Mexico demands one further vehicle temporary importation complication in the form of a bond you have to pay at border entry and you get it back when you leave. All the advice online said to pay by credit card. This particular vehicle border crossing had a credit card machine, but they didn’t have chip and pin technology. Or so they insisted. Can we pay in cash? Yes. Can we pay in Mexican pesos? No, it absolutely must be in US dollars.Now here is the rub. Three and a half hours, six ATM machines and four banks later, we discover that Mexican banks cannot pay out US dollars. This is designed to put a stop to money laundering by the narcotics gangs. The last bank relented but only after another hour of form filling, copying, stamping and many phone calls to head office. By this time it’s touching 35C already. After aging about 50 years, we finally got hold of our US dollars. Back to the border, join the end of another queue because by this time traffic is crossing in volume. From an early start at 8am at the border, we made it through the final phase by well past lunchtime. We’re not exactly well pleased by Mexico.
Our chosen route took us through the central highlands of Mexico, avoiding the Pacific and Caribbean coastlines because of the intense heat at this time of year (May). In January and February these coastlines are pleasant and attract many American tourists.
This meant that we would miss Acapulco, the iconic resort where tanned and toned divers chuck themselves off high cliffs and survive being cut to ribbons on sharp rocks laying just below the surface of the sea. We are now wary of iconic anything, and from what we had been told, Acapulco is now a huge urban sprawl of high rise hotels and polluted air. Polluted air is one thing that Mexico does really well. As we drove northwards through the higher altitudes it was hot enough to boil our brains, so goodness knows what it was like on the coast.There are two things you find all over Mexico – speed bumps and graffiti. Some speed bumps are signed and slow you down, some are signed but don’t exist which still slows you down while you spend time trying to focus and find the damned thing, and many are not signed but exist, which means that you are constantly looking out for them and you still miss some, in which case you are suddenly launched into outer space and then wait for the bang as you land. They are called “topes”. We have lots of names for them.
Graffiti is a plague. Antigua in Guatemala is a UNESCO World Heritage site and justly so. Oaxaca and Puebla in Mexico are also UNESCO World Heritage sites, also for their colonial buildings. They must have been granted this status before the spray paint artists got going. There are so many beautiful buildings ruined by graffiti; many have been painted, tagged, painted, tagged, painted again and tagged again. Those people trying to keep up with painting over the tagging have basically given up. Even the doors to the astonishing Santo Domingo church have been defiled.
We expected rough roads in Mexico but found perfectly reasonable road surfaces; the toll roads were like expressways but expensive. We made an executive decision as soon as we came across the tope-free toll roads to use them in preference to the tope-ridden free roads. It was armchair motoring. Driving standards are normal – most people are sensible with the usual odd lunatic thrown in.
It seems that Mexicans are allowed to drive three types of vehicle – monster pick-up trucks, either 2 or 4WD; VWs, or totally clapped out wrecks that stagger from one junction to the next in crab-like fashion, haemorrhaging black filth from the exhaust and leaving a trail of water and/or oil drips and neither boot nor bonnet capable of closing. There are many more vehicles on the road than any other Latin American country we have seen so far, which leads us to believe that Mexico is nowhere near as poor as westerners think.
We see news footage of Mexicans moving heaven and earth to make their way to the USA for a better life, but we can only conclude that it is because they want a better lifestyle rather than desperately need a better standard of living. From our experiences in Peru, we now know that there is a great difference.We met a lorry driver and his family at a toll road picnic area. He takes his wife and two year old son with him on his Mexico City to Tijuana run in his huge lorry and trailer. His name is Antonio, his son is Iran; he told us he tried to get USA entry but was turned down and so is going through the Canadian entry procedure. He spoke reasonable English, asked us to join him and his family for some lunch and explained how he wanted the best opportunities for his son. His is a common story. His attitude to tourists is typical of what we found throughout Mexico – they are a very friendly people, open and communicative.
How they eat the Mexican food will forever remain a mystery to us both. Maybe their chefs all used to work in fireworks factories. It isn’t hot, it’s explosive. The trick is to keep a goodly supply of very cold water to hand, or preferably a fire-engine, put a tiny amount of suspect food on the last millimetre of a knife blade, and just touch it with the very tip of your tongue to minimize major tissue damage. Our first true Mexican food experience was at a ranch restaurant that catered for bus trips with a metzcal tasting and sales shop. Tequila and metzcal are related spirits distilled from the crushed and roasted pulp from the leaves of two different species of agave. Metzcal is found in the south, tequila in the north.
