Which was really forty-eight. I'd like to talk to the editors of the Lonely Planet, actually.

To enjoy Mexico, or any travel destination, I expect, one has to accept it on its own terms. To truly appreciate the wonder of the country and its people, one has to get away from the tourist destinations. Not that lying on a beach isn't a good excuse for a vacation, but Mexico has much more to offer than beaches. The Mexican people are a warm and hospitable bunch, and appreciate those who want an eyeful of their country, gringos or no. And it's only the Twilight Zone if you let it be.

Submitted for your approval:

It is Spring, 1994. Two twenty-something Canadienses have had it with Vancouver and decide a trip to Belize is in order. Now you have to understand that, historically, Matt and I, together, have bad travel karma. As this was our first excursion, we could be forgiven for not knowing this. The early part of the trip was a bit of an adventure as well, so I'll start at the very beginning.

Vancouver, March (early) 1994 - I am the proud owner of a 1980 Volvo wagon with a bad alternator. I fix this with my vacation pay from my most recent position, head chef of the Planet Cafe. On our way.

Day 1: Once across the border (a bit of complication here as I only have temporary plates. I explain that the car was bought in the States, and I am returning it to its co-owner, my friend Mario, in California. How the Volvo got to Canada is another story entirely,) we stop in Bellingham for a bucket of KFC to keep us company. I drive through Seattle, Portland, and relinquish control to Matt in the evening somewhere in southern Oregon. I nap.

Day 2: In the wee hours, Matt is driving in northern California somewhere outside of Sacramento when all the gauges suddenly go wonky. He wakes me, and when we pull over, everything's normal again. I curse him and return to my nap. A little later, the gauges wack out again, but by this time, Matt's hallucinating anyway, so no big deal. I wake up, take over driving, and around threeish, we get to Venice. Alas that my friend John is not to be found. We wander around the beach for awhile, but Matt gets a bit spooked when someone catcalls his Montreal Canadiens jersey, so we continue on to Fullerton/Brea. In the early evening, we arrive at the address my friend Buck has given me, but it can't be right-this place is a mansion. It is right, and we find that Buck and some friends live in the old Gamble (of Proctor & Gamble) house. Nice digs. Buck still works at Disneyland, so we while away a couple of days in Orange County. The Volvo refuses to start anyway. After buying a new battery, we're on our way.

Day 5 (let's say): We leave in the morning, arriving in Temecula early afternoon, after some real issues from the Volvo. We get to my friend Mario's house, finally, and his dad has a look at the car. He asks us if we know that it's been on fire sometime in the last couple of days. After a good night of partying with some old friends from Baily's, we get up early the next morning, bid a not-so-fond adieu to the Volvo, strap on our backpacks, and head for De Luz Canyon.

Day 6: The goal here is to hike the 15 or so miles between Temecula and Fallbrook (where my grandparents are) in the steep, though well-roaded, De Luz Canyon. "A conditioning hump," says one of Mario's neighbours, a Marine recently returned from Desert Storm.

"Precisely," says us. About 5:30 in the afternoon, we're pooped. We've drunk all our water, and bathing our sore feet in the Santa Margarita river. Luckily, a farmer gives us a lift the last seven miles or so into Fallbrook, and we call my Grandpa, who pops down to Burger King to get us. Sleeping in actual beds that night. Sweet.

Day 7: Transit bus to San Diego, Greyhound to Calexico, hotel that night, wandering around Calexico trying to stay out of trouble.

Day 8: Mexico at last. We wander into Mexicali, walk the five miles or so to the train station. There's no train that morning after all. Who'd have thought those schedules meant anything? The only option is to take the second-class train to Guadalajara. It leaves at 9 p.m. Just as well really, as we realize that we waltzed right into Mexico without so much as a friendly nod from anybody with a badge. In other words-no visas. Hmmm. We waltz right back to the border-it takes us about an hour to find the immigration office once we're there, and without too much sarcasm, we receive our visas. Matt's getting edgy by now. We're back to the train station, by about three, leaving us six hours to make friends. Thankfully, one of my cooks gave me a yo-yo. I very poorly entertain some of the children, until they get over the novelty of seeing a white guy somewhere they probably never have before. We make friends with Frank (not Francisco or Pancho-Frank!) and a couple of other younger guys, who are intrigued that we're taking the train with the "regular people." A delightful old guy insisted that once we got to Belize, we had to go to Nicaragua, and see the lakes and rivers. He's quite drunk, but his tears are real enough. I promise him we'll try.

By about ten o'clock, we're aboard and the train is moving. Matt and I are essentially sitting on our backpacks, as the overhead storage was full by the time we got to our seats. Frank sees this and decides it won't do.

He calls the conductor. Matt by this time has barricaded himself next to the window, and is watching wide-eyed as Frank and the conductor yell at each other in Spanish and point at us. "What," he says, "the hell. Is going on?"

"Frank's getting us our storage."

"Tell them not to worry about it. I'm totally comfy," he lies. We weren't.

