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 Travel & Outdoors | March 2006 
Viviendo en México - Michoacán part 1
 Korah Winn - PVNN
| | We double checked the locks and took pictures of each other jamming a chair under the door handle. We laughed about it, but we still slept better knowing it was there. |
I have been taking it pretty easy and have not been traveling for the past few weekends. I have almost fallen into somewhat of a regular routine. All that changed when I became friends with Philana. Philana and I are in the same cooking class and our personalities clicked.
Philana was born in China but lives in California. She decided that since she was bored, she was going to come to Mexico for six weeks to learn more Spanish. We decided to become travel buddies because it is often quite difficult to find people to travel with whom you do not clash with after traveling with them on a crowded bus for several hours.
During class, we were making conversation with two of our Canadian friends. They had decided to catch a bus later that night at 1 am. They were going to travel while it was dark so they would arrive at their destination in Michoacán in the early morning.
The reason they were going to go to so much trouble is because this weekend was the last weekend that visitors were allowed to enter the Mariposa Monarca (Monarch Butterfly) sanctuary. Philana took one look at me and said, "Vamos a Michoacán."
I thought about what kind of commitments I already had, and since I could not think of a good enough reason to refuse her invitation, I replied, "¿Por qué no?" (Why not?) After making that spontaneous decision, we quickly began making what plans we could.
We left the next day, Friday, after school. We took a cab to the Central Camionera (main bus station) and looked at the myriad of choices for busses from which to pick. In Mexico, busses are much more common for traveling than in the United States.
Philana and I bought tickets with Primera Plus. The bus was fantastic. We had movies, clean bathroom, comfortable seats, snacks and air conditioning. It took us about three and half hours to get to Morelia, our first destination in the state of Michoacán. We got there around 8:30 pm.
We had been told we would need to catch one more bus to a small town named Angangueo, which was closer to the mariposa sanctuary. Unbeknownst to us, there were no direct busses to Angangueo. Using our combined Spanish skills, we asked the ticket seller what he thought might be the best strategy to get to the mariposas.
We finally settled on taking another three-hour trip to a place we had never heard of, called Zitácuaro. That would supposedly put us within an hour of Angangueo. The bus ride was uneventful except for listening to a guitar player who played for about twenty minutes in the hopes of receiving handouts, and then also when I got shushed by a guy for talking too loudly. I couldn't help but think of my brother teasing me about remembering to use my inside voice.
When we arrived in Zitácuaro, we took a bus to the "best" hotel in town. We checked out the hotel room. It was very basic, but we only needed it for a couple of hours of sleep because we were leaving early.
We had fun while we only half-joked about securing the room. We double checked the locks and took pictures of each other jamming a chair under the door handle (just like in the movies.) We laughed about it, but we still slept better knowing it was there. We wanted to get a good night's sleep because we knew the next day was going to be amazing.Go to Part 2 »»»
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