Dispatch Number 85 -Two Years: Mexico

This is a series covering the past two years of car travels through Latin America that began in the fall of 2008. Beginning with Mexico and on through Central America's Guatemala-Honduras-Nicaragua-Costa Rica-Panama and South America's Columbia-Ecuador and Peru. The loose plan is to continue driving to the bottom of the world, Ushuaia, Argentina. These are stories of characters, experiences and hardships.

San Diego, California. I slept in the parking lot of Bob's Big Boy. That night sleep came with dread and reluctance as plans to drive into Mexico with a friend fell apart, I was about to go alone. Today, I write this Dispatch from South America in Peru, two and a half years and 20,000 miles later. I began travels as a tourist, then became a traveler and eventually found myself on an odyssey.

My intention to travel by land and sea have gone well, using only paper maps and asking locals for directions at nearly every intersection, since road signs are unusual. Dusty bumpy back-road travel done in an old, 1986 Toyota Land Cruiser, without a GPS gizmo, cellular phone or a computer. Locals often ride with me to the next town, sharing area attractions and what local crops are grown. The regions I stay in tend to be agrarian communities made up of subsistence agriculture, where majority of the day is spent securing life's essentials. A world without vacations and manual labor to the end.

I take occasional Spanish classes while living with host families absorbing local customs and culture. If categories matter, I am a rural tourist or in more extreme cases the anti-tourist. The intent when I left the US, was to see how another part of the world lived, and to see it off the Pan American Highway system, beginning in Mexico and running to the bottom of the world in Ushuaia, Argentina.

Here is the briefest recap of the journey to date, country by country, starting in October 2008 when I entered Mexico with a sinking feeling in my belly.

Mexico
October 2008

My cellphone rang, it was Stephanie. I wasn't at Bob's Big Boy anymore.
Can you wait another day for me to get there? I want to go with you into Mexico.

I was so relieved. Not alone. My dream of driving the Western Hemisphere was launched when we crossed the border into Mexico through Tijuana. I had trouble remembering how to drive through Tijuana like I once knew as a youth, when friends and I would go there for day-long beer drunks on the beach. I'd awake after passing out over the backgammon board sun-burned and head blazing in pain.

A green traveler excited by it all, I exclaimed just about everything and everyone I came in contact with as, Great!

I suspected my enthusiasm irritated people. When I entered Mexico I spoke no Spanish, learning essentials along the way from gas station attendants and restaurant owners.
You don't say 'Gasolina Maximo', it's 'Lleno por favor' for fill 'er up, said one Pemex attendant.
It was seat-of-the-pants learning that suited me well. Stephanie traveled with me for two months, taking back roads everywhere we went, making remote desert camps across Baja California.

We met Richard, an outlaw living in Bahia de Los Angeles, who escaped from the US before the feds caught him for large-scale pot growing in California, some mysterious friend in the US smuggled money to him periodically. A born storyteller, he dazzled us daily with tales of his past. His eccentric side was kept hidden until we went to town: he wore down-feather house boots and Bermudas to the bar in 90+ degree heat. Taking a Coke, he looked far-out with his unkempt silver hair and those booties. He taught me how to make lemonade and ceviche from the fish we caught together.

While in the desert I found a recent plane crash, one that overshot the runway a few days earlier during an emergency landing. I opened the aircraft door and went inside the twin engine air ambulance. In the medical kit I took blue surgical gloves as a memento. I felt criminal, however being at the site of a crash and able enter the plane unimpeded was too tempting. Where were the investigators and yellow tape, like on the news?

Months later in Taxco near Mexico City, I attended my first of many Spanish schools in Latin America. At the midpoint of the language program, I invited a class-mate to go with me to a village to visit an old man I gave a ride to weeks earlier. Looking for Mr. Rodriquez. A seventy-something compact man with a wrinkled face, who grew medicinal plants and had extended an invite when I dropped him off.

My classmate and I rolled into the small village and asked a group of Sunday beer drinkers, one that included a boisterous bull rider, If they knew where we could find Mr. Rodriquez?
No, we don't know who that is, came the group reply after a minute or so of discussion between eight of them.
I brought out two bottles of beer and joined with my friend Katka, who looked displeased to see me drink at this hour. Thirty minutes and six one-liter bottles of beers later. Suddenly, the oldest and fattest in the group blurts out, That's my uncle! Rodriquez, is my uncle! He hasn't lived here in two years.

Southern Mexico

Don't go there. Zapatista country is dangerous with kidnappings, robberies and murders, they said. They are usually the ones who never go, but rely on repeated stories of mayhem that may have been accurate ten years back. When it comes to human adaptation people hopelessly cling to the past. I think animals in Darwin's world adapt faster than humans do. The warnings filled me with resolve.

Zapatista (EZLN: Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, Zapatista Army of National Liberation) is a political-social movement for the under-represented indigenous class in Mexico and is based in San Cristobal de la Casis, a place that draws intellectual revolutionaries the world over. While hardly revolutionary, the colonial city with its low skyline felt entertaining and heavily touristed. As a commercial revolutionary from the north, I bought an EZLN coffee mug.

Only while traveling with Matt, an excellent surfer from Australia, in the heart of Chiapas along the border with Guatemala, did things begin to feel revolutionary. A region where communities rejected national government, preferring self-rule based on Zapatismo Ideology. These communities posted black and red hand painted signs outlining the manifesto. Anti-Federal graffiti was everywhere, often in the form of murals on school walls. This region felt tough, but not unsafe to the outsider.

It was in this region, we found small Maya communities set in the jungle, some said they had undiluted Maya blood -they did look different, a lot different. Matt and I camped at one spot on a swim hole playing backgammon and swimming with locals. For a couple days we puzzled over the relationship between the caretaker/owner and his young helper. Matt, finally broke the silence that summed up our confusion, She's the plumpy wife-daughter.

Mexican culture is vibrant, lively and proud like few others countries in Latin America. They had blood in their veins. Mexico possesses an incredible treasure of Spanish-era Catholic churches, unrivaled by any other I have visited in the Americas. Its food among the best in the hemisphere, Peruvian fare comes a distant second. I had set the tone in Mexico, living a third-class life, staying in dumpy hotels and eating comida tipica, local dishes to make the money last, and it has been that way ever since. I don't want to come home!

Alienation was my natural condition, I was a stranger everywhere I went. With everything familiar stripped away, I felt childlike, defenseless and dim, and having to acquire a language. Mexico helped me understand what I wanted: to immerse in local culture and not patronize the locals.

David
Chiquian, Peru

More on Mexico: select Dispatches-

Joe and Red Light District-http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/02/dispatch-number-8-joe.html

Bull Fighting, I'll Go Again-http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/07/dispatch-number-22-la-coleta.html

Richard the Outlaw-http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/02/dispatch-number-11-richard.html

Lampoon the RV-class-http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/01/dispatch-number-5-rv-park.html

Churches & Weddings-http://travelingdave-intheamericas.blogspot.com/2009/08/dispatch-number-25-weddings_03.html