Colima State

After much debate we finally decided to leave the comfortable coastal life to experience inland Mexico. We knew this would involve a lot of climbing as Guadalajara is at 1500 m, so tried to prepare ourselves for a couple of big uphill days. We also decided to take the toll road instead of some narrower, hillier options to get to Guadalajara in the hope of reducing the grade and number of hills we had to climb. Things started off well with plentiful sweet shops along the road where we sampled many of the different forms of sweet coconut bars. At one point we rode over a bridge and got a good look at all the stages of brick making - from digging sand out of the river with an excavator to mixing and firing the bricks. We were very excited when we reached a watermelon stand outside of Colima (City) as we were running low on water, so we sat and chatted with the owner for a while and each devoured half a watermelon. The Colima Volcano came into view, and then we were surprised to see it erupt; we thought we were really lucky to have witnessed this powerful force, but we soon discovered that this was nearly an hourly occurrence and none of the locals seemed to notice. At some point during our climbing we also entered sugar country - we rode by fields and fields of sugarcane and started being passed by many heavily laden trucks hauling the canes to be processed.Read more