"No way," says I, "am I going to insult their hospitality like that. Sit tight."

Eventually we discover that the parcels in our rack belong to a woman in the next car, who like everyone on the train but us, has been shopping at the border (or working across the border) and is returning home for Easter.

"Si, si, senora," and a heavy sigh comes from the conductor as he leads the woman and her baggage away, with her complaining bitterly. I thank Frank, and we stow our bags overhead and try to sleep.

The train chugs through the Mexican desert, and after the first couple of stops in small towns along the way, I learn to sleep through the children running up and down the aisles, hawking tacos, cocas, hielos, etc.

A word about these trains. They're old. I don't know how old, but I suspect that we could well have been sitting precisely where Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata might have sat, as boys, had they ever traveled by rail. There was no light, apart from the conductor's flashlight, or the occasional spark of a match, or drawn ember of a cigarette. There was no running water, and looking into the toilet, you could see the tracks flashing by in the hole at the bottom. The windows didn't move; be they up, down, or somewhere in-between, that's where they stayed. The romantic in me is in heaven.

Day 9, Benjamin Hill: When I was young, I lived in the States, and my dad was in the Border Patrol. At about this time, British TV was all the rage, and Dad chuckled one night when he came home from work. A guy he had picked up told him he was from "Benny Hill." Thinking about this, I was pretty thrilled to pull into this little burgh at about 6:30 in the morning.

There wasn't much to it-a few houses, a store, Pacifico and Colosio banners. What was interesting was that the train pulled onto a side track, the engine disengaged, and left. Asking around, I was reasonably sure it was coming back, or another one would replace it. After all, all these people couldn't live in Benny Hill, and nobody was really leaving the train.

I may have mentioned that Matt was getting edgy by now. When he woke up and looked down the aisle toward the front of the train, sans engine, it didn't help. I was up, stretching, and looking around.

"Peter."

"Yeah?"

"Where are we?"

"Benny Hill."

"What?"

"Sorry, Benjamin Hill."

"Why is there desert at the front of the train?"

"Ah, well, the engine left."

"When?"

"About an hour ago. I'm gonna go to that store and get some smokes. You want anything?"

"I want to know when the engine is coming back."

"Oh, well, nobody seems real sure."

He said a couple of things inappropriate for print then, and I replied with a shrug and a "This is Mexico, Matt." It just went downhill from there.

I looked around town, it didn't take long, and we waited for the engine to come back. It did, around 9:30, and we were on our way again.

That was a good day. We traveled on through Sonora and Sinaloa, inland mostly, seeing really pretty country. I wandered around the train that day, and made friends with another young guy whose name I can't recall. The deal was he was supposed to speak to me in English, and me to him in Spanish, for practice, but mine was too limited for the things I wanted to know.

We passed a big sign, an entrance to a driveway it looked like, on the road next to the tracks. My friend told me that we'd been along this guy's ranch all day, and would be for a couple more hours. Amazing.

I wandered up and down the train, trading smokes for stories, and only got a little nervous once, when a couple of caballos were saying that this girl on the train liked me. I insisted that they were mistaken-I was much too young, I said, she must have been looking at them. I went back to my car.

We slept all right that night, though it was getting chilly.

Day 10: This is the morning we pulled into Mazatlan, and it was getting close to Matt's last straw. We stopped at the station, and by now, we'd gone through our 24 hours worth of water, and were getting less picky about the facilities. Off the train goes Matt, looking for a real loo. He found it, too, and it was blessedly free. The TP, however was not. I am reporting this second hand, but as I understand it, the gentleman stationed in front of the bathroom was charging people not for the amenities, but the peripherals. Matt almost caused an international incident, and worse, nearly missed the train as we were leaving.

Mazatlan from the rear is no real gem, and we weren't sorry to be going. You certainly couldn't see the beach from where we were.

That day found us wondering just when the hell we'd be getting to Guadalajara, where we were supposed to catch a train for Mexico City. We were in the desert again, and the mountains, into Durango, Nayarit, and Jalisco. In the afternoon, we came upon rows and rows of cactus plants, tequila plantations, and then later we came to the fire. I never got a satisfactory explanation, but there seemed to be a bushfire going, and it was burning right up to the tracks.

So we rode over it. We got smoky for a while, then we were through.

We got into Guadalajara about 9, found out that the train schedule we had was wrong (again) and the next train for D.F. wasn't until late the next afternoon.

By now, we had a good thick shell, consisting of 48 hours worth of sweat & soot, so we decided a hotel, shower, and dinner were in order. Everything in the train station was closed, and we nodded in a way we hoped was friendly to the two 16-year olds in fatigues carrying guns bigger than themselves on our way out.

We found the hotel mentioned in the Lonely Planet book, though it had a different name. We got our room, had incredibly long showers, and went to a nice restaurant for dinner. I learned here that the Spanish word for ashtray is "sanisero."

By the time we got back to the hotel it hit me. Let's leave this vague and say I was horribly ill. I suspect this was a combination of surviving for 48 hours while preparing for 16; 24 at the outside, i.e. drinking the water, eating the food, being exhausted, inhaling train fumes, alternating between too hot and too cold.

