Member-only story
TRAVEL MEMOIRS
My Walk on the Wild Side
Getting back to nature in the Central Mexican Highlands
It was a long way up.
By the time we got to the Botanical Gardens, we’d already walked for more than a half hour, all uphill, mostly at a forty-five-degree angle… on cobblestone roads. It was not easy. I’m not complaining. It was San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
This wasn’t our first rodeo. My friend and I walked 333 kilometers just a year earlier, along the Camino Portuguese — Coastal Route from Porto to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. That was a lot of walking up and down hills and across cobblestone roads, in scorching heat.
For us, this would be just a walk in the park compared to that trek.
The higher we climbed the bigger and more expensive the homes became. When we got to the top we walked through an exclusive enclave. Several massive homes were under construction among the already-established mansions. Each one is locked away behind huge concrete walls. As soon as someone opened a gate I was craning my neck to get a glimpse inside.
Our mission was to try to find shade… any shade… but the midday sun was directly overhead with no shadows from the buildings or even from us. And the thermometer was rising. We wandered along a dirt and gravel road dodging grasshoppers, until we finally found our destination.
El Charco del Ingenio — the Botanical Gardens of San Miguel de Allende. It’s an eighty-eight-hectare site highlighting the flora and some of the fauna from the region. There was every type of cactus you can imagine — along with trees, flowers and shrubs. And they attracted bugs, and insects, which attracted birds and lizards.
