South of the Border, West of the Sun: Real de Catorce

The sheer variety this country provides never ceases to amaze me. Last week I traveled southeast to the edge of the rainforest, this week I traveled southwest to the desert highlands. Real de Catorce, my ultimate destination, had no prehispanic ruins or Gulf Coast beaches. No, all it had was wide open space and plenty of it. Which is a-okay by me: after the crowded streets of Monterrey, I welcomed the isolation. Not that I was totally isolated. Although the town - a former silver mining settlement whose mines have long since petered out - has less than a thousand people, I met a charming Italian backpacker named Gianluca within minutes of arriving in the city. Spanish was, as it should be in Mexico, our common language and we serendipitously spent two days wandering the town's cobbled streets and cactus-laden mountainsides.

The city was charming and, to me, exceptionally unique: I have never before been to a settlement which was once larger than it is now. So it was with Real de Catorce, which is not quite a ghost town but nevertheless has a certain hollowness to it. Its bullring sits unused and so do the majority of its houses. Isolation has its advantages, however: the sunsets rivaled the moonrises and the cloudless sky was invariably full of stars.

Even the stars, however, we no match for the canyons. The area around Real de Catorce has long been of ceremonial importance to the Huichol people and it is little wonder why. I have had the good fortune to see the Wadi Rum desert of Jordan and, truth be told, it has nothing on Real de Catorce. Achingly beautiful, Gianluca and I walked to the top of Cerro Quemado and back for ten hours one day without seeing another person. So much the better for us, I suppose, but more's the pity for everyone else. Some 10,000 feet above sea level, where the air is thin and clear, you can see the for miles in every direction.

I think paradise looks a little something like this: