okay, though it wasn't super happy.

Temple of the moon.

Panorama. The street of the dead is off to the right, temple of the moon on the right, and temple of the Sun off in the distance.

The temple - they apparently reconstructed these pillars after digging them up. The art is stunning.

Standing on a bench with a selfie stick. Try to look more tourist.

Some of the paintings they found.

More paintings inside.

The sun came out as I was leaving, so I got one more picture of the temple a bit lit up.

The vendors were already much more plentiful by the time I left, and I got accosted out the gates by people offering me menus for the restaurants right outside. I declined, and got some delicious pork tacos at the place around the corner from the hotel before packing up, doing a few checks on the bike, and heading out. (The oil was actually pretty low after two days of hard riding - I'm going to have to keep an eye on it, this thing's eating a lot of oil.)

I got out of town right as some rain seemed to be heading in, and made tracks for Orizaba - another place that had been on the schedule originally, got bumped for time, and then put back on due to the hurricane detour. I decided to spend two nights there to recover a bit after the last few hard days, and because I'd seen some interesting things to do there. More on that later.