October 27, Guadalajara
We arrived in Mazatlan on Thursday and it is the nicest town we have seen so far in Mexico. The city was not very large, centered on a town square was dominated by a cathedral. The town has a fair number of tourists, and apparently it is a cruise ship stop. Cathy, Ruth, Merv and I cruised through the cafes and restaurants, sampling the mainland Mexican cuisine - a much nicer variety that Baja, though still nothing anywhere near healthy. We also stopped by the city's opera house, and happened to see that Arturo Sandoval was playing Friday night. We decided to go, then found out that a hurricane was coming. Actually I was in an internet cafe and saw that someone had left open a browser with a huge photo of a hurricane over what looked like southern Mexico... which prompted us to go to weatherchannel.com, where we saw a storm roughly the size of Mexico headed for us. Only afterwards did we notice that people were taping crosses onto their windows to protect them from windblasts. Merv and I checked to make sure that the bikes were high enough to not get swamped, and we then waited for the storm.
So we weren't sure it was still going to happen, but by the evening the hurricane had headed for land south of us, and all we'd seen was a brief but intense shower. However by this time Ruth wasn't feeling well, so Cathy and I were on our own. The concert was on, and by the time we I'd heard the name but didn't know his music. We got tickets and went into the opera house, which was quite old and recently restored, with a pair of birds looking for a way out. I went in with thoughts that I should see some Latin music, because we're in Mexico, but didn't expect to be very interested. The show turned out to be one of the best liver performances I've ever seen - incredible jazz playing with Latin influences and a sense of humor and playfulness that modern jazz musicians generally don't have. I'm now interested in seeing more Cuban music - I'll try to see Buena Vista Social Club if I can find it down here.
We left Mazatlan the next day for Tepic, starting our route towards the central plateau of Mexico. Merv and Ruth are headed north, so we've parted ways for now, but who knows, we may meet again in the south. We headed out on the highway south - another toll road, and an expensive one, but we were expecting rain, so it seemed worth it. As we headed south along the coast, we at first saw little sign of the hurricane, but then in a few miles we started seeing road signs twisted and torn, ancient trees split in half, and houses with their roofs torn off. It looked like the storm would have been damaging anywhere, but so many of the houses in Mexico are just tin roofs over wooden or concrete walls, and under normal circumstances these are weighted down with a few large rocks - nothing that would stop these winds. We turned inland 30 miles before reaching Puerto Vallarta of Love Boat fame, which was the center of the devastation. We heard that it was now a disaster area, and we worried about bridges being out and hordes of refugees in the hotels in Tepic.
When we got into Tepic - which we quickly renamed Septic, because it was a fairly ugly town - we went to the first hotel in our guidebook, which took us nearly an hour to find. The hotel was half empty - I guess that the people most affected by the hurricane couldn't afford the $10 we were paying, which made me feel pretty guilty. The hotel was half of what had originally been a larger hotel, and then was cut in half down the middle, so that the lobby was only half a lobby. The respective owners sat on opposite sides of a thin jury rigged partition - it sounded like there must be a good story in this, since both hotels were apparently owned by the same family - perhaps a family argument. Since the stairs that led up to the balcony for the second story were on the other side, they had improvised a rather perilous set of steep stairs out of cinder blocks, which we used to carry up our 7 bags of gear. The owner and his son helped us heave the bike over the steps, through the lobby and into the truncated courtyard. The streets were dark and dismal, and not having anything nice looking in our neighborhood we ended up giving in and hitting a Pizza Hut for dinner.
Today we started for Guadalajara, Mexico's second largest city. We were lucky, because today is Sunday, which means only a fraction of the usual traffic. The toll road took us through more mountains, past vast plantations of Agave cacti. Tequila is legally only tequila if it is made in Guadalajara state, the same way that Tabasco must come from the state of Tabasco. The cacti grew to 5 feet wide in gravelly sand, long bluish green pointed leaves waiting five years to be harvested. There was also a Jose Cuervo distillery nearby somewhere, but on a Mexican road the last thing I needed was some free samples after the factory tour - maybe I'll try some in town, where I can have a taxi get me home.
