Hitchhiking in Mexico -

After leaving Mexico City we didn't go straight to Oaxaca, where on Saturday afternoon we were supposed to experience some magic realism. We decided to make a short stop in Puebla, where we had to try the local specialty - MOLE - and tequila ice cream!

We only spent about 3 hours there that evening, and around midnight we had to decide between spending the night in Puebla to get on the 7 am bus or go to the bus station to catch a bus to Oaxaca, which was leaving in less than 30 minutes... we chose option #2 - we got there extremely fast in a cab, sometimes passing on a red light, just to hear that there were no more tickets neither for the night nor morning bus. We had to get to Oaxaca some other way... It was almost 1am, darkness and silence surrounding us, and the only thing we could think of was hitchhiking. The question was, where we could find people heading in direction to Oaxaca; especially that it is not the most popular mode of transportation in Mexico- everybody prefers buses. And out of nowhere appeared a taxi driver,who suggested two solutions:
1) he was going to take us to Oaxaca for 2000 pesos - our answer was obvious - out of the budget
2) he was going to take us to a toll station where the police, who is always there, could help us get a ride

This option completely won, and we didn't even need the police. On an A2 paper we wrote the name of the city we were going to and only 15 minutes later we hopped on a trailer, whose 2 drivers decided to help us.

OUR RIDE

And that's how our adventure started. The driver and his companion, later known as "student", were quite strange and completely silent. Just a few seconds after we left the toll booth the student changed with the driver, and we continued our trip going 20km/h. We knew right then that the night was going to be a long one, but in our worst nightmares we didn't imagine it was going to be that bad... Around 3am we stopped at a gas station for 20 minutes, so the men could take a shower and change clothes; real Rico Suaves came back - white open shirts, gold chains...

While they were in the shower, we had some fun:

Then we hit a fog like from a horror movie - we were still driving 20km/h by a cliff edge that was going down 1200m. In case of accidents they don't even bother to get cars or humans bodies out from there. At this stage we were a little nervous, because we could not see any signs for the city of our destination. We were hoping to get to Oaxaca around 8am, and the trailer driver finished his trip at 9:30am, but not in the city of Oaxaca, but in some other town in the state with the same name, which still was about 240km away from Oaxaca de Juárez. We went to the bus station, but the bus just left. The next one was leaving in 5 hours, and we really hoped to get to our original destination around 4pm. We didn't accept the possibility of not achieving our goal, because we really wanted to see the market during the market day, which in Oaxaca is on Saturdays. So we got back to the crossstreets, where we were left by our hitchhiking "friends," and we tried getting another ride. Everybody was really curious, what we were doing- as I mentioned it's not the most popular form of transport in Mexico, but one step at a time we wanted to continue our trip. Finally we got on a colectivo (shared van, cab, or truck) to a town located about 50km from Tuxtepec, where we got by accident in the first place. Afterwards we took a bus to Oaxaca, and when we finally got there at 6:30pm, more than 17 hours of travel have passed.

Thanks to this sudden change of itinerary we met some nice people, we drove through the mountains covered with wild forests glittering after rain with different shades of green, and finally we heard that the market that we wanted to see so badly is not completely safe and not that great, and that on Sunday there is a better one 15km away