I went to bed with Matt's chuckles ringing in my ears.

Day 11: The next morning I was still feeling pretty queasy. Matt came out of the bathroom looking green. He handed me some money.

"I think you better get the room for another day," was all he said as he clambered back into bed. I spent the day being ill and finishing the book I had brought for company, Graham Chapman's very unorthodox autobiography, and by the evening, I was feeling something like my old self.

I wandered around Guadalajara for a while, grabbing a paper and just looking. We were downtown, close to the plaza, and there were a lot of shops (Libertad, I found out later) and a beautiful church (the Cathedral), but the city itself was pretty quiet.

When I got back, I got some cokes for us and paid for the room for yet another day.

Day 12: I spent the better part of the day wandering around, this time while things were open. I didn't go into the cathedral, and for some ungodly reason (I'll blame the fever) didn't take any pictures. I did talk to a very nice lady from Quebec who had retired to Guadalajara, actually to Lake Chapala (which has something like 50,000 U.S., Canadian, and German expatriates) and worked in the tourist office. She was very helpful and recommended the zoo, but said the Church wasn't open for tours at present.

I went back to the hotel - Matt was still ill, but promised to move tomorrow. We watched the Oscars that night.

Day 13: Matt decided it was time to go home. Can't say that I blame him. He'd been pretty ill. We decided to make a go of the zoo, where I will describe his last straw. So Day 12 had been a holiday (March 21, Benito Juarez' birthday.) So after the circus of trying to figure out the bus system, (there isn't a transit system so much as anybody who has a bus and a favourite route can stop at a given station. The fare is largely whim, loosely based on the distance you want to travel and the state of the bus.) We finally got on one that took us eight miles or so out of town to the zoo. The parking lot was strangely quiet. No fear though, the lady at the tourist booth had said that the zoo was closed Mondays, which was yesterday. Today was Tuesday. We kept walking.

No doubt about it. The zoo is closed.

"Peter."

"Yeah, Matt?"

"Why is the zoo closed?"

"I don't know. But you can sort of see the flamingos from here."

A car pulled up and a well-dressed lady and thirty or forty screaming children got out.

"Is the zoo closed?" she asked us.

"Apparently," said Matt, a little tight-lipped I thought.

"Oh yes of course," she said, "yesterday was the holiday, so they would have been open then."

"So closed today?" I think we were both a bit incredulous on that one.

"Exactly." She lived in L.A. now, which would explain how she had forgotten such an obvious local custom.

As she and her pack of savages drove off, Matt was throwing rocks at the zoo.

"Satisfied?" I asked as he walked up to me.

"Let's go find a swear-swear-swearing Pizza Hut."

So we did.

That evening we each boarded our respective buses (first-class). Matt was going back roughly the way we came, through Tijuana and back into San Diego, then on up the coast. I didn't have a job or a home so I thought I'd take advantage of my location and visit my brother and sister in Texas.

Now for a note on buses in Mexico. Luxury.

I was in the most comfortable seat I had ever felt (on a bus,) there was a fridge full of cokes, coffee, videos (watched the Man With No Face!) and woke up early the next morning in Nuevo Laredo, where I finally remembered I had a camera.

Day 14: Nuevo Laredo is not a tourist town. But if you want a feel of cross-border industry, maquilladoras, and what dirty border towns (on both sides) are like, I can't think of a better place. I had lunch, again, in a place recommended by the book but with a different name, and it was excellent. I crossed the border after buying one of the best hammocks I have ever lain in. Ok, the only one, but it was cool.

An Afterword: Bonus for Poli-Sci students. Day 14 was March 23, 1994. Ring a bell? Ok, I'll kill the suspense. PRI head Colosio was gunned down that day. In Tijuana. By day 15, I was sitting in my uncle's living room in Texas watching the news. I saw the story, looked at my watch and nodded. Yep, Matt would have arrived in TJ the morning of the 24th. I found out afterward that by the time he'd gotten to the border, he'd been held at gunpoint a number of times, had his visa taken, and somehow got back into the States without even seeing customs. Strangely, he hasn't been back to Mexico, but that experience served him in good stead while on his jaunts to Africa, which I might induce him into writing about one day.

Copyright © 2002 Peter S. Allen
All rights reserved

About the Author

         Pete S. Allen, or Uncle Pete to some (or Cranky Uncle Pete to still others), has been writing unprofessionally since he was about five, much to the entertainment of a number of English teachers throughout North America. Professionally, his non-fiction ventures are limited to a number of websites -- many now defunct, but a few still 'funct, like Poodle Press, Work Writes, the new Stormtribe, and now Kudzu! [Actually, Kudzu is also defunct - this is Kudzu Monthly.-Ed.] Under various pseudonyms, he has/will have fiction work appearing in Black Petals, Sinisteria, Another Realm, and Would That It Were. He is also editor, founder, and alpha weasel of the Swamp.
 
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