October 29, Guadalajara
Guadalajara has grown on me quickly. I had my first clamato today, something like a Bloody Mary without the vodka, served with a beer and salt on the glass. I sipped a few while we sat in a balcony restaurant overlooking one of the busiest streets. It's a very busy place - the entire zone where we are is jammed with traffic and parking is illegal almost anywhere, but luckily the bike is now ensconsed in the courtyard of the former monastery where we are now staying. We moved here after Cathy was kept awake all night in our previous hotel by a drunk who was blasting Tchaikosky's Nutcracker all night. The new hotel is in a beautiful room with tall ceilings and wood paneling, with courtyards that are open to the sky, and thick walls that almost shut out the noise of the passing buses and trucks.
The downtown is mostly five story buildings that all remind of Macy's in Manhattan. We've ended up staying an extra day to explore the sights since everything was closed on Monday. Yesterday we got to the Mariachi Square, where I negotiated a "concert" with the head of the 20 strong mariachi player contingent. I'd been hoping to listen in as other tourists bought songs, but the mariachis outnumbered the gringos by ten to one, so I had to actually break down and pay them. I asked him how many songs this would be, because I read in the guidebook that you should ask in advance. He assured me it would be several canciones, and rounded up a small orchestra, with two different singing sections, so we were literally surrounded by the music at our table. Then they played one song - albeit one good song - and they were done. I tried to argue with them, but the man had already taken my 100 pesos ($10) so I just chalked it up to experience - never pay anyone here until they are done. A few other gringos took the bait after us, but not for the entire group, and we heard a few more songs while I sipped beer and Cathy had a Fresca.
That night we tried to catch some jazz, but wound up with Spanish classical guitar, which was also really good. I sampled a few kinds of tequila, much better than the Jose Cuervo I'm used to, but still not really something I would try savor - the lime and salt really help block out the taste. The guitarist started taking requests - some of the people in the audience asked for some pop music, so I then asked the guy to play some blues, which was good without being at all bluesy.
Today we hit the city park, and saw a butterfly preserve, some local birds, and an orchid room. in the butterfly dome we were surrounded by an incredible variety of butterflies, all local to the state, along with displays about migratory patterns and their lifecycles. There was also another domed area with birds, but most of them seemed fairly listless - Cathy was hoping to catch a resplendent quetzal from Guatemala, but we had no luck there. It was a nice break from the concrete and diesel exhaust though.
Back in the main tourist area we then hit the Hospicio Cabaņa, the Cathedral, a local museum, and the governor's palace. The palace had an exhibit on the making of tequila, which really explains the taste - the open vats attract bugs and other vermin, and this is the nice public relations version of the process. Do I want to know more? Not really. Since these guys get eliminated in the straining process, the worm than winds up in mescal must be put in there afterwards... and really, what's the difference?
The Hospicio Cabaņa was the highlight of all of this - it features murals by Orozco, one of the premier muralists of Mexico. The most famous muralists were Orozco and Diego Rivera, and they both did historical murals with leftist themes back in the 30's and 40's. What was originally the chapel was covered with murals depicting the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Aztec resistance, and incredible brutality. The images are a mixture of history with facist imagery from the Twentieth Century of barb wire and people in chains. Horses are depicted as tanks, and the introduction of the wheel is something sinister that crushes the indigenas underneath it. The centerpiece is the Hombre Del Fuego, on the inside of the dome, where normally there would be a vision of God and Heaven there is a hellish figure that you see as if from underneath, burning everything around him. Truly incredible painting, even if very grim. I can't wait to see the Diego Rivera murals in Mexico City.
October 31, Guanajuato
The way to Guanajuato was filled with butterflies of every color, clouds of them that would weave towards us and then usually somehow miss us at the last second - most of the time. It was sad to stop for gas and have a virtually intact monarch butterfly plastered to the windscreen. As we went down the road after that, I had to resist the urge to try to dodge them because I'd probably send us off the road into the ditch. After reading On the Road I'd expected clouds of giant insects, but the butterflies were a nice surprise, though they sometimes made seeing the road a little difficult, since they were mezmerizing in their colors and patterns.
