Topes, topes, topes

Harvey has already written a bunch about driving in Mexico in his blog, but I thought I'd add a few comments of my own.

We arrived yesterday in Oaxaca, after driving most of the length of Mexico in roughly two hour shifts each.  For most of that distance we drove the cuotas, or toll highways.  For the most part these are divided highways and very good roads.  The tolls themselves are puzzling though as I was never quite clear whether I was paying a toll for the road I was just on or the one I was entering,  and the amount of the toll didn't seem to bear much relation to either the length or quality of the road segment.  Overall they weren't cheap either:  our highest toll day saw us paying about $30 for a day of driving.  

 But I appreciated them much more after our "Mexico City Bypass Operation".  On the advice of one of our guidebooks we bypassed Mexico City's traffic and byzantine rules about who's allowed to drive on which day of the week by taking to secondary highways.   We happily left the toll road just after Queretaro at about noon with about 260 km to cover before our destination for the day.  Lots of time to get there before dark, we thought.  But we hadn't counted on the topes!

Let me explain about topes.  Even more so than in Canada, no one in Mexico seems to notice or care much about posted speed limits.   But this poses a problem for communities in that most secondary roads run right through the centre of town.  Most communities aren't that interested in having cars roar through at 130 km/hr!   The universal solution is topes.

Simply stated, a tope is a speed bump.  But it's not a gentle, friendly, rounded speed bump like you might find in a parking lot or school zone in Canada.  A Mexican tope means business.  From a distance it might look little, but they are tall for their size and not all that rounded.  Taking one at much more than 20 km/hr could easily flatten a tire.  Everyone respects topes, and everyone slows right down to cross over them.

On secondary highways, each tope is marked by a sign, and every community you pass through has a minimum of 3 to 5, or many more if the community is larger and stretches out a few km along the highway.  Our 3 hour drive to Cuidad Sahagun took us almost 6 hours.  It could have been worse though:  I missed the last turn in Pachuga and Harv navigated us back on track via a short section of tertiary road.  On the tertiary roads the topes are usually unmarked.  Even more fun!  The game becomes "spot the tope".  Not a game where you want to have even one miss, given that these topes are even taller than the ones on the secondary highways.  :-)

Which brings us to the first rule of Mexican driving.  Don't drive after dark.  A rule that we respected absolutely on our entire trip.  One unseen topes could take out your car's suspension.