Mexico City
Mexico
Made quite an early start this morning. A so called taxi arrived at the hotel at 0530 and I was treated to a death ride through the unlit streets of Tepic at goodness knows what speed. There was a little light on the horizon as I walked out to my aircraft. The apron didnt even had lighting so I had to use a torch to navigate around the Cessnas to find my bird. After completing the pre flight walkaround, I filed a flight plan and ate a light meal of bread with some rather horrible smelling cheese out of a tube. I took one look at the weather and thought that mayby I would be spending the night there again tonight. It didnt look good but I thought that I could always turn back if it got really bad. I strapped myself into the cockpit and fired up the systems. Even now the temperature was already 25 degrees so I decided to taxi out with the hood open.
There was no traffic or air traffic control on duty at this time so it was straight out onto the runway and down to the hold point. After completing the pre take offs, I closed the canopy, moved the aircraft into the middle of the runway and opened the throttles.
The aircraft performed flawlessly in the takeoff and soon I was climbing out over the Mexican countryside. The sun was just comming up and I was treated to a spectacular view of the sunrise.
Once I had a bit more light, I could see the clouds towering ahead of me. They looked really uninviting but I elected to push on as there was still quite a bit of clear sky around the CBs that I could use.
As I climbed up through 10000ft, I broke out the oxygen bottle and the good ole iPod once more. I climbed up all the way to 14000ft which is as high as I have had this aircraft and it took some experimenting to get the mixture set.
The clouds were really towering over me now and I made several deviations from my track to take me around the bigger cells. Below me, lightning was illuminating the ground every few seconds. The ride became rougher the closer in I got and I slowed the aircraft to just below VA to avoid overstressing the old girl. I requested a level change to try and get above the worst of it and I was cleared up to 18000ft.
The ground was rising up to meet me now. Mexico city sits above 7000ft and is plagued by low cloud quite often. Today was no exception, as I flew closer to the field, the basin below me almost vanished in the haze, and possibly quite a lot of pollution.
I was still getting thrown around a bit by the up draughts off the CBs but the weather was steadily improving the closer I got to Mexico City. The radio traffic increased and soon I was decending down to 9000ft, which of course is only 2000ft above the ground.
I managed to catch the morning rush at Mexico so I was placed in the holding pattern for about 10 minutes while some of the backlog was cleared. Eventually I rolled out of the turn and spotted the PAPIs through the haze and the controller who hardly spoke English cleared me to continue on in. I slowed the Invader up and got the flaps out early to control the speed. There was a bit of tail wind reported on finals so I didnt want to be caught out here.
I landed without incident and then had a hell of a time finding my way to the GA area. It was way over the other side of the strip and the terminal charts didnt seem to match what I was seeing. I stopped and studied the charts in detail before I discovered that I was at fault. I found a spot on the tarmac close to the fuel pump and shut the aeroplane down.
I went over to the local flying club and tried to get some transport into town to find a hotel. One of the instructors was a chap named Ross who was an Australian, from Seaford in Melbourne, offered to let me stay in his apartment. I seem to be lucky with finding people who are prepared to put me up for a few nights. Ross arranged some transport for me and I left my bags with him to sort out. He gave me his address and some rough directions on how to find it and I set out into the second largest city in the world.
The first thing I did was to go out to Autódromo Hermanos RodrÃÂguez which is only five minutes drive from the airport. This was where the Mexican GP was held from 1962 through to 1970. The track was named after the RodrÃÂguez brothers Pedro and Ricardo, Ricardo being killed on this very track. I walked from the start line down to the corner where he crashed and just quietly stood there for a while. We drove into town after this and after finding a reasonable tourist map ditched the taxi and went sightseeing. There are some pretty interesting buildings here, very European. After spending much of the afternoon looking around this huge city, I caught a cab out to Ross' apartment and after a few wrong turns and scary moments on the road, arrived tired and hungry. Im just going to see what the weather does tomorrow. If its ok, Ill depart and fly south, if not, theres plenty more things to see here.
MMEP - MMMX = 349.6nm
