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Trumpets In My Head I

We all love music, right? Maybe, but nobody loves music as much as people of Mexico. It's everywhere, from the streets of big cities to the smallest mountain villages.


Music pours from stereo sets, can be heard on a bus, on all plazas, in restaurants. Guitar, fiddle and trumpets, many trumpets. They will accompany me on my trip though Mexico.



Places mapped by Wanderlog, a trip planner on iOS and Android

CDMX & Cacti


In this weird times when airport feels like a nuclear reactor I'm lucky enough to be able to pack my bike again and go to somewhere nice and warm.

Mexico City welcomes with colonial architecture, streets as clean as in Switzerland (really!) and a vibe that's bit exotic and bit American.

Cacti in front of the cathedral - I'll see many more of them on this trip.

Palacio de Bellas Artes is as picturesque as it gets from the outside, but inside is even more interesting

Inside Palacio looks like a set of Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Love it!

Face of Lenin will follow me on the whole trip, popping up up now and then in the most surprising places

Library-cafe-garden had to draw my attention. I'm afraid I've spent way too many hours there

But enough of the city, it's not what I came for. Compressing my gear as much as possible and heading to the land of cacti.

Starting with a couple of days in Reserva de la Biósfera Tehuacán-Cuicatlán, an UNESCO world heritage site. Somehow beginning feels less than inviting

But then it turns into an awesome ride among the mountains of Puebla state.

Ride goes though mainly uninhabited mountains with occasional village now and then. Even tiny villages have "gates"

Weather is not exactly sunny, but with the amount of climbing I'm more than happy to see these clouds (especially because they didn't bring rain)

Flowers seem to be satisfied with limited amount of rain too.

And here they are. In thousands

I didn't see many potential targets for hunting, but maybe these are just my poor hunting skills.

Some of these cacti are impressively high!

Not only cacti look weird here.

Climbing, climbing, it has to start going downhill at one point hopefully

It didn't. Not on this day at least. Camping on top of the mountain. As soon as the sun rises I'm getting up and starting my daily quest to find coffee

Now this looks promising, there has to be a village nearby (=coffee!)

There was some! Buildings all over Mexico are super-colorful, even if they are in the middle of nowhere

Proper road - very rare sight on this trip.

A sight my European eye is not accustomed to

Many kilometers without seeing any living creature, apart from grey something with a long tail

Tucuman to Oaxaca

Tehuacán, another colorful city full of murals and brightly painted houses is where I'll rest for a bit before jumping on a bike again

If I ever wanted to get a tatoo I'm unlikely to do it in a place called "leprosy" 😉

Hat business in bloom

Next part on the bike goes through mountainous part of northern Oaxaca state

A village now and then is where I can get some good local food and practice my beginner-level Spanish explaining to people what I'm doing there

Tortillas are kept warm wrapped in a cloth (and at least some of these clothes are woven manually)

Welcome back to the cactus world

Massive climb ahead of me - I decided to split it in two parts. Will climb a bit today, camp somewhere and continue tomorrow morning to the top.

Climbs usually mean good views too!

If I only knew how difficult this climbing will be...

Having survived it somehow I'm on the top now

Behind the corner there is a village where a nice old lady cooked a meal for me because there are no restaurants anywhere close

One of my best camping spots on this trip

You can clearly see why. This is the view I had in the morning

Pushing further though the mountains I'm heading towards longer break at Oaxaca

Couple of more hours though the forest...

... and on the dirtiest bike on earth I'm slowly arriving there. Time for a break!


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Location: Oaxaca, Mexico

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