The City of Guanajuato was originally one giant silver mine, and now that the mining is gone, the tunnels that remain have been made into the main through roads, snaking beneath the city in a maze of connecting passages, slightly taller than the buses. These are sometimes open to the sky, looking up to colonial houses that perch at the edges of the canyons, and sometimes pitch black. There are sidewalks in the tunnels with stairs leading up to the streets, but few ramps to the surface, and when you reemerge you may find you are now on the other side of town. We found a hotel and I drove up several steps into the lobby - I'm getting good at this now - and we had a nice room in an old hotel overlooking an interior courtyard with a pool.
The next day was Halloween, a holiday that has been imported from the United States by Mexican immigrants. It is only a few days before the Day of the Dead, and the two holidays seem to be merging - you can only hope that American commercialism doesn't end up killing the local traditions. As it happens, the high mineral content of the local soil has naturally mummified bodies in the local cemeteries, and one of the big attractions in Guanajuato is the Museo del Mumias. We walked up a huge hill to it, and got lost at one point in a really bad looking section of town - the people still had cars and houses, but there was an Appalachian feeling to the way that people used their front yards as garbage dumps.
The Salon of the Dead was a collection of death themed oddities. Most of the Salon was holograms and bizarre artifacts like something out of Ripply's Believe It or Not - nothing really disturbing. The museum, on the other hand, was room after room of stacked glass cases with real dead bodies, most of them fairly grotesque. I wondered how they had gotten the permission to disinter all of these people and put them on display, then figured that they were probably all poor people who had been in a potter's field, with no families to argue. The corpses ran the gamut from well preserved to skeletons with tissue paper wrappings of mineralized skin - with a few really strange ones like a bloated drowning victim, and a case of infants. It seemed like the most appropriate thing we could have done on Halloween, and it was also a good lead-in to the Day of the Dead.
Guanajuato is the state where Mexican independence began, and the centerpiece in the city of Guanajuato was a monument to Pipila, a huge primitive looking statue out of hundreds of pieces of stone mortared together. Pipila was a hero in the War of Independence who slaughtered a garrison of Spanish soldiers - leading to a counterreaction from the Spanish that devastated the city. It overlooks the city from a hilltop, and after seeing it we took a funicular back down into the center of town. We also went to the Museum of the Iconography of Don Quixote - which featured a Day of the Dead scuplture of skeletons of Don Quixote, Sancho Panza and their horses, in full charge. We also saw the childhood home of Diego Rivera, with some of his artwork, and finished up by going to the Granary, now a historical museum.
The Granary was where the four original leaders of the independence movement, including Hidalgo himself, were beheaded, following Pipila's attack. Their heads were displayed in cages from the four corners of the building as a warning. The Guanajuato region bore the brunt of the war against the Spanish - it had originally been the richest part of Mexico, but was devastated after a decade of war. Originally the upper and lower classes of Guanajuato and Mexico in general were united in the fight, but freedom finally came when Santa Ana, a general for the Spanish, turned traitor and joined the rebels - and then tried to become king. This replaced the Spanish oligarchy with a native one, and the lower classes were no better off than before. Only after another 40 years and another war (and briefly an Emperor from France) did the rebels in Guanajuato finally achieve their goals and install a more progressive government. The matyred leaders of the original rebellion now have their names on the major streets of every Mexican City, so I guess they had the last laugh.
Kids here wear the same kinds of costumes that you can buy in Kmart for the most part, but there were some inventive ones. Outside there were four kids in costume - I thought this was an interesting sign of how Mexico was changing, so I tried for a photo - and when they saw me doing this, they insisted that I take another one with their masks on, while they held up their arms and roared like the monsters from Where the Wild Things Are. I expected them to come across the street and try to get some money, but they were happy just to have their photos taken.
Later that night we headed down to the Union Jardin, and got caught in a rainstorm. Cathy and I huddled together under an umbrella in an outdoor cafe until finally the rain became too hard and we had to go inside. We moved on to the Cafe Van Gogh, with gesso copies in grand scale of his paintings on the wall. Guanajuato is truly beautiful, like a Venice with tunnels instead of canals, and we wandered through its back alleys and plazas, but decided not to chance the tunnels at night. Tonight I was going to write this up - but the internet for the entire country is down because of a system failure in the Telmex offices, so I guess it will have to wait until we get through Mexico City.
