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Take the Toll Road to Saltillo, Coahuila
Northbound on the 40, the toll freeway from Monterrey, is also called the Carretera Interoceánica. But we weren’t driving to the ocean.
The landscape changes almost immediately after you leave the city, a sprawling concrete jungle of more than 4 million people and about as many freeways and boulevards. There are garlic vendors with massive braids of bulbs on the roadside. There are open plains of wind turbines as you cross the north end of the Sierra Madre Oriental between the states of Nuevo León and Coahuila.
Within a two-hour road trip you arrive at a museum that’s only 20 years old.
The Museo del Desierto is one surprise after another. The lobby is large enough to host a correspondence dinner. Down a gradual descent a nondescript entrance opens into the museum itself.
Each exhibit is called a pavilion. The paleontology pavilion wraps around massive replicas of an Isauria, Sabinasaurio, Quetzalcoatlus and a T-rex. Every wall boasts fossils discovered after historic erosions.
Next, you wander from pre-history to the arrival of man, petroglyphs and rupestrian paintings. Cave art is our first introduction to the cultural anthropology of the nomadic people that once roamed this area.
