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| Our Trekking group to San Jose De la Popa. Photo credits: Joel . From the Right: Ben, Me, Nancy, David(green shirt), Nora(black dress), Kat, Dylan(white shirt), Violeta and Joel(in shorts) . Photographer is other guide i believe |
The Day of Journey:
We met at the meeting point of the Trek at 6:00 AM in monterrey and continued towards the trekking point in Popa in Nancy's car. There were trekkers who came to the meeting point and did not have their car. They joined in the car's of David(our trekking guide) and other trekkers who brought their car. In Nancy's car, we had the company of Ben and Joel who were from US. The guide has told us to follow him and was telling that it would take around 2 hours of drive to reach there. We have to go through the cities of San Nicolas, Hidalgo before reaching the city of Mina. Hidalgo has one more park by name Potraro which is known for many hiking trails as well .
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| Journey towards Mina |
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| Somewhere near Mina when you start seeing Popa towards your left. It looks like perfectly chisled mountain |
Difficult Path to reach San Jose De la Popa:
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| Welcome Signboard of Mina |
When you cross the welcome signboard for Mina, you have to drive for about 7-8 kms before you start seeing the Popa towards your left. It looks like a perfect flat mountain unlike the other mountains you might have hiked before. Somewhere around 07:15 , we came across this point from where we had to take left and step into Country road. Initial parts of it was about to constructed as a tar road where someone has just put gravels, sand and other stuff and about to complete it. It was full of dust when a vehicle goes infront of you and we had to go slow. After some time, there were large sized gravels and they started hitting Nancy's car because of lesser ground clearance and driving technique of Nancy. So, we had to decrease the speed further which resulted in we getting separated from the 2 jeeps ahead of us :-)
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| Road towards Popa where you are seeing the flat Popa towards your left |
Unless you have a vehicle with good ground clearance, path gets difficult further because of the size of gravels across the road
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| A Panoramic view of the Popa |
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| Nancy's poor car which saw a wash few days back is in this condition now |
House of Don Miguel :
Whenever the jeeps going infront of us felt that we are too slow, they stopped the vehicles and waited for us to join and continuing further. After the dirt track adventure of around 21 KM, we reached the starting point of the trek around 08:40 AM . We parked our vehicles infront of the house of Don Miguel. "Don" is an interesting usage in spanish which they used it similar to "Mr". But "Don" is uesd to refer to persons of age older than 50 years or so. "Donny" is the female version of it.
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| Don Miguel's Farm |
Beginning of the Hike:
There are markings in Yellow across the path which indicates the directions for hiking. although there are less chances to get lost as you have to always head towards the Popa Summit which would be towards your right, make sure that you see some yellow markings or Orange ribbons every 400 meters or so to make sure that you are on track . There are trail running events held here as well where they indicate the path with orange ribbons.
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Beginning of trek
Temperature predictions for the day was over 30 degrees and the Caps(Gorras) and Sun Glasses(Lentes) , Full Sleave shirts helped a lot.
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| From Left: Violeta, Dylan(white shirt) |
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| One more group pic during the hiking |
We continued hiking after a short water break against the shades of some rocks. Although this hiking path is around 4.5 kms, it might get difficult initially because of the inclination and rocks . Hot Sun can make it worse as well and it is recommended to go there with atleast 2-3 lieters of water. I had 2 lieters of water and that was just sufficient till i came down as it was with Sipper. If you are carrying it in bottles take atleast 3 liters as other friends who bought water in bottles ran out of water although they bought 3,4 liters of it. one more point to note here is , it does not have many resting points with shades as there are no bigger trees and you have only few points like below one with some shade because of rocks
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| Place of some shade for a water break |
We continued our trek further when the sun was rising further
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| One more selfie on the way up. PC: Joel |
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| Journey towards the Popa Summit. From Right: Me, Nancy, Dylan, Violet, Kat, Nora and Rest of the grop |
False destinations and viewpoints:
In many places, you feel like you have reached your destination. But after reaching there, you would realize that the final point is still ahead :-)
But the views of Damm good in these false destinations and you end up enjoying the surrounding views from there instead of feeling sad about not reaching final destination.
First False Destination view point:
Violeta was very tired and thought of giving the whole trip at a point of time and Me and Nancy who were at the back with her had to increase our pace to catch up with guys infront and inform the guide about the same. We thought that they had reached this point which we initially though as destination. But It was a pseudo destination and Guide went back to pick Violeta and we had to wait around 15-20 mins before she got her energy back and came back with guide.
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| One of view points in journey towards Popa |
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Problem with all photographers is You always take great photo of others and don't get good ones for yourself :-)
Second View Point:
After walking for 15-20 mins, we reached other point which we initially thought as destination. But once we reached there, we just realized that its not destination and destination is still ahead
Third Pseudo Destination
From the second point, we walked for some more time to reach another point which turned out to be false destination as well. But we started getting the clear views of Popa summit from there.
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| Yes, This is the way towards Popa Summit |
Popa Summit:
Finally we reached the summit around 11:45. The guide told that it would take around 3 hours to reach the top, we did it in approx same time inspite of some waiting here and there.
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| Popa Summit |
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| Fellow Trekker signing in the Popa Summit log book. Photo credits: Joel |
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| My sign in Indic Languages. Rotate the pic to read more :-) |
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| Group pic at Popa Summit. PC; Violeta |
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| One more Group pic. Photo credits: Violeta |
The views from the top were good and worth the ascent
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| A panorama at the Summit. Enlarge for full views |
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| Violeta's Offerings at the Top of Summit. Porbably she can write more on this(if she sees it ) |
The hike to the summit provides you a chance to view various types of Cactus and other desert life forms which i did not see in other hikes before. Some views of them are given below. As of now, most of them are unknown to me and need to lookout for further info regarding their names
Checkout my Insta for further pics of them and details.
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| Button Cactus |
Time to Depart:
One Sad thing of the day was one of our lady guides had lost her phone and we had to look for it on our way back , wait in hot sun for her to complete her search for some time :-( As we did not know the exact location of where she dropped it, we could not locate it and had to descend with somehow sad face :-( We reached bottom around 2:35 PM . Probably we would have taken 1.5 hours instead of 2 hours if we the phone incident did not happen... We rested in the place infront of Don Miguel's house and relaxed for a while.
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| Our Group: Don Miguel is at the extreme Right |
Ben and Joel were great full enough to take some extra steps to find a store in that village where they could buy some coke, soda like Joya for the whole group. Thanks once again to you guys if you are reading it :-)
We started our journey back after some time and road was comfortable this time, thanks to Joel :-)
After this we headed towards the Archaelogical site of Boca De Potrerillos in Mina and would pen down more details about it in my next blog post.
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