That’s the techie stuff out of the way. We haven’t tasted either, and judging from the reaction of people who have, we don’t want to. The traditional way of drinking either is to put a worm, or rather larvae, in the bottom of your glass, dip a piece of lime into a salt/ground up red larvae mixture, suck on the lime and then down the tequila/metzcal in one shot, and swallow the worm. Now can you see why we haven’t tasted it yet? You might as well distil a spirit from fermented cold rice pudding and drink it along with a cockroach. In the south of Mexico there are agave plantations of various sizes throughout the region, some for commercial production and some for home brew. You can even see primitive roasting ovens and circular concrete troughs with crushing wheels powered by donkeys in smaller settlements. They aren’t exactly hygienic.Cacti are everywhere, chiefly because the central highlands are so dry. Some species grow as big as trees. There is one variety, the ones with flat, oval sections known as prickly pear that is also grown on a commercial basis. Believe it or not, people eat these ovals. You see them for sale in supermarkets but with spines removed, and on restaurant menus. Perhaps you also detect a slightly masochistic streak in Mexicans – they eat cactus leaves flavoured with red hot chillies and wash it down with a spirit and worm.
We had done the Incas, the Tiahuanacans, the Chimu, the Mayans, and now it was time for the Zapotecs. That is why we drove to Oaxaca, to see Monte Alban, a hilltop archaeological site of pyramids, terraces and tombs. You find the theme of ball courts run through all of the Central American civilizations, a place where the game played with a heavy rubber ball was used for entertainment and also as a means of settling disputes. If two factions couldn’t agree, then the ballgame was used as the final deciding factor. Bill Shankly, one of the most successful Liverpool football managers, once said “football isn’t a matter of life and death, it’s more important than that”. In Central American culture, this form of football was a matter of life or death, except that it was better to loose than win.Our next archaeological site, Teotihuacan, lay to the north-east of Mexico City. We had no intention of visiting Mexico City – it is home to over 20 million people and its traffic congestion is legendary. Bad, non-existent or inaccurate road signage and out of date maps turned us into quivering wrecks. It took us all day to cover 100 kilometres between Puebla and Teotihuacan, trying to circumnavigate rather than be sucked into the vortex of Mexico City. We ended up driving through some very dodgy districts, trying not to make eye contact with anyone.
No-one knows who the Teotihuacans were or where they appeared from, so they are known as the Teotihuacans. Who makes the call about what names are given to which civilization? How did we know that the Zapotecs were the Zapotecs when they didn’t have a written history? What the Teotihuacans left were two huge pyramids, one, the Pyramid of the Moon; the other, the pyramid of the Sun, covers the same ground area as the great pyramid of Cheops in Egypt but is not quite as high. Between and beyond the two major pyramids lay many more minor pyramids, with a long central avenue lined with terraces and civil buildings. Now, they are grey coloured stone but originally they were rendered and painted brick red. It must have been a formidable sight in its heyday.Half a day drive north of Teotihuacan lies Tula, an older Olmec archaeological site that features huge statues as well as the characteristic pyramid structures. We always associated Central America with the Aztecs, so where did they fit into the chronology of Central American history? They came along later in the 12th century AD, down from Aztlan somewhere in northern Mexico and long after these earlier civilizations had disappeared. After 200 years of southward migration and violence, they re-branded themselves as the Mexica. Hence the name Mexico.
The Aztecs/Mexica took brutality and human sacrifice to whole new levels. After the construction of their new pyramid temple in what is now Mexico City, the human sacrifices that the temple dedication required took four days to complete. It is estimated that the Mexica got through 50,000 human sacrifices per year. They really were the neighbours from hell. Luckily, the Spanish colonisers in the sixteenth century had the benefit of firearms. Cortes defeated Montezuma, the last Mexica ruler. Montezuma is still extracting his own particularly savage revenge from invading foreign tourists.The closer we drove towards the USA, the more Americanised Mexico became - the bigger the supermarkets and the bigger the people. Mexicans really like their cakes and sweet sticky buns and it shows. From Tula it became a five day slog towards Chihuahua, the turn off point for our next target, the Copper Canyon. Our driving through Mexico was punctuated every day by army roadblocks with several soldiers heavily armed and with at least one armoured vehicle with machine gun. We were flagged down by every single roadblock.
Mexico has a serious drug problem in the form of drug cartels shifting vast amounts of cocaine and other drugs from Colombia to the USA. Mexico has decided to try to crack down, no pun intended, on this drug trafficking. Police do the detection work, the army do the “random” vehicle inspections. They were not random with us. They know that the drug runners use specially adapted 4WDs, or some of the numerous heavy goods vehicles, or sometimes passengers on the long distance buses are carriers.Random implies that there was a chance that we would be pulled in. There was nothing random about the way we were picked out from a queue of traffic every single time. Those personnel responsible for choosing vehicles to inspect aren’t the brightest stars in the universe, they just couldn’t stop themselves. Rather than choose the most likely vehicles, “profiling” as it’s called, they acted on an instant reaction to the TC. See TC, stick out the red flag.
