We collected our (again automatic) car on Sunday morning, packed it as quickly as possible, said goodbye to our old house and watched as our friends started to move in to what had been my home for almost 2 years. And then we headed off to our first destination - a night at the spa hotel Taninul deep in the La Hasteca countryside in San Luis Potosi.
It was a long drive and after the midway point we began to feel nervous as the car was making a bit of a strange noise. It got worse and worse - a kind of grinding noise when we breaked and eventually even when we weren't breaking. We made it to Taninul without any disasters but had decided not to go ay further in that car. So it was a day of mixed emotions - frustration over the car, joy at being in a beautiful tropical spa resort and a twinge of sadness.
Despite frequent phonecalls to the car rental company and not so many returned calls from them we managed to relax and enjoy our day by the hot sulphurous pool which was fantastic to just lounge about in (if a bit hot). In the evening we had massages and a nice dinner at the restaurant there. We were still worried about the car but knew there was nothing we could do until the following morning so we crashed out in our huge bed.
Taninul is a really beautiful resort, the building is pretty from the outside, there's greenery surrounding it, the sulphur pool, a normal pool, tennis courts, mango trees, birds and animals everywhere - a nice little tropical paradise and highly recommended if you can get a good price on a room like we did.
The next day we got up, determined to enjoy the time we would have left there. We called Hertz again and they said they'd bring a new car at about 2:30pm. So we had some time to kill. We did this most effectively by getting covered in 2 different types of mud! The firs was from a little pit next to the sulphur pool - it was filled with a thin greenish mud which we splashed all over us, dried off in the sun and then washed off under the mini waterfall which came from the sulphur pool. Then we'd seen other people covered head to toe in thick dark mud and we knew we just had to do that!
Some boys working there got on their goges and dove to the bottom of the sulphur pool. They emerged with yoghurt tubs full of that thick black mud we'd admired and we began spreading it liberally over ourselves. It was good fun and we enjoyed waddling around in it as much as we enjoyed washing it off in the sulphur pool (where it had come from in the first place) and finding soft pinky skin underneath again.
By this time we were ready for a shower, check out and lunch and then we just had to wait for the new car to arrive. Which it did eventually - and joy of joys it was a manual!!!! It took a while to sort out all the documents and the guy who had brught the new car out was none too keen on driving the other one back to SLP so there were many frantic phone calls back to the office. The new car really was new - only 2 weeks old, so we happily loaded al our stuff into it and finally headed for Tampico and the Gulf Coast.
