Estado de Michoacán de Ocampo

Patzcuaro is a beautiful old colonial town, and we had a lovely tranquil camp site just on the edge of town. We're still high at around 2,000 metres meaning its gorgeously warm in the sun but drops down to a few degrees overnight. This doesn't bother us as we have an electric heater (thanks for buying that on your trip mum & dad!), as well as a gas heater for when we are camping without a hookup, so we are nice and toasty overnight.

We spent a couple of days exploring this large town and its multitude of plazas and artisan craft shops. We managed to buy lots of pressies, promptly filling the space we just created by sending a parcel home. We even found a Chinese restaurant, which made a nice change from tacos, tacos and more tacos, and cost us a whopping 3 bucks for a huge plateful!

On the 3rd day we drove a few minutes to the dock and caught a little boat over to the island of Janitzio. Our boat was worryingly called the Titanic, but it managed to get us the 25 minutes over to the island. We wound our way up the small island, with large steps covered on all sides with stalls selling mostly tack. At the top was a cool monument which you could climb to get great views over the lake and beautiful rolling hills.

We could have easily spent longer exploring the area but we felt we needed to keep momentum otherwise we will never reach Guatemala.

We heades towards the butterflys (check next blog post) and decided to make a stop off at some hot springs. There are great roads here, but they are tolled and boy are they expensive. We've paid 30 bucks for an hours drive before, so we decided to take the Libre (free) roads. This can be a bit of an adventure, with rough surfaces and hundreds of topes (speed bumps) suddenly appearing on 50mph roads. Sometimes you do get to go along some beautiful sections, particularly up in the hills, which (just about) makes it worthwhile. As we were drawing near we started heading up a windy road, which went up and up until we leveled out about 3,000 metres. The whole area is geothermal and we found a great campsite with amazing hot pools, and spent a lovely afternoon lounging around. We had a camp fire to keep away the cold, and we could hear the nice white noise from the steam power plant next door.Les mer