November 6, Cuernavaca
Our arrival in Mexico City was just short of miraculous on November 1. The day started out well, but quickly became the worst since the Deadhorse run. Since we landed in Mazatlan I had been planning what could be described as a strategic assault on Mexico City. I'd heard terrible things about the traffic, the pollution, and the crime. Even the police were a major problem - we talked to Lariza, a friend of Monica's in San Fransisco and she said that in the course of her fast drive from San Fransisco to Nicaragua she was only stopped by the police in all of Mexico and Central America for a mordida ("little bite", or bribe) 4 times - all in one afternoon as she tried to drive through the Mexico City area to the Guatemalan border. It seemed crazy to try to bring the motorcycle in, since if we didn't get bike-jacked or crushed by a pack of buses we'd have to choose our hotel based on where we could find secure parking. I always tell tourists who try to visit New York that if they want to stay in Manhattan, learn to love the subway, and I decided to take my own advice on this.
The best solution was to not stay in the city at night at all; we'd ride down to one of the satellite cities an hour or so away, and take buses in from the suburbs to the trains. This would mean we'd lose some sightseeing time, but on the other hand we didn't care about the nightlife so we could get up really early, go in and take the train around, and be out again before dark. After consulting Let's Go on the literally hundreds of things to see, we decided on a city, which was Cuernavaca, described as a upper class hangout and language school nexus for gringos, to the south of Mexico City. Hmmm... carjacking or capuccino? Self denying though I am, this wasn't a hard call. So it wasn't going to be very genuine, but we assumed the city was going to be very stressful by day, so having an easy place to come back to had a lot of appeal. This left us with the task of getting around the region to Cuernavaca - all roads lead to Mexico City. We had a road atlas that I bought in Guadalajara and a AAA map that I'd bought in Seattle - and they didn't agree on where some of the roads were. The road atlas was recent, and had a better track record with its predictions, so we looked in it and found a route that took us 50 miles to the west of Mexico City through the city of Tula.
We wanted to avoid Tula also, but that was asking a little too much. Roads in Mexico tend to run right through the hearts of the cities, and Mexico City is so big that even the satellite cities 100 miles away are large - it's something like the New York metro area, where the city is so large that its influence is felt throughout the northeast. Mexico City itself has 20 million people, and about half of Mexico's 125 million or so people live in the central plateau, within a few hundred miles of Mexico City. We had decided to try to get to Cuernavaca in one day, because we'd spent an extra day in Guanajuato, and we wanted to be in Cuernavaca for the Day of the Dead. Our plan had us riding 275 miles from Guanajuato, to just northwest of Mexico City, then straight down outside of the city, and then east to Cuernavaca. We figured that if we got through Tula quickly, we could actually arrive in Cuernavaca long before dark. We started out at 8:45am, and rode hard for 6 hours with quick snacks and gas stops. So far the only incident of the day was when a bird had flown into the window of the truck stop where we had lunch. It was only stunned, and after Cathy rescued it, it flew away apparently unharmed. This seemed like a good omen. By around 3:30 we were entering Tula, our last major barrier before we were on the road to Cuernavaca.
We drove through most of the city without incident, but then as we approached the highways that led out of Mexico City, things slowed to a crawl. I had aluminum panniers and a passenger, and random pedestrians and vendors popped out between cars, so I couldn't cut through the gridlock between the cars and buses the way I would have liked to. We slowly reached a junction where we had to make a turn, and since as usual there were no signs, we had to guess which way to go - and this was the fatal moment that determined the rest of the day. Based on a few glances at the map on my tank bag, I guessed left, which led us into the market area of the city. Formal shops on one side competed with temporary shacks on the other, and the ostensibly two lane street was jammed with randomly parked cars, produce, wandering families, honking taxis and swarms of vendors wandering through the traffic. We went from a crawl to immobilized, as we sat behind a queue of buses, which in turn had to wait for people to push wheelbarrows of fruit and racks of clothes down the street. We tried to keep our cool - some bumps in the road were to be expected on a day like this. After about an hour, we got out of the crowd, and got our bearings back, and made a right turn onto the major avenue west - a street with 3 lanes on each side, with 100 meters of grass in the center in which stood power pylons.
