Reaching the Pants on the Kilometer 13 Bus – with no taxi!
Just follow the green staircase down and begin your journey, that's the Mexico-Toluca highway, climbing at a perfectly walkable grade.
Someday I will learn why the Kilometro 13 un-ceremoniously dumps passengers onto a bridge in the middle of nowhere.It could very well have been called the Kilometro 15 or 17 bus and actually continue on to somewhere useful.
I think it is extra assurance from God that Santa Fe is not meant for people but only for cars – and this rude liberatarian fanatacism – while appropriate in the hey-day of the neo-cons – today seems a bit dated.
So yes, this is another anti-car post.
It’s not technically “the middle of nowhere.” Just the middle of some of Mexico City’s WORST URBAN PLANNING EVER.
If you need to get to those dreaded Pantalones in Santa Fe (technically, the Pants stand proud in Bosque de las Lomas, Cuajimalpa) and you are smart enough to not drive there, just bring a light-weight book or magazine and catch the buses marked Kilometro 13 anywhere on Paseo de la Reforma. The trip can easily take an hour in traffic but these are the nice new Bicentenario Buses, so if you catch a seat, the journey is quite comfortable. I know lots of people who go there on business – but it also makes a surreal tourist destination.
The driver of the Kilometro 13 Bus will actually turn around and tell you to get off at what is presumably Kilometro 13 – it’s technically on an overpass bridge where all manner of other buses and taxis and microbuses are also stopping – and you might be tempted to catch a taxi right there. Ridiculous though. All a taxi can do is navigate the continued senselessness of over-eager highway development that makes Santa Fe so uninhabitable in the first place. So you end up paying to travel on streets that by logical argument shouldn’t even be there. DON’T SUPPORT THIS through vehicular travel. Pedi-travellers need to stick together and getting to the Pantalooneys is not any big deal.
You just go down the stairs and up the hill on the Mexico-Toluca Highway – a little cardio is going to do you good as we continue the battle against this sort of non-sustainable development.
This colorful thoroughfare means you made it. Paseo de Lilas & Mexico-Toluca Autopista, Colonias San Gabriel & Lomas de Santa Fe in Alvaro Obregon and Bosque de Las Lomas, Cuajimalpa
When you reach the top of the hill – about 8 minutes that would kill fatty Santa Fe corporate hogs – just bear to the right and watch for the colorful corner in the photo at right. That’s the intersection of Paseo de Lilas turning off of a only somewhat obnoxious stretch of the Mexico-Toluca Highway. From the Paseo de Lilas intersection it is another one minute to the intersection with Bosque de Alisos to the LEFT which leads you easily down down down into the belly of the beast. From there, it’s obvious who wears the Pants in Bosques. (Hint: it’s not people.)
Use the map below for a better idea of this quick pro-people walking trip to the bottom of the Pantalones of Bosque de Las Lomas or click here for a map of Delegacion Alvaro Obregon.
Please wait a sec while the Kilometro 13 – Walking to the Pantalones map loads up.
There is actually a bus called the Km 14, and this one takes a different route, going right to the pants. I work at the pants, but I actually prefer to take the Km 13 getting there, and the Km 14 coming back. Never seen the colorful corner though… I think they might have painted over it now!