Durango (City)

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Driving the Mazatlán-Durango Cuota

I left home around 9:30 on Thursday, with my ETA in Durango being about 2:30 with the one hour time change. The Road out of Isla took me 28 minutes, but that’s only because I was taking my time. It was in surprisingly good shape!

I stopped for fuel in Villa Union, where there was also, very conveniently, an Oxxo (coffee) and a Panamá (goodies for the road)! I started on Mex 40D (cuota) at about 10:30.

To my surprise, the brand new road was in terrible shape and huge sections were under construction. It was very slow and tedious going. I didn’t take a lot of pictures because there weren’t many places to stop, including on the Guinness Record-holding Baluarte Bridge, which wound up being very underwhelming from the point of view of driving over it. There are tons of spectacular photos of it on the web showing it off from better vantage points than I ever had!

The drive was very, very, very scenic:

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I had plenty of time to admire the scenery:

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I liked how this tunnel is open to the world:

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Sometimes, I felt like I was on top of the world:

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I did not like this super, super, super long tunnel with lots of glaring lights. I drove it almost blind:

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A miniature version of the Baluarte Bridge:

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Here, you can see the tunnel with windows in it:

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Coming to the Baluarte Bridge. Lots of signs saying no stopping, no parking!

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At the end of it, I crossed over into the state of Durango. Another state for my visited Mexican states map!

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Welcome to the state of Durango!

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Weather conditions were perfect, increasingly cool as well as overcast, so I wasn’t baking in my truck:

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Coming into the city of Durango, there was a long downhill stretch. You can see a red stripe in the picture above. It leads to a runaway lane:

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First glimpse of the city of Durango!

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Stopped at a rest area just before the final toll booth and was amused by the bathroom door signage:

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Made it to Durango!

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Considering what a disaster the road is, quality-wise, even all the feats of engineering in the form of tunnels and bridges did not make the $500 I spent in tolls seem reasonable for how tedious this road was to drive. I looked forward to possibly revising that opinion on the road back!

Unlike Mazatlán, Durango believes in street signage, so with the help of my GPS, I found my hotel without a single wrong turn. The parking beside it wasn’t attached to the hotel, though, so I took some street parking to go check in and find out where to stash my truck. When I came back, I had a warning on my windshield that I was in a pay parking zone (metres) and would get a ticket if I didn’t move ASAP. That’s when I knew for sure I was in a very different world from Mazatlán, but more on that later. First, let’s get settled in the hotel!

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Off to Durango At Last!

I’m really glad that my trip to Durango last spring got postponed. I just know that I would not have had as good a time as I did this past weekend back last March, when the budget was so tight and I was only starting to get comfortable in Mexico. But I just finished crunching the numbers for the past weekend and the result is rather funny….

Last spring, I had a fairly strict 300CAD or 3,700MXN budget for the trip. To be honest, I didn’t have a budget for the past weekend. I was overdue for a holiday, Mexico is inexpensive, and as long as I didn’t do a ton of shopping, I wasn’t going to worry about how much I was spending. Well, the trip, including tolls, fuel, and lodging, cost me a grand total of 388CAD or 4,750MXN! I could have afforded this trip last March!

From now on, all prices are in MXN.

Like this past spring, I started by looking for accommodation. Not knowing then that the rest of the trip would be so inexpensive, I had a paltry accommodation budget and could only look at places outside of Centro. This time, I was willing to pay up to $1,000 a night to stay somewhere decent in Centro. Turns out that I didn’t need to spend nearly that much. The Hotel Posada San Agustin, rated four-stars by TripAdvisor reviewers, was right in the heart of Centro and a basic room was a mere $600 a night! Now, I knew I was getting a two-star room in a four-star hotel, but that was perfect for me. I wasn’t going to spend that much time in my room anyway! This hotel also offered free parking, which was very important! I will have pictures in due time. 🙂

That out of the way, I took advantage of not having a proofing shift on Thursday to head out for three nights. The plan was to drive the new toll road to Durango and the old libre back. I decided to do it in this order for a number of reasons, including that the libre takes several hours to drive and you ‘gain’ an hour on the trip back to Maz due to a time zone change, while ‘losing’ one on the way to Durango. I also preferred to do a narrow twisty road that would take who knows how long with home at the other end and I also preferred to coast downhill than burn a ton of gas climbing the switchbacks.

So with all that bla bla bla out of the way, let’s head to Durango!