Old Jeep is still the way to travel in Mexico
1960s Traveller allows tourists to hit the heights
Ten people are riding Don Cristino’s 1961 Jeep Willys Traveller into the Sierra de Catorce of San Luís Potosí. Four in the cab. Two standing at the rear entry, where the doors used to be. Three — me included — bracing ourselves on the roof rack.
The owner of Willys del Real manoeuvres expertly along a dry riverbed and then on dirt-track trails that widen into a cobblestone road. For three decades, he’s driven Catholic pilgrims more than 9,000 feet up to pray before the image of Saint Francis of Assisi at a church in the mostly abandoned silver- mining settlement of Real de Catorce. More recently, tourists have been eager to explore the well-preserved Colonial style of this virtual ghost town, which is in high demand as a Hollywood film set.
I hope we make it. Around every switchback, the topheavy Jeep sways.
“Don’t worry,” Don Cristino says. “She can fit 15, easy.”
Oh, but I am worried. If the old brakes fail, our Saturday morning countryside drive ends with the Willys barrel-rolling down a 500-foot canyon to my right.
San Luis Potosí is Mexico’s answer to Michigan. It’s a critical hub of car and truck production, where General Motors has assembled vehicles since 2008. BMW is breaking ground on billion-dollar assembly plant for the 3 Series sedan.
Some 800 parts companies serve the automakers in the broader region that includes San Luis Potosí and its neighbouring states of Guanajuato and Aguascalientes. By 2020, those three states — to say nothing of the rest of Mexico — will leap past Canada to claim eleventh place in automotive production globally.
Buoyed by the manufacturing economy, tourism is also on the rise. A combination of business and adventure travellers are discovering San Luis Potosí. Nearly three dozen hotels are being developed, including the first Conrad Hotel ( an upscale Hilton brand) opening later this month. And a new international airport is being built that will more than double the capacity of arrivals to San Luis Potosí in the next 20 months.
I’ve lined up a series of white- knuckle adventures — the Willys, trekking, scuba- diving, canoeing, rappelling — with Corazón de Xoconostle Tours, a creation of three rock climbers, friends from university, who opened a hostel in 2014 and have expanded with a tour business. Automotive executives moving to San Luis Potosí are often customers.
“Once they’ve arranged schooling and housing, their next question is always ‘What is there to see and do here?’, ” says co-owner Miguel Galarraga.
Cristino parks the Willys by a sagging stone bridge, and we photograph ruins of a silver-mining camp in the valley. I also get a closer look at the Jeep. He’s added a bigger transmission, better suspension, and a few other aftermarket safety fixes, but the rounded rear wheel- wells, one- piece windshield, sidemounted seats, and post-1957 grille suggest this is likely a 1961 Jeep Willys Traveller, a rare early Jeep station wagon, experts at eWillys. com confirm. About 1,300 were made.
Cristino owns four Willys, which were brought to the area originally by a mining company. They’re hugely popular among Jeep club enthusiasts, whom he sometimes meets in the mountains.
“They bring their own Jeeps but they always fall in love with mine,” he crows.
Soon, Real de Catorce comes into view. We park, leaving the Willys’ doors unlocked with thousands of dollars worth of gear inside. It’s that kind of town.
At the height of its silverdriven fortune, starting in the 1860s, Real de Catorce was powerful enough to own a licence to print money — the country’s first mint was here. Women would dress in European finery long before the new styles had reached Mexico City.
I wander into the handpainted church, the cockfighting stadium and bullring — relics of a different boomtown — and l i nger amid the street vendors hawking souvenirs, until the daylight threatens to fade.
The Jeeping ends at Cristino’s B& B in the railway town of Estación Catorce: Station 14. San Luis Potosí’s convenient logistics are a huge draw for the automakers. Finished vehicles are trucked along the Pan-American Highway — the 48,000km spine of the Americas nicknamed “the NAFTA Express” — or they move by rail.
Kansas City Southern took over vast stretches of the federal railway system in the 1990s, cancelled passenger service to towns such as Estación Catorce, and dedicated the rails to freight. Madein- Mexico vehicles and consumer goods are returned to the U.S. marketplace for sale, using these American-owned tracks laid right outside Cristino’s front window. They’re the same trains that migrants ride to reach El Norte.
The next morning, Erika Leija, co-owner of Media Luna Escuela de Buceo, dives with me in Half- Moon Lagoon, a netherworld of petrified trees and broad- leaf foliage. At the surface, I sip water that was bottled from the wellspring feeding the lagoon, as families are spreading out picnic lunches in the shade of a cypress forest.
What I’m discovering in San Luis Potosí is unlike anything I’ve known or could have imagined. I’ ll take a second and third helping of this Mexico, please.