For many years, I’ve wanted to see the monarch migration. While we’ve been in Mexico in almost the right time, or almost the right place it’s never all worked out before. Since we finally had all of the pieces, I was excited to plan this trip.
Our choices were to go on a tour or rent a car and do it ourselves. Still scarred from a less-than-stellar van tour in Oaxaca, we immediately threw that option out. Finding a rental car was no problem—there are a million options in Mexico City. After previous experience, we were also familiar with the document we needed to request from our credit card to show that we already had the insurance coverage they might push us to pay for.
Next on was to determine which of the sanctuaries we would go visit. There are about 4 or 5 and I was hoping for a decent amount of monarchs, not an insane hike, and a few amount of people. With a lot of internet research, we ended up choosing Sierra Chincua Reserve. While doing this research, there was a reasonable amount of internet “chatter” about the areas not being so safe anymore. We paid attention, but saw absolutely nothing to be concerned on our trip.
Aside from seeing the butterflies, my most proud moment of all of this is picking up the phone and calling the hotel to see if I could make a reservation and negotiate a better rate than what I could find online. I left the call with both a reservation and a rate I was happy with—phone calls in a language you are learning are so hard because you lose all of the benefit of hand gestures, pointing or a person writing down a number for you if you get in way over your head. I was SO PROUD! I even texted my Spanish teacher immediately because I was so excited. Fast forward to checking in: there was a note that said “Only speaks a little Spanish” (in Spanish, of course). I still got everything I had needed, but it definitely took a little wind out of my sails.
The drive was a simple 3 hours, and we were careful to try to avoid traffic times. We arrived with time to explore the small mining town we were staying in—Angangueo. They were very proud of the grit and fortitude of their people which resulted from their time as a mining town, a tragic mining accident, and then the mining running out. Now the butterfly tourism gives the town some revenue.
In the morning we woke up, trying to be slightly before the tourists, but not so early the butterflies were not active. We got to the Reserve around 10 and hired a guide off the street who was 70 and managed to dance and sing to us for the majority of our tour! The “hike” was a walk of maybe 45 minutes total to get to the butterflies. Largely on Jeep roads, and not notably steep. When we arrived to the butterfly viewing area, we were given strict instructions about being quiet so not to disturb them and to stay within a roped off trail.
The monarchs were in huge clumps on tree branches off aways. There were so many, it didn’t look like it could possibly be monarchs but looked more like giant brown masses growing off the trees. Every time the sun came out for a while, monarchs would spring from the clump and flutter around. Monarchs prefer to be active when they are warm, and our day was only partly sunny so there were not as many monarchs flying as we had hoped but it was still pretty spectacular.