Miahuatlan de Porfirio Diaz, OA - Not Oaxaca

The road from Mazunte to Oaxaca is 260 kms, but Google says it takes your average vehicle 5 hours and 42 minutes to make the trip.  This is because the road, in a lot of places, looks like this:




Luckily, Carmel and I were not in a rush, and we enjoyed the changing scenery as we gained altitude.  after about 5 hours of driving, just as the sun set, the interior of Vandrew's cabin was illuminated by the ominous red harbinger of doom...the brake light.

Now, the brake light itself was not as unnerving as the immediate softness of the brake pedal.  Luckily, this happened only a few kilometers away from civilization, and we soon pulled into a Pemex and filled up.  I checked the brake fluid, which was a bit low, but not too bad.  Carmel asked the gas station attendant for a recommendation for a mechanic in the neighbourhood, and he told us that there was a garage only a few minutes down the road.

We found the garage with no trouble, but it was on a fairly busy main road, and closed, as it was close to 7pm.  The family that lives beside the garage was sitting in their "living room" (the open courtyard between the disconnected rooms of their residence), and Carmel asked them if there was anywhere that we could park Vandrew for the night.

The family all came out to help and they pushed broken down cars out of the way to make room for us, then invited us to use their bathroom for the duration of our stay.  There was no running water for their toilet, and it was flushed by pouring a bucket of water from a 45 gallon drum that sat next to the toilet.  It turns out there were two children in the neuclear family, and their two cousins also lived with them as one of their parents had died and the other was working far away.  The youngest boy, Santiago, was holding a card from the card game UNO, and we were invited to play.  It was really kind of this family to open their house to some strangers that happened to break down in front of their house.

The next morning, a simple breakfast was prepared for us, and we drank coffee and looked at pictures and tried to communicate as best we could.  Martin, the father, was rightly proud of the courtyard of his home, where he grew avocados, bananas, apricots and limes,  After breakfast, Martin came with me to a different mechanic that specialized in brakes, a few minutes down the road, while Carmel had a shower.  The mechanic got to work right away, and while Martin and I watched, he removed the wheels, fiddled around, topped up the brake fluid, and generally did mechanical things.  After about a half and hour, the wheels were back on, and I took it for a test drive.  Brakes work!

The whole ordeal only cost 70 pesos!

Back on the road and heading into Oaxaca...only a day behind schedule.