Saturday on the Carreterra Near Santiago NL
Written: May 15 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Slice of everyday life with no glitz and no packaging
Cons: No glitz to hide the dirt or smells
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| mrkstvns's Full Review: |
Amazing how commonplace activities become excursions into another way of life when you just become a local for a weekend. I've been spending some time with family and friends in the Monterrey area, and last weekend (May 6), we took a drive along the highway (carreterra) that runs between Monterrey and Cadereyta
One of the more common weekend activities among regiomontanos (as the people from Monterrey call themselves) is to drive out towards Cadereyta. There are lots of places along the way to stop off for sightseeing, picnicing, shopping, or dining. Saturdays and Sundays you'll find heavy traffic both in directions as people go out to the waterfalls, the reservoir, the mountains, the commercial picnic grounds, or the long strips of small shops and informal roadside eateries.
Be warned though: This isn't sightseeing as told you to by Frommer's or Fodor's, it's experiencing a weekend the way a typical Mexican experiences it. If you are the kind of traveller who carries your stereotypes with you, please don't do anything I describe here -- stay in town where there the museums are new and the waiters wear ties.
If you don't have a car, you can get a taxi to take you for not a lot of money. Grey Line also runs trips from downtown hotels out to the falls, though you might not have the opportunities of stopping at roadside vendors, the rows upon rows of artisan shops and restaurants, or the towns along the way.
Roadside Vendors
Roadside vendors are not exactly uncommon features of country highways anywhere that I've ever been, but I can't think of any other place where I've ever seen so many of them in such concentration. Cars and pickup trucks are pulled up alongside the road for miles -- virtually from the edges of Monterrey all the way out to the waterfalls at Cascada Cola de Caballo.
Oranges, onions, furniture, motor oil, you name it! The most common commodity being sold by these roadside entrepreneurs has to be puppies. You can't drive more than 1/4 mile without seeing a sign for "cachorritos" or "perritos". Often, you'll see a guy with four or five little pups playing on a blanket on the hood of a car. Somehow I've never thought of impulse buying a puppy from a guy selling them out of the backseat of a Volkswagen bug, but it's obviously the way things are done in Monterrey! Ah well, different places different customs...I guess it's better than the uncaring brutality of industrial puppy mills feeding corporate retail chain stores in malls, like you find in the U.S....
Cascada Cola de Caballo (Horsetail Falls)
A couple miles past the town of Santiago you'll see a sign for the turnoff to the waterfalls. You'll hang a right then wind along a twisty narrow road for a couple miles before reaching the parking areas. You pay a few pesos to get in, go through the turnstiles and then fend off the kids selling trinkets and offerring burro rides up to the falls (or you can take them up on the deal -- your choice!) There are also picnic areas near the park's base. To get to the falls, you walk a few hundred meters (maybe 1/2 mile at the most) along a stone-paved path that's never particularly steep nor treacherous.
The waterfall is a small river (or large stream -- take your pick) that drops some 25 to 30 meters (about 80-90 feet). There's a small bridge where you can have your picture taken against the backdrop of the falls and the lush mountain vegetation, or you can step back to a platform area and get a more panoramic shot.
Santiago
After leaving the waterfall, we stopped in the town of Santiago for lunch and a little sightseeing. The town is small, but very neat by northern Mexico standards, with a couple of very nice restaurants, a pleasant central plaza, and a beautiful old church. All this on a high hill commanding a stunning view of the valley below. One of the things I loved most about the town was the drive down the hill along the road that passes next to the church. You drop down a steep slope lined with brown adobe walls that have huge bouganvillea vines hanging over them, completely covered in bright pink flowers!
The plaza is less lush than some small town squares I've seen in southern Mexico, but it makes up for it somewhat with tall trees and a beautiful little fountain in the center made from talavera ceramic pottery. On a Saturday afternoon, most of the benches were occuppied by old men chatting or reading the paper, and a couple kids running around in the grass chasing the pigeons.
Las Palomas
There are a couple of very nice restaurants in Santiago and we were undecided between El Rincon with its rooftop dining area, or Las Palomas with its traditional hacienda feel and its beautiful rustic dining rooms. We chose Las Palomas, mostly because my niece liked the fountain on the lower terrace dining area. The restaurant also includes a small gift shop featuring traditional mexican folk art. Upstairs dining rooms had brightly painted wood chairs and tables with pink tablecloths and looked very inviting -- even more so since there was live music in the restaurant and you could watch the show from the upper levels. But the downstairs dining areas were nice too. We were under a thatch palapa style roof with those lightweight leather chairs on cane frames that you often see around Jalisco. The fountain proved amusing since it seemed to attract all the kids in the place! The food was outstanding! I had a delicious broiled fish in a green chile sauce. They had a good selection of tequilas and beers, including Casta -- a new craft microbrewed brand that's being made in nearby Apodaca (I'll try to do a beer review on this when I get a chance). All in all, good food, great setting and a wonderful place to just sit and chat with friends. It's no wonder that lunch took us some 3 hours (Ay! I love my weekends in Mexico...)
