We spent a sleepless night in the domestic flights waiting room lying on the spotless marble floor. At 06:00 hrs. we got a taxi to Alameda in the predawn gloom. Mexico City is the capital and largest city of Mexico and the most-populous city in North America. Mexico City is one of the most important cultural and financial centres in the world. It is located in the Valley of Mexico (Valle de México), a large valley in the high plateaus in the centre of Mexico, at an altitude of 2,240 meters (7,350 ft).
Alameda Central is a public urban park in downtown Mexico City. Created in 1592, the Alameda Central is the oldest public park in the Americas. The area used to be an Aztec marketplace. On 11 January 1592, Viceroy Luis de Velasco II ordered the creation of a public green space for the city's residents. It is located in Cuauhtémoc borough, adjacent to the Palacio de Bellas Artes, between Juárez Avenue and Hidalgo Avenue.
The other cars on the road looked like they were losers in a Banger Race (in the UK old scrap vehicles are raced against one another, with the winner being the first to the chequered flag after a set number of laps. Contact to damage an opponent's car is permitted and encouraged within the formula, with cars progressively becoming more damaged throughout the meeting).
We paid 6,000 Mexican Pesos for our friendly elderly driver to take us into town. The city was reminiscent of Cairo in Egypt but without the constant traffic hooting. Familiar brand names such as Pepsi Cola, Kodak and Kellogg’s Cornflakes were on the hoardings that we passed.
We walked along the Avenida Hidalgo and attracted very little attention from the early risers who were on their way to work. We were nervous as the Lonely Planet guidebook warned that we were likely to be jumped and robbed on the city streets, but the city had a friendly atmosphere, and I began to relax.
We tried several dubious looking ruins that were in our Lonely Planet guidebook before finding the Hotel Buena Vista at 34 Bernal Díaz, México 3, D.F. (D.F. signifying Federal District) opposite the Hotel Bernal Díaz which looked like it had been mortared in an attack!
The Spanish soldier Bernal Díaz del Castillo (ca. 1496-ca. 1584) was a member of the expedition that conquered the Aztec empire. His "A True History of the Conquest of New Spain" is the most complete contemporary chronicle of that event.
We left our rucksacks with a trustworthy looking bloke on the reception desk and were told to come back in two hours to check in. We wandered about the city as the sun came up and the temperature rose. We tried some snacks from roadside vendors and threw away a dodgy fried affair and some particularly nasty sweet chocolate soup before finding a palatable maize and chicken roll.
There was no sign of the dust or smog that we were led to expect, and the traffic was chaotic but relatively quiet. Some parts of the city looked spectacular with tall buildings but overall, it was low and flat. There were thousands of Volkswagen Beetles on the road, a car that was still in production in Mexico City at this time.
The Volkswagen Beetle—officially the Volkswagen Type 1, informally in German the Käfer (meaning "beetle"), in parts of the English-speaking world the Bug, and known by many other nicknames in other languages—is a two-door, rear-engine economy car, intended for five occupants that was manufactured and marketed by German automaker Volkswagen (VW) from 1938 until 2003.
The original concept behind the first Volkswagen, the company, and its name is the notion of a people’s car – a car affordable and practical enough for common people to own. Hence the name, which is literally "people's car" in German. Although the Volkswagen beetle was mainly the brainchild of Ferdinand Porsche and Adolf Hitler, the idea of a "people's car" is much older than Nazism and has existed since the mass-production of cars was introduced.
Back at the hotel we waited as the cleaners removed the possessions of a previous occupant and cleaned the room until it was spotless. We laid on the beds in our room for several hours, Declan dozing fitfully as I researched with increasing terror our route ahead through Central America.
At 15:00 hrs. we went out again on a mission to take a few photographs. The city was a lot quieter than I imagined it to be for one of the most populous cities in the world. Several indigenous Indian women begged or peddled trinkets in the street, some of them in colourful traditional dress.
The police battled to control the traffic and shoeshine stalls did a roaring trade with their throne-like stalls. We walked through an area of affluent restaurants and ended up in a café cum bar in the Plaza Insurgentes shopping district eating chicken and rice washed down with Bohemia cerveza (beer). This cost us a total of 9,800 Mexican Pesos.
We sat and watched the Mexicans going by as we ate. On the way back to the hotel we sat on a bench in the main Paseo de la Reforma and watched the traffic as an elderly manual worker in safety boots wolf-whistled the passing muchachas (girls).
Paseo de la Reforma (translated as "Promenade of the Reform") is a wide avenue that runs diagonally across the heart of Mexico City. It was designed by Ferdinand von Rosenzweig in the 1860s and modelled after the great boulevards of Europe, such as the Ringstraße in Vienna and the Champs-Élysées in Paris.
Another bar stop on the way back gave the proprietor an opportunity to clear out some ancient stock of Bohemia cerveza at 1,300 Mexican Pesos per bottle and introduced us to Mexican television with a banal quiz program. We got back to the hotel at 17:00 hrs. and sprawled on our beds. A sleepless night of tossing and turning ensued.
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