It seemed like it would be a fast street, but this was the direction away from Mexico City, at 4:30pm on a Friday afternoon of a holiday weekend. Naturally, we were again completely immobilized. I was hoping for creeping traffic, where you move at walking speed for several miles, but we weren't even getting that most of the time. The bike started to overheat for the first time ever. After a mysterious pause for half an hour, we finally started moving slowly. Up the road half a mile, I spotted a street ahead that could lead us out of the city, and there was a turn for it to the left. No one else was making the turn, but I couldn't see any signs that prohibited it. On the other hand, with all of the buses around me I couldn't see much at all, and if it was New York - which often has similar problems - I'd probably have looked twice. I decided to go for it, and turned into the road across the median. As I was doing this, I realized there was a small convention of motorcycle cops taking place there, directing the traffic by hanging out in a circle, and one of them immediately broke away and pulled me over.
He was a guy in his 40's, mustache, sunglasses, beer belly and the motorcycle cop helmet - like CHiP's after 30 bad years of drinking and doughnuts. He looked at me in disbelief - surely I knew that I had made an illegal left turn. My Spanish ability was not good enough to explain that their was no sign, so I settled for playing dumb. I wasn't sure whether this would help me or hurt me, but I definitely couldn't speak well enough to talk my way out of it. He motioned for me to follow as he turned right and went against the other three lanes of traffic on the opposite side of the median and pulled his motorcycle onto the grass. I figured that getting out of the way couldn't help me, nor would going to a more remote place, so I looked confused and waited until the street was blocked by a truck. Ignorance is strength. He walked back from his bike, and tried to talk to me again - I just kept saying that I was lost and that I didn't understand - I didn't try to say I was innocent since that seemed to be beside the point.
He tried Cathy for language skills - he seemed to think that she understood him (and she did to some extent, but she also played dumb). Cathy was giving him her Madonna face - not Madonna as in the protean superstar with the occaisionally cone shaped breasts, but the mother of the big guy himself, Jesus. As Monica had explained to us in San Francisco, Mexico is a conservative culture, and many men have the tendancy to quickly place women in one of two categories - Madonna or whore. Whore is a bad place to be - this is the reason I refer to Cathy now as "mi esposa" (my wife) and not "mi novia" (girlfriend or fiancee) because apparently when you are in your 30's you're expected to be past the girlfriend/boyfriend stage in Mexico, as we learned in Baja. However if men think the woman is a Madonna type, they will generally show her (and as a result me as well) a great deal more consideration than they would a man alone. George also said this, and went on to say that two men on bikes would probably get stopped constantly by the police but as long as we were together I would probably have few problems. I hoped that this would help us here.
At last we came to he inevitable, the point where he asked for a mordida. One of the people we met on the ferry from Mazatlan, George, was from Mexico City, and he told us that in the city the cops no longer had any right to take away your license plate or your driving license, two ways in the past that they had compelled hapless tourists to pay the mordida. In fact the only thing the cops in Mexico City could do now was issue a ticket for about $6, which they were not allowed to accept money for, and could be paid at stores and banks almost anywhere. This was part of a large anti-corruption drive, one of the steps recommended by Rudolph Guiliani's consulting firm. We, however, were outside of Mexico City, in Mexico's Newark, so those rules did not apply here. I figured that the other cops would probably ask for a cut of his mordida, so he'd want to keep it as low key as possible. He asked for 1000 pesos - $100. I knew at this point that we weren't going to get away without paying anything.
Months ago, I started preparing a fake wallet - it has expired credit cards, a temporary license, supermarket cards, and about 200 pesos ($20) and a few single dollars. Any less, and it couldn't credibly be my real wallet since we were on a motorcycle, not riding a bus with a backpack, but all the rest of my cash was in my money belt. The wallet is as much for police as for thieves. So I took out the wallet, held it up, opened it, and held aloft the $22 inside for anyone within 50 meters to see, and said "this is it!" really loudly. The risk here was that the other cops would also want a cut, and I'd not get away before they stopped us for hours and extracted a few hundred dollars - some people had said in a mordida situation, let them take you to the station, but others had said if you wind up there you'll have to bribe five people instead of one to get out. I was also blocking traffic.
