We got up at 7 am, had breakfast at the hotel then back to the room for packing. Then out the door and across the street to the station to get on the train.
Pretty uneventful, but it is nice to be in first class. Even nicer to be traveling during covid, in that well over half of the seats are empty. When we go to the bar car to see the sights, it is only moderately crowded. The car where our seats are is arranged in 6 sets of 8 seats, pairs facing each other on both sides of the car. The row behind us has a faintly of 6 or so taking up that many seats. The row in front of us has a couple on the right side of the car, taking up 2 out of 8 seats, the row in front of them also has 2 taking up 8 seats etc. Oh, and we have two seats out of 8 in our row as well. The seats are high backed with headrests and arm rests and tilt back quite a ways. Each side of the car has a table with sides that fold down making it plenty comfortable. There is a pair of bathrooms in each car, and a unisex bathroom in the bar car. As I have said we are in first class, and we are at the back of the train. The bar car is at the back of the train and we are the first car forward of that, there is one more first class car ahead of us, then the dining car with upstairs dining and view. Forward of that car is a bar car for the executive class, then a couple of executive class cars and then the luggage car to separate economy from the executive cars. Forward of the economy class are the two engines pulling the train.
The service is pretty good, either lunch or breakfast is included in the price of the ticket, and lunch is served in the dining car. We elected to have lunch, and it is the same menu as the trip up. One of the waiters finds us on the train, and gets our order then will go get our lunch made up. The order was taken at about 10:30 and lunch will be about 1 pm. We were in the bar car seeing the sights when he found us and brought the menus. Lunch will be in 4 courses again, and all non alcoholic beverages are included in our tickets. We had coffee in the bar car in the comfy swivel seats there. The front half of the bar car has low swivel seats arranged with two facing each other and a small table in between. There are about 8 or 12 of these seats and then the bar with the bar tender. The back half of the bar car has bar stools around the outside and windows that open all the way around. There is a bar to hold drinks at the windows, and another bar down the middle to hold drinks as well. Other than the fact that the temperature is in the 40’s, it is a great place to hangout and see the sights!
We have had a couple of stops since we got on the train, it started at Creel, and we got on at Divisidora. The family that was behind us has disembarked and I think that there is one other couple in this car with us. Like I said there is a pretty low number of people in the train. As a snack we had one of the grapefruit from the day before, very juicy and sweet.
One of the nice services they do on the train is have the steward(ess) come and tell all the passengers about upcoming things on the trip. For example we were just told about the “most important part of the trip” and that we should go to the bar car to see it. This particular part of the trip has the train going through several short tunnels and then a much longer tunnel in the last tunnel, the train drops several hundred feet and makes a 180 degree turn inside the tunnel, then when it comes out of the tunnel, it makes another 180 degree turn as it crosses a bridge. We were able to get pictures on the way up and video on the way down. Also, as this is the “most important part of the trip” virtually all of the first class passengers were in the bar car, all of about 25 of us! There are 96 seats in first class.
We just had lunch. Served in 4 courses, first course was a tamale, second course a broth, third course chicken breast (I am not sure when we have had chicken that was that dry) and finally a desert of a small chocolate pie with ice cream on it. About an hour for lunch. Not like we have a schedule to keep.
We had cell service for a few seconds, long enough to find out that our conversation a month or so ago on Satellite, while free to us cost him $35 for 6 minutes. We still have some figuring out to do as to exactly how to use the satellite phone to the best advantage. It was charged as an international call. What is bad about that is if we had called him, it would have been deducted from our free 150 minutes per month. Like I said we have some figuring out how to use this best.
After lunch and a nap, we played a game of rummy 500. Well okay, we use the same rules but we don’t keep score, as we wind up being too competitive. This is a good compromise for us. We also had the last of our expensive beer.
Earlier in this blog I mentioned that we had been told we needed lots of small bills. We had several thousand pesos in 200 peso notes. Which we had sort of thought of as small bills ($10 each). We also had a few 100 peso notes ($5 each), 50 pesos notes ($2.5 each)and some 20 peso notes ($1 each). Probably a dozen or more of these bills smaller than 200 pesos. This was no where near enough SMALL bills. We had several lunches that were less than 200 pesos, including drinks. So, how much do you leave for a tip? What about when you go to the store to buy a bottle of water? (30 pesos) or you want to buy a thing that someone made like a basket and it is 80 pesos. There was only 1 ATM that we saw, and our experience with them is no small bills, so we did not try. So, should you contemplate taking this trip my suggestion is that you bring about 5000 pesos ($250) in small bills less than 100 pesos each. Also don’t be afraid to carry coins of 1, 2 or 5 pesos each.
