The Road to Acapulco

From Mexico City to Acapulco

   We live in Mexico City, over 7300 ft above sea level. That’s quite a descent during the 5+ hours down to Acapulco at the Pacific Ocean. Given the efficiency of cars, it doesn’t take any longer going up all that distance, though I am sure that much more gas is consumed on the return to Ciudad Mexico.

   It’s a great road, four lanes, divided, going through quite rugged country—hence multiply curved—with mostly trees on both sides. But by no means only trees. Many, many sections have high walls on one or both sides, indicating clearly that the road was cut deeply into a rough terrain.

   The walls are so high—or, more accurately, the road is down so deep—that, mostly, they could not be left them untouched after the excavating machinery produced them. Without some treatment, dirt and stones would continuously, or at least sporadically, bombard the road, making it dangerous to the point of being wholly unsafe.

   In short, those almost sheerly vertical expanses must be treated to make the road safe or even just passable. And treated they are, in a great variety of ways, with often special walls on the side of the road preventing stones an dirt spilling into the passage for speeding automobiles.

   How treated?  I took no notes, much less take pictures, but a lot  of ingenuity was lavished the ways that these monumental walls are kept stable. Complex configurations of wires, hold in some expanses, what looked like plastic sheets contain others. Everywhere fist-sized stones are inserted in rows and rows of plastic pipes emerge from the walls, presumably to relieve water pressure in weather not as benign as we had.

   In a few spots workers were visible on those walls, held by ropes to prevent them from sliding disastrously down into the roadbed. They were a small sample of the hundreds of skilled operators that covered these “walls” in the first place.

   I am not knowledgeable about important roads of the world, but this one from Mexico City to Acapulco should be counted as one of them. I was surprised that the internet did not mark it as being as unusual as I found it to be.