The searches are futile. They fixated on our black bag tied onto the luggage rack. Why would any self-respecting drug smuggler use such a conspicuous vehicle and stash their dope in a totally visible bag? A narco’s number one priority is to make themselves look as normal and ordinary as possible, not stand out like a sore thumb. There isn’t one sniffer dog to be seen. These roadblocks didn’t frighten us so they certainly wouldn’t frighten any smuggler. We got so fed up with this lark that we decided to go deaf and blind. We avoided eye contact so we “didn’t see you flag us down”, and we “didn’t hear you shout”. They spoke not one word of English and when we did stop, we didn’t speak one word of Spanish. Roberto fumed and swore, I looked blank and showed them our map and pointed roughly in the direction of our next destination. After lots of theatrical shrugging of shoulders, they always capitulated and let us go.
As we approached Chihuahua we saw on CNN news that trouble was expected there, and after a particularly bloody weekend we saw that many policemen and drug runners had been shot in gun battles in Chihuahua. We also saw troop movements towards the north of Mexico. Chihuahua is the jumping off point for several of the land crossings into the USA, including ours. We rationalised that the drug cartels are highly unlikely to make a Best Western motel the site of their next gun battle. Strangely, Chihuahua is devoid of graffiti. Maybe the local drug mafiosi disapprove of tagging; maybe they take a pride in their surroundings – everyone has to live somewhere and after all, they have their own highly effective brand of law enforcement.
Copper Canyon is deeper in places than the Grand Canyon, but nowhere near as spectacular. From Chihuahua it takes about half a day to reach Creel, a not too tourist town with basic hotels that is the jumping off point for viewing the canyon. There is a tourist railway line from Chihuahua to Los Moles on the Pacific coast that travels along the edge of the canyon. This is how most tourists see Copper Canyon. We saw the canyon by road trips from Creel; one to Divisidero, a very small town which offers the best views of the canyon, and a second trip south that takes in canyons and mesas on the opposite side of Copper Canyon. We found this latter trip to be a sublime drive with great scenery, something we haven’t been able to say about the rest of the driving that we’ve done in Mexico.On our return to Chihuahua we came across a serious army checkpoint with soldiers fully and extensively armed, wearing helmets, bullet proof vests, full camouflage and face masks, presumably so that the narcos couldn’t identify them. They were not messing around and again, we were pulled in. Some of the bigger pickups were being thoroughly searched. Our searcher spoke excellent English so Roberto gave him a real verbal earbashing. I expected us both to be clapped in irons, but the officer agreed that we shouldn’t have been pulled in and let us go after only searching, yes, you guessed it, the black bag on the luggage carrier.
We had two days solid driving to get to the USA border from Chihuahua. How many more of these roadblocks were we to come across? We expected more as we got closer to the USA but no, there were only two roadblocks on the last day and both were feeble affairs with only a cursory prod and poke. An elderly couple at the last roadblock told us that fifteen people had been murdered in their small town in the last two months, all drug related killings and all since the start of the crackdown.
The parts of Mexico we have seen don’t leave the pulse racing. It’s hot and dry and dusty in the highlands with pale pink hills sparsely dotted with charcoal grey stunted trees and cactus. Where water has been applied it is surprisingly verdant with huge expanses of vegetables and fruit grown on an industrial scale. Mexico also has its heavy industry with petro-chemical and power plants chucking out pollution that you can taste and see. Towns and cities are scruffy, untidy, smelly from bad drains, graffiti ridden and garbage strewn. It does have poverty but not on the scale we expected, and many more people making a basic living than we expected. We found many more modern cars on the road than the rest of Central America. Somehow it lacked identity. It is worth visiting for its archaeological sites, which are superb.There is an awful lot of Mexico that we haven’t seen – the jungle-clad Yucatan peninsular with its beaches and archaeological sites, the Pacific coast with the huge westernised high rise beach resorts and still much of the central highlands, so we cannot comment on these areas. It is a huge country. Basically all we have done is drive through the central spine. Our third target we set ourselves – to cross out of Central America and into the USA – was upon us.
Exit from Mexico was easy, once we found out where to go, and our entry into the USA was totally painless. Where are all the touts, vagrants, food sellers, money changers, where is the noise, the confusion, the smells, the crowds, the photocopying, the stamping, the signing and counter-signing, colourful clothing, black hair, bronzed skins, horns blaring, shouting? Where is that maddening buzz?We found ourselves smoothly and calmly driving into Douglas, Arizona. Yeah, corny but we couldn’t resist it. All our previous border crossings had been raucous affairs where we were dashed from pillar to post and then catapulted into the next country. This felt like a door slowly but surely closing behind us, gradually, antiseptically fading out the sounds, smells, tastes, sights and feel of Latin America. We should have felt elated at having completed a major part of our trip, but there was a strange sense of loss.
It’s still an awful long way to Prudoe Bay in Alaska. Doubtless we’ll be able to find some rough roads to liven things up a bit.
