A Couple of Days in Guerrero

After all these years in Mexico, we finaly decided to take a drive to the Zihuatanejo area but elected to stay in Los Troncones rather that Zihuanatejo itself as Troncones is a bit of a low key redneck beach town more to our liking than the more frenetic Zihuatanejo which is a fine place on a splendid bay reminiscent of Northern California´s Sausalito but with a warm sea and, as it turns out, that area is about seven hours or so from Ajijic down the autopista from Uruapan and, for the most part, an easy drive on good roads except for that unbelievably dreadful drive from the La Barca exist on the Chapala-Guadalajara carretera to Ocotlan but that is another story. This tale is about the drive from Troncones to Uruapan up Highways 200 and 37 and this is normally an uneventful drive over decent roads with very little traffic but as we were driving from Troncones heading toward Lazaro Cárdenes and the Michoacan border we were passed by a number of vehicles in which rode perhaps 30 or so state police with machine guns at hand and as we approached the entrance to the Lazaro Cardenas-Uruápan autopista those fellows had all stopped and deboarded and were putting on bullet proof vests and it occurred to us that perhaps things were a bit unsettled in Michoacan but, what the hell, we had to get back to Lake Chapala and that was the only feasible route to accomplish that in a reasonable time so we plugged on but decided that we had to visit a town along the way with the exotic name of Nueva Italia so we pulled off there to check out what we thought would be a couple of famous haciendas but as we rode through town we were passed by machine gun toting federales in pickup trucks so we thought it a good idea to get the hell out of there which we did and this seems like a lame story but I´ll have you know we have lived here for a decade and have never observed such a show of force by state and federal cops here so something unpleasant is going on in our neighboring state and, no doubt, here as well.

Thanks for the update Mr. Dawg. Glad you made it home OK. Perhaps they were just setting up a collection center for the Policia Fiesta..........

Maybe Calderon is REALLY cracking down on the drug cartels. That's a good thing, but best not to travel into those areas now.