08/21/98

Run For the Border / Uninspired Wrapup




Casablanca was really good! Our venue turned out not to be a movie theatre after all, but a video parlor, of which animal there are several specimens in Antigua. As it happened, we were the only customers that night, so we got a private screening, and complete control over the remote. It was great. I particularly thought the ending of the film was pretty neat. (Even if Rick's final speech was a little hard to swallow.) At any rate, the ending of our South of the Border jaunt was unfortunately not so tidy.


The Plaza Mayor is almost as lovely during the day as it was on our first night (and first glimpse). We enjoy the last of the light on our last day, tripping on protruding cobblestones, amazed to ultimately find fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh cybercafes. Best navigational quip: "Is that the volcano, or the other volcano?" After the movie, still early for dinner in these parts, we hit Picasso's for pre-dinner beers.


Picasso's is interesting inside (gee, imagine that), and we spend an hour or so sucking down liter size bottles of Gallo, and bumming Marlboro Reds off of Miguel and Ariel. These last are a couple of strapping young Guatemala City types in town working a three month gig with one of the hotels (front desk, and guest activities, respectively). They are handsome and charming (one of them, Ariel, in English), curious about the States, and fun to chat with. We take our leave in search of non-liquid sustenance.


Out in the street, we wander past a diner with a TV–Representative Such'N'Such is indicating his incomplete satisfaction with Clinton's avowal of an "inappropriate relationship." "Oh, shit," conclude we. "Clinton must have made his statement." We stumble into Cafe.Net and log onto nytimes.com. While coming in slower than dirt (don't know whether it was the small pipe into the room, or the several hundred thousand extra hits the Times got that evening), we eventually got the gist of the story–and watched the details being updated in real time, as we hit our Reload button. (It was in Brownsville that we got the surreal news of the embassy bombings; and it would be a few days later in Laredo when we would get word of the U.S. counterattacks. There's been a lot to keep up with, for travelers abroad!)


Over an odd combination of Thai and sushi, we ruminate on the affairs of the day–and our method of accessing them. In an equally odd moment of personal history, I recollect that it was my Uncle Jack (currently following along with this trip from D.C.) who gave me my first 300 baud modem about fifteen years ago! We had been visiting with them (as we did frequently), and I guess I had been going on about BBS's and whatnot, and how I hoped to get a modem for my Commodore 64 to check all this madness out. A couple of weeks later, back home in Atlanta, a package arrived with a grand and unexpected gift: a cartridge-style modem for my C64. How cool is that? Even more so, when one considers the longterm impact this might have had (looking at my life now). Thanks a bunch, Jack, and I haven't forgotten. (If you listen carefully, you can hear him blushing from K Street (?), a couple dozen blocks north of the White House.) 8^)


In the morning, we have farewell croissants and coffee at Cafe Opera, yet another crazily funky local cafe. The interior is done mainly in posters of opera stars, and the atmosphere is hip to say the least. Then it was out of the hotel, and into the car, and out of Antigua to the northwest. Tired, happy, fulfilled, anxious to be making tracks toward home, we decide to bag Lake Atitlan. I was looking forward to it, but getting out there (and out of there!) would have been a commitment; and it'll give me another reason to come back; and, like, I said, we're keen to at least be moving toward the States. We head out of town toward the mountains, initially driving dizzyingly directly at one of Antigua's peripheral volcanoes.








Special Bonus Section : How to See Guatemala:

We now officially know how to see Guatemala, and it's how you should, too: Fly to Guatemala City. (I have no idea what the rates are, but you can always get a deal these days.) Grab a cab the 30 or so miles to Antigua (this will be cheap as well). Check in for a week or ten days, and base your whole vacation out of this stellar city. During your stay, you can easily do the following stuff:

    

  • Fly to Tikal in the north: You can either get a commercial flight to nearby Flores, and then a bus or cab to the ruins–or much better yet, get a commercial tour package involving a puddle jumper which can land right at the little airstrip in Tikal Park. One or two day packages are readily available for like US$80-$120, and I imagine well worth it. Stay at one of the hotels in the Park. If you enter the ruins after 3pm on your first day, they will stamp your pass for the next day as well, so you can come back in the morning and do the sunrise from Temple IV thing. (If not, you'll (probably) have to pay an addition 50 quetzals/person entrance fee, but who cares.)

