mexico: they are hard, appear out of nowhere, come in all shapes and sizes, and nobody like them. but let’s back up for a sec and explain why they even exist. so far, all mexican highways i’ve been on go through towns and cities. literally, the freeway becomes the main street of the town (which sometimes may only have one road). so, instead of stop signs, people add topes to slow cars down. and these towns might be 5-10 km apart…meaning that on many highways you have to stop every ten minutes.
the best tope is smooth, painted with yellow/white stripes, has warning lines painted on the ground leading up to the tope, and has signs a few hundred meters before & at the tope itself. this is true about 5% of the time. Most of the time, a tope will have 1 or 2 of the above. And, about 10-20% of the time, it’ll be a perfectly camouflaged stump of concrete which you can only notice from about 10 feet away. in those cases, the shocks bottom out with a loud thump, followed by the scraping of the bottom of the *rusted* car against the asphalt. even when crawling over the bump, i’ll often get a ‘ping’ or scrape. i put *rusted* in accents, because about 6 months ago, i was driving in san francisco & my exhaust pipe broke in half. i paid a guy $20 to weld it together…and he said it wouldn’t last a month (because of all of the rust).
if the rest of latin america has topes, i’m convinced that they will be the demise of the sentra. not only are my shocks squeaking (more than usual), but now my breaks are (from all the sudden stopping) & i’m pretty sure my exhaust pipe has some cracks in it now.
one last note about why they’re pure evil. it’s bad enough that the topes are hidden…but they’re also completely random. sometimes they’ll even just paint the road to look like a tope, when there’s nothing there. other times there’ll be just one in a little town…or seven….or three; or maybe they’ll be back to back…or separated by 400 feet. in some cases, they’ll even throw one or two down after you’ve already left the town…one last chance for your car to break down in their town. and one last thing: for some reason (hint: topes) there are almost as many tire stores as gas stations in mexico. in the us, the tire manufacturers lobby the government; here, they just build more topes.

the devil