For our second long weekend of the year, we bought a nice new tent and a blow-up bed and headed to La Huasteca for a little camping trip. We made a fairly early start and got on the bus, hopeful for a fatastic weekend. As we got closer and closer to La Huasteca the weather seemed to get increasingly greyer and greyer until we started seeing a few spots of rain. By the time we got to the stop for Tamasopo it was raining (not pouring but enough that we'd get wet). We tried to be positive and got in a taxi up to Puente de Dios, which was further than I thought it would be. We wrnt to the first campsite that we saw and got the tent up quickly so we could get inside and hide from the rain.
The rain didn't seem to be stopping so we went for a little walk. There wasn't much to see as the waterfalls and river were down a long way and you had to pay to go down there. We spent 10 minutes wandering about and met a nice American guy called Brian who lived at Puente de Dios and had a little jewellery stall. He told us that if we needed blankets he could help us out. I was relieved to hear this as we'd foolishly brought no blankets (thinking it would be hot hot hot Huasteca style weather and not a little bit of England in the centre of Mexico!)
We went back to the tent and ate and read magazines and chilled out for a while until we realised our tent was not 100% waterproof. When we went back to see Brian he also offered us a tarp to put over our tent and came and helped us put it up. Huge relief! Although our tent was now pretty dark inside.
We finished off a picnic dinner, got a cup of hot chocolate from a little shop and held onto each other as tight as we could to keep warm all night!
The next day it had stopped raining and the sun came out. We went to check out the breakfast options and suddenly I heard American voices calling my name. Sitting in one of the 2 cafes at Puente de Dios were 3 teachers from Berlitz who had also had the great idea to go to La Huasteca for the weekend. The strange thing was that they'd pitched their tent right next to ours and we hadn't realised the day before.
We got ready after a breakfast of gorditas and headed down the muddy path to the waterfalls. It was getting very hot and I realised I'd forgotten my suncream, so priority number one was finding a spot with some shade for me. It was quite busy along the river, but eventually we found a quiet spot a bit further down than most people could be bothered to walk. We spread out our stuff, ed got down to sunbathing while i relaxed in the shade.
We had fun splashing about in the river and picnicking and we saw the boys from Berlitz again as they came splashing and swimming down the river, jumping off rocks and enjoying the beautiful day that it had turned into. We stayed there most of the day but on the way back up we visited a part called El Cafetal which is a very deep pool which several waterfalls emptied into.
I decided to have a swim while ed waited for me. The current were strong in there and i was glad that there was a rope to hold onto. It was fun though and although a very tiring swim, it was a beautiful place to be. We watched some crazy Australians jump off a rock way above the pool and plunge deep into it.
We went back to the campsite for a shower and time to relax. Later we met up with the boys again after going for dinner. They made a campfire next to their tent and we spent a couple of hours chatting to them, although their conversations did get a bit strange and there was much debate over what happens to glass bottles if you put them in the fire.
Eventually it started raining again and so that signalled the end of the night, but it wasn't very heavy rain so our tent was safe.
We got up a bit late the next morning to more grey skies. We had planned to go on a little train ride up in the mountains with Brian, who was going to a ranch he owned up there. He'd told us the views were spectacular but as it was cloudy we decided to pass. We went for a walk to try and find some other waterfalls he'd told us about but the path was wet and dangerous so we never got there. In the end we went back to the campsite and packed up.
Ed disappeared for a while - i thought he'd just gone to brush his teeth, and he came back shouting to hurry cos there was a taxi there (we'd been panicking about how to get out of Puente de Dios as there's no public transport and we hadn't seen a taxi since we got out of one on the Saturday morning!) We ran to the taxi and he took us back to the highway. We didn't have to wait long for a bus back to SLP and the end of our camping adventure.