  • Take a day trip, or a 1-2 day overnighter to Lake Atitlan. Again, tour packages are available, or you can just grab a bus or cab. Panajachel is the most popular destination, though it is supposed to be slightly touristy, and there are about a dozen little towns situated on the lake. While there, you can take boat tours across the lake, or go horseback riding around it.

  • Take a tour up a volcano. The tour we saw was an 8-hour excursion (which was too long for our limited stay), and involves a bus ride to the base, hiking, views of the valley from the heights, and views of the core of the volcano at day–and at night. The latter is supposed to be spectacular.

  • Take a mountain bike or motorcycle tour of the area. Rentals are cheap and plentiful.

  • For info on all of the above tours/rentals, just check the bulletin board at Dona Luisas; or the board at any of dozens of places; or just walk around and stick your head in tour places, or at tour signs. You can't miss it.


You could, I am sure, also work Belize into the same trip, though probably not quite as seamlessly. At any rate, can you guess I'm planning on coming back? Oh, last notes: get a good guidebook, and–as Antigua is also the most romantic city I've seen–go with someone you want to cuddle with.






Back to the scene of our exodus, and sad to report that we almost immediately get lost in a rural Guatemalan town on the edge of the mountains. A 20 minute long animated conversation with a pair of Guatemalan women yields, principally, a strong admonition against taking the route we had decided on. Those roads, I am told in no uncertain terms, are bad and dangerous. To go to Mexico, I am additionally advised, we should go back to Guatemala City (a suggestion which seems at first quite ridiculous). Our mistake, one we have made before, lay in assuming that a mere line on the map actually signifies a route one might comfortably traverse by car. This is not the case. In Guatemala, they put a line on the map for any path without large trees, and more than a few feet wide.


Unbelievably, the clutch is slipping again. This, I believe, is an adjustment problem. I've had new clutches that needed a little tweaking before; but this experience does not much palliate the misery of this repeated experience of the failure of the clutch (and the impending failure of forward motion). Finally, we can't find our way out of town (even with the combined help of the Guat women, and a couple of young European backpacking women who's English is better than my Spanish), and so we turn tail and head for the smooth road back to Guat City, and the major CA highway nearby.


As we ultimately successfully escape the gravity well of Guat City, I opine to Sara that it looks like we've finally "gotten out of Dodge." "Well, there are dozens of Dodges up ahead to get through," she counters. "Mmm, no, I don't think so. You have to have actually been in a place for a little while, and then escaped, for it to be Dodge. Dodge is not someplace you pass through; it's someplace you get out of." "Whatever." We make the Mexican border, and stand in line for an hour or so, behind a very nice Canadian couple (the only people we've met who've also driven down–from Toronto!) who are being suspected of smuggling their four children out of the country. We hit Tapachula, the famous (and miserable) border town, and spend an hour nursing the clutch, navigating traffic around the zocalo, and looking for a particular hotel which has the virtue of being recommended by Let's Go Mexico, but not, sadly, that of existence.






Special Bonus Section : Why Let's Go Mexico Sucks

First the obligatory Official Bastardizations: The two finalists are Let's Bag Mexico and Let's Get the Fuck Out of Mexico, both composed during our exodus. As for an exposition of the guide's suckiness, a few swatches of dialogue should suffice:

    

  • In Villahermosa
    M: "So the book's got the address for the tourist office?"
    S: "Yep."
    M: "Cool. Where is it on the city map?"
    S: "That part of the city isn't on their map."

  • In Tampico
    S: "Does it look to you like Tampico is a place you want to stop?"
    M: "I don't know, the first several paragraphs are all about the Spanish explorer who discovered it, and all the cool stuff he did there. Interesting... but is a detailed history from the 1500s really the first info we're going to need as travellers to this place? Jeesh...."

