Saturday morning’s first stop was to be the teleférico (cable car), which, like all Durango attractions, only opened at 10:00 a.m. En route, I stopped in at a coffee roasting house and ordered their $10 Americano special, but was upsold to a $28 French pressed cup. MMM! They also gave me a small bag of their grounds, good enough to make at least four more coffees at home! What a deal! It was very, very, very loud in the store and I could barely hear anything, so when the guy pushed the bag of beans at me, I said, “No thank you,” and he laughed and replied, very loudly, “No, no, we are gifting it to you!” I’ve never had that happen before and I’m actually drinking a cup of their coffee as I’m writing this post! It is much better than the disappointing Chiapas I bought from Rico’s, but still not as good as Rico’s Veracruz!

It’s so hard to get decent coffee in Maz, enough so that I thought that Mexico doesn’t have a coffee culture. As it turns out, this is just another Maz thing. There is coffee everywhere in Durango, from espresso drinks to plain old drip coffee. I never saw any instant. If I ordered coffee with a meal, I got real coffee. In Maz, I get instant. *shudders* So I may have overdone it a bit with the caffeine over the weekend!

I took my coffee to the library and sipped it while enjoying the view, then I bought my ticket. $20 roundtrip. I knew that there wasn’t much at the other end, just a church and lookout point, but I wanted to see Durango from above. And, $20 roundtrip! Durango is so affordable!

Here I am at the waiting area on the low side. You can see that the cable cars don’t travel very far or very high.

The cars were very clean and in new condition:

Your return ticket is good all day, but I can’t imagine spending much time at the top.

I love looking down at Mexican rooftops!

It really didn’t feel that high up while I was riding the cable car:

Everything about the installation was very shiny and obviously well maintained:

Here’s the platform at the top:

There was a youngish gal riding solo next to me and we started to talk when we landed. Her name is Julia (hoo-lee-ah) and she is a 27-year-old nurse from Guadalajara who was enjoying her three weeks of holiday traveling from home to Durango by way of Maz. She was on Isla last week! We hit it off right away, being so unaccustomed to running into other solo female travelers. She went along for the same reason I do so: we can’t find the right person to share the journey with!

She was traveling by bus because she wanted to see the scenery and not just her steering wheel. Got to agree with her on that one. I love to drive, but I sometimes miss out on what’s around me!

We ended up spending all of Saturday together! So this is how you get a picture of me at the Mirador de los remedios (viewpoint of the remedies):

Durango is huge. You don’t really see urban sprawl like that in Canada:

This tower amused me:

The viewpoint was well done, with a lot of different levels:

This is the oldest church in Durango, built in the early 1600s:

So much urban sprawl:

Julia and I had fun mapping out the parts of the city that we know. I could see the Soriana sign on 20 de noviembre, so it was very easy to spot my hotel!

We had a conversation with the cable car operator on the way down. He was curious as to where I’m from and when I said Maz for the winter he shuddered and said pretty much the same thing the pharmacist had said the night before about Maz not being a place he particularly enjoys going! I then got a lecture on all that Durango has to offer tourists (museums, shows, architecture, and more) and its three big annual festivals. I promised him that I would tell all my friends to come to Durango. So go to Durango!

I was peckish as we landed and was going to ask Julia if she wanted to eat something when she preempted my question! She’d only had coffee since getting up, so she was ready for a big brunch. She wanted to try a place called Tostadas, right around the corner on Florida from Tía Chona. We had to wait to get a table, which was a sign that this was a good restaurant! We both had orange juice with complimentary toast and jam while we perused the menu. She ordered some sort of mini-burrito things. I went with a torta and it was really good, with thinly sliced roast pork, as well as guacamole, mustard, cheese, ham, and other goodies. Julia made me laugh when she said she doesn’t like hot things — both in terms of spiciness and temperature! I added some of the spicy salsa to my torta and asked if that was bad form since she wasn’t putting any on her rather plain looking meal. Not at all, it was just too spicy for her! Another Mexican stereotype debunked; they don’t all like burning their tongues!

When we were done eating, we had just enough time to hoof it to Plaza de armas to catch a bus!