The snow covered Pico de Orizabo (also known as Citlaltépetl) is an inactive stratovolcano. At 5,636m it is the highest mountain in Mexico and the third highest in North America and I'm slowly realising the new bus may have tinted windows.
The Helia Bravo Hollis botanical garden is just a sliver of the larger Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Biosphere Reserve and is noted for growing over 80 species of cacti many of which are endemic to the area. It's quite weird when you drive into the reserve as suddenly cacti are growing all around where previously there had been none.
This is salt mining apparently.
The garden is named after a notable Mexican botanist who made the study of cacti her lifelong work and who died in 2001 just 4 days short of her 100 birthday. This is our specialist botanist guide but, as his English wasn't particularly strong, Francisco did most of the talking.
The guided walk took about an hour and it was blisteringly hot as you'd imagine.
Although not a cactus, this Ponytail Palm is several 1000 years old and its trunk is said to resemble an elephant's foot. Apparently it's a thing to see how many people it needs to hug it.
But, as usual, I don't like joining the crowd and prefer to hang back and take my own shots.
Hopefully you see the face in the top left leaf as clearly as I do?
Another face - just look at this sweet little chap, a seed head from a species I can't remember. Luckily Dave didn't mind me using his t-shirt as a good backdrop.
This looks just like a marrow type leaf, or similar, until you notice the vicious spines.
The hairy ones are always fun.
A few more close ups.
For lunch Francisco took us to a specialist restaurant nearby which offered lots of cactus based dishes - I think most of us stuck to "normal" food, certainly Ian did and I simply ventured across the road for a couple of packets of crisps. A knife sharpener I saw whilst I was out.