  • In Palenque
    S: "This looks like a long hike. Are you sure you're up for it?"
    M: "Where does it lead to?"
    S: "I don't know, some waterfalls maybe?"
    M: "Well, let's check the map."
    S: "They don't have these trails on the map."

  • Also in Palenque
    M: "Well, we're not lost anymore, here's a big placard for this section of ruins. We're at Group B. But, hmm, Group B isn't on the map."

  • Also in Palenque
    S: "There's supposed to be lots of hallucinogenic herbs growing around here."
    M (under breath): "Great, another hugely helpful tip from the happy tripping writers at Let's Go."

  • In Palenque (the town)
    M: "Alright, we'll drive to Agua Azul. Does the book say how to get there?"
    S: "Well... it just tells you which bus to take."

  • In Tapachula
    M: "We're looking for the Hotel Armistad. On Seventh Street, near tenth? Can you direct us to that area of town at least?"
    Local Men: "No, we've never really heard of that area of town."
    M (after finally finding that area of town): "We're looking for the Hotel Armistad. It's supposed to be at number 47 on this street?"
    Local Women: "No, there's no Hotel Armistad in this city. And we don't think there ever has been."


By the end of the trip, I was willing to stop anywhere, as long as we could wander around and figure everything out on our own without the encumbrance of Let's Go Mexico.






So, I was pretty much personally apoplectic to be in Tapachula, once again dependent on this failing car, and that failure of a guidebook. But, the nice local women did recommend a nice hotel just a couple of blocks over, and we sacked it into this hot room, and let the night pass in relative safety. Special fauna highlight: There was a lizard in the bathroom, another first. Also, this was the night illness struck. It turned out not to be malaria (as I quite naturally assumed it was), but merely a bad head cold engendered by the ceiling fan we quite naturally had blowing full blast on our unblanketed sweaty bodies. Sara had some congestion, and I spent the next two days honking, snorting, and rubbing my aching temples and sinuses. We left at dawn.


The south of Mexico is hugely, and unexpectedly, mountainous. We passed some huge ones, and a cool wind farm, and wound our way through crazy mountain roads. I swear, I'm going to start buying topographical maps–this business of finding myself unexpectedly driving through mountain ranges is getting old. Passing by an in-process rodeo, our vehicle was very nearly kicked by a bronco (which was being tremulously transported across the road by several caballeros with lots of ropes), another new one. We decided to bag Oaxaca, and keep going; all of Mexico lay between us and home, and we were anxious to eat some of it. Passing by, and high above, Oaxaca, it pretty much looked like another sprawling and dirty Mexican town (albeit with some nice churches at the center).


We finally stopped for the night, just at sundown, in Tehuacan, which was unexpectedly pretty nice. It had a pretty zocalo, surrounded by lots of restaurants and utility stores, and we found a nice old hotel just off the square, with spacious rooms and built around a big atrium. There was also a high babe factor in this town, and a pharmacy which sold me CoTylenol, both of which went along way toward soothing my aching head. Drugged, I slept ten hours straight, while Sara went out for food. Again, we left at dawn. We figured there were still two very hard days of driving between us and Austin.


"Hard." Heh. Mexico City isn't a city, it's an inland sea (and a big one). I realize now that other cities don't sprawl, they merely develop a little condensation on their surfaces; whereas Mexico City has long overrun its banks, gone raging through the valley, and now laps at the feet of the surrounding mountains. What we were thinking when we decided to drive through Mexico City to our connecting highway, I have no idea. (Well, I do recall that we would have had to take a dozen connecting roads to detour; but, if I could go back, I would happily take a gross of connecting roads in order to detour.) We spent a little over two hours lost in Mexico City; trying to read totally useless and confusing Mexico City road signs; sitting in Mexico City traffic (reportedly worst in the world); and breathing Mexico City air (ditto). It might have been bearable, if not for the spectre of the failing clutch, which could at any moment leave us in M.C. on a longterm (or permanent) basis. We stopped several times for directions I couldn't follow; and finally had the luck to stumble upon an English-speaking cabbie! With this boon, we found the northbound highway out of town.