Shops on the Carreterra
Close to Santiago (probably within a mile) is a long stretch of highway that's lined with shops and outdoor roadside cafes. A turnoff lane keeps slow-moving window shoppers divided from through highway traffic. Pedestrian overpass bridges let shoppers cross safely.
Anything you can imagine (and some things you can't) can be found in these shops! Some of the larger shops specialize in rustic pine wood furniture, or wrought iron. Others specialize in folk art for the kitchen. Some sell local produce, like fresh honey or piquin chiles. There are places selling rough-textured blankets for $5 (50 pesos) and there are places where you can get sleazy T-shirts or hats emblazoned with tasteless spanish epithets. Looking for the spanish equivalent of a "Big Johnson" T-shirt? You can get it here from any of 10 different vendors! I picked up a huge cast iron comal (the flat skillets used for heating tortillas) for less than $5. Bargains can be had.
The real treat of this shop area is the large number of outdoor cafes. Several of them offer buffet lunches for about $3. Many of them feature huge grills where chicken, young goats, or slabs of beef are being grilled. Even as you stroll through the shops, you can't help but be enticed by the clouds of wood smoke carrying the scent of slow roasting marinated meats...
Women make fresh tortillas by hand, patting the corn dough between their hands and then slapping the tortillas on hot stone next to the grill. You can get a huge plate with fresh grilled chicken, beans, stewed vegetables, and the freshest, tastiest tortillas you ever experienced, along with an ice cold bottle of beer for under $5. Then grab a seat at any of the steel tables emblazoned with Carta Blanca logos and pull up a plastic lawn chair for some down home chowing!
These places are great (and great values), but gringos would do well to be a little careful about what they eat. The food is delicious and fresh, but cleanliness sometimes varies and all the warnings you hear about fresh vegetables and salads and drinks with ice should be adhered to religiously here! Also watch for things that are unusually greasy -- stay away from the stewed chicharrones. You can get away with eating salad or having ice in your coke when you're at a big chain hotel or a top restaurant in downtown Monterrey, but out on the highway??? No Way, Jose!
There are also stands interspersed with the shops where you can get some sweets or a light desert. Try the gorditas, which are like crumpets made with corn flour with sugar or honey. I also love the locally made or homemade sweets. Maybe candied pumpkin or squash (calabaza), or tamarindo. My favorites are anything made with scorched goats milk (leche quemada), which tastes like caramel and brown sugar and often has pecan toppings. This is also pretty much what Glorias are -- one of the most popular regional candies in northern Mexico (and available everywhere, including the shops at Monterrey's airport).
There are some down sides to the whole shop area. It gets incredibly crowded on a weekend afternoon and can be hard to push your way through the crowd. Parking is tight, though there are small dirt lots behind the shops where you can park for a couple pesos. Also, don't count on nice clean bathrooms. You'll find some public toilets on side streets, but it will cost you a couple pesos to use them, and they're not always pleasant. If you're lucky, toilet paper will be available and the toilets will flush. (We once made the mistake of deciding to wait until we got to the Pemex station between Santiago and Monterrey -- the toilets were even more disgusting than near the shops!)
Back to Town
If you feel adventurous on the way back, you can cruise around the reservoir and find the backroad that leads back to Monterrey. My wife and I did this a couple years ago and found the road to be pleasantly deserted until we started getting close to Monterrey. There are also some wonderful little places right on the reservoir where locals sometimes stop to launch a rowboat or fish from the shore. My wife, my brother-in-law, and I went out to one of these little places on Christmas night a year ago. The place looked like a whitewashed ramshackle dive in a dirt parking lot, but boy oh boy could they cook a fish! (Reminds me of the slogan used by Washington D.C. barbecue restaurant Red Hot and Blue, "best barbecue in a building that isn't condemned".) You can choose the fish you want, and they'll clean it and deep fry the whole thing right before your eyes. Then you grab a beer from one of the ice chests, pull up a chair at one of the rickety metal beer-logo emblazoned tables, and dive into some great eating!
Whew! After all these words, I still have lots more to say about what you'll see and find on a simple weekend drive just outside Monterrey. Maybe Monterrey isn't known as a tourist area, but this review might give you some insight as to why I love spending time there and why I'm never bored, no matter how many times I've been there. If you find yourself out that way, have a gordita for me!
Recommended:
Yes
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