Tuesday 15th November (continued)

We had already worked out that we were in the right kind of location for this plant, it is just that it has never been recorded on this, the eastern side, of the Rio Moctezuma.  Amazing, but such a shame they were far away.  We drank in this sight for a while, then carried on a little further – only a few hundred metres – to find a large colony of these yuccas growing right by the road side – both above and below the road level.  Scanning with binoculars we could see hundreds more in the surrounding hillside, some growing in dense groups of 20 or more plants of all ages.  Magnificent. 

After spending some time with these rare and beautiful plants we carried on along the dirt track, which by now had turned into a scarily steep, deeply rutted track with a sheer drop to one side and hair-pin bends every few hundred metres.  I have vertigo issues and found this drive quite alarming, though it was all tempered by what we had just encountered.  Eventually we got to the valley bottom – a dry riverbed – and what seemed to be a working mine.  Unable to find the road out we tried to ask the miners, who seemed rather curious about our presence there, where the road out was.  Apparently there wasn’t one – we had been on the wrong road all along.   But had we not have been we would never have found the yuccas - such is providence.

No choice but to turn around and head back.  I didn’t find the trip up quite as scary, and we stopped off again to climb up to a group of the yuccas on what seemed to me like an inaccessible part of the hillside.  Loose scree and an increasing slope brought on my vertigo again, although Nick hopped about like a mountain goat with no apparent problem.  Just behind the yuccas was an impressive trunked specimen of Dasylirion longissimum – the newly named cousin of the more northerly D. quadrangulatum – but I was too scared to go any further.  

On the way back, as I was recovering my composure, Nick stopped for 10minutes or so to look at yet another #*&%$#’@ dahlia.  

So after a hard day’s driving we ended up roughly 5 miles from where we started – and as night began to fall we made a long drive to Tamazunchale (Ta-ma-sun-CHAR-lay), where we found a rather excellent hotel.  This region is very tropical; we got out of the car to a blast of heat despite the darkness.

What a day.

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