Random Smack:We passed the Tropic of Cancer. We were passed by a black Dodge Stratus!... and a truck marked "Material No Peligroso," both of which were very reassuring in their ways. If you drive through Mexico long enough, you will eventually pass the namesake of every U.S. west coast town: Palo Alto, San Carlos, San Jose... Los Angeles. Monterry at night is another sea of tiny white lights, lapping at the base of the huge red rock under which it sits. Central Mexico is still pretty mountainous, but segues into a northern Mexico which is much like the American SW: long rolling scrubbly hills; endless straight stretches of road; low, bare, glinty sunlight; dizzyling large groves of tree-sized cacti (or were they merely catcus-like trees?); and some stunning desert vistas which I should have stopped to photograph, but was way too focused on hightailing it out of there to bother. But it was nice, and Joe (my desert-mongering friend) would most likely approve.


Our planned stopping point, Saltilla, is (we suddenly) realize, pretty damned close to the border–maybe two hours, three at the most. This–the prospect of a run for the border–is really tempting. We are decided in our course of action when we are stopped at our last, and worst, military checkpoint. Here, a gaggle of grinning black-clad twenty-year olds with knives strapped to their hips proceed to rifle through my shaving kit, bang on the very door panels, fumblingly flirt with my sister, and generally give us the biggest case of the creeps we've had yet. Wisely, we keep our mouths shut and hasten to hand every bag over to them, until they get bored and wander smirkingly away.


The irony here, I consider, is that even this most thorough search would not have yielded jack, if I were actually smuggling (or trying to hide something); it would be cake to bury guns or drugs deep enough that these kinds of searches wouldn't turn anything up. Their only function, then, is to harrass and intimidate the law-abiding–and the tourists who pump money into this disaster of an economy. But, beyond all of that, we decide we are sick to death of being in a militarized police state, and grimly resolve that our heads are going to hit U.S. pillows this night. We want to back in the States... badly. As if to smooth the ruffled feathers of our resolution, the sun sets before us very prettily–one final attractive image of Mexico, one which I hope will stick with us.


Our last reckless late night push for the border, and in particular our yearning to breath free air again, leads to some interesting discussion. We spend a lot of time talking about everything we are going to enjoy once across the border: smooth non-toll roads; potable water; freedom of movement without searches; useful and sensible fucking road signs. We plan to drink espresso; I'm very keen for a Sam Adams (best beer in America!)–and a full day at the multiplex, watching all the new releases I've missed, and basically luxuriating in American culture. This is odd, and not precisely intended: the ostensible goal of travel was to internationalize me. Instead, I've found myself hugely Americanized! I've always adored this country; but racing for that border, I was suddenly weepingly grateful to be a citizen of the most prosperous, and most free, nation the planet has yet seen.


Also, despite having seemingly been narrowed rather than broadened, I do have the strong feeling that I will enjoy the benefit of enjoying how good we really have it–and in particular not taking for granted the little things. Americans, we realize, probably just have it too easy, lately; we're taking everything for granted. As for my feelings about Mexico, I do recognize that part of our difficulties and discomfort stemmed from moving on the ground; racing to get through much of Mexico; and not necessarily stopping to enjoy the good parts. So my view of the country is admittedly skewed. But I finish not being a fan of this place. I can't say I didn't see anything in Mexico I liked–but I definitely didn't see anything worth going to Mexico for.


After a late night jaunt through U.S. immigration, we check into a nice Motel 6 in Laredo, and do the leisurely drive to Austin the next day. Driving on U.S. highways is so relaxing (no potholes, paying for gas with credit cards, etc.), I feel like I'm ready to do a cross-country tour. Happily, though, all I have to do is get on a plane in a few hours, to get back to my favorite corner of my favorite country. I'm glad to have gone, and I'm extremely glad to get back–and I'm glad for the thoughts the trip has inspired... mixed bag though they may be.


Finally, thanks very much to all of ya'll (there are 20 folks on the list, others logging in now and then) who came along with us for this jaunt. It wouldn't have been the same without you–any more than our lives would be the same without ya'll in them. 8^) See you next time.


Yours verily,












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