The cop motioned frantically for me to lower the money and for me to hand it to him down low. I knew at this point that I could probably get away without paying anything - if he was this embarrassed already, all I had to do was agree to pay but ask for a receipt... a ballsy move that many motorcycle riders have successfully used to get out of mordida situations. On the other hand, I'd budgeted about $300 for bribes in Mexico based on the horror stories of other travellers, and I'd been in the country for over 2 weeks and not had to pay any. Also, if I stopped for an hour we'd never make Cuernavaca before dark, and if push came to shove the supervisor might decide to make my life very difficult, so $22 was ok by me. For some strange reason, the cop then wanted to give me directions - as if he wanted to give some service in return for his fee. I'd been stuck in traffic for hours with nothing to do but look at a map, and I was very aware of where I'd gone wrong before, so I knew immediately that his instructions were either wrong or would take me through Mexico City after dark - either way, thanks but no thanks. I yessed him to death when he point left, and drove straight on to the highway. My first mordida situation had gone fairly well.
This episode had taken us to 5:30, but Cuernavaca was supposed to be only 50 kilometers (about 31 miles) away. We had half an hour of sunlight left, and then we'd have another 20 minutes or so of twilight, and then we'd be on the Mexican roads with no street lights, random pot holes, hidden speed bumps, and possibly bandits, trying to navigate with a puny motorcycle headlight. We headed down the main highway, looking for the turn to the east on a secondary road that would take us over the hills to Cuernavaca. We made a turn in the middle of a large town, and headed out along a road that ran through smaller towns. It was the day before the Day of the Dead, and we could see decorations, and in a distant cemetery there were bonfires. It was easy to imagine that possibly these villages were here 500 years ago, looking almost the same on this day, as the Aztecs honored their ancestors. As we passed through one of the towns, and I stopped to ask directions we saw a pack of stray dogs, a common site in Mexico, try to cross the street and one of them got hit by a car and limped away.
It was getting dark. The dusty concrete town didn't look like a place where we'd really want to spend the night. We pushed on down the road, and must have missed our turnoff. As night fell we found ourselves confronting the unreal vision of a Holiday Inn. I couldn't believe it at first, but we stopped, and it seemed to actually be the real thing. We thought about taking a room, and asked the clerk how much it would be. For us, only $65 - normally it was $80. We thought it over. The clerk asked us where we were trying to get to, and we told him Cuernavaca. He drew us a map to the entrance ramp, but said the road there could have bandits. We thought this was probably a story to get us to stay, but we weren't sure, since there were warnings for many Mexican roads after dark, and for Mexico City there were definitely carjacking problems. We walked outside, not sure what to do. Our rule was to be off the road at night, but we were only 50 kilometers away (30 miles) - half an hour under normal circumstances. We decided to push on, but if anything went wrong we would return to the Holiday Inn.
So we went down to the on ramp, overshot it, and nearly got hit by a bus when we tried to turn around. We got on the right road, but somehow in the wrong direction. The Mexican road signs always indicate the towns they go to, not directions, so if you are unfamiliar with the names - or the names are very similar - you can easily get going the wrong way. We took a 20 minute detour into a town we definitely did not want to stay in, and eventually got back to our road. As we came back to the overpass for the Holiday Inn, I asked Cathy if she wanted to stop. Somehow we miscommunicated - we were both thinking at this point that it would be a better idea to pay the $65 and get off the road, but I thought she wanted to continue, and she thought I did. Oops.
On we went, first through tiny towns ridden with speed bumps, then into the hills. It started to rain. The road was crowded with vehicles, and they pulled in and out of the road very quickly in the towns, with little warning. Packs of dogs became braver at night and charged out at us with suicidal ferociousness, while if we left more than 10 feet between us and the car in front, the car behind us would gun it and head for a collision on the opposite side of the road with oncoming cars, cutting in front of us at the last possible second. A truck behind us seemed to turn a spotlight on us as we rode, making me wonder about the bandit warning. There were so many things working against us, it was almost funny. I pulled over for a minute in the middle of a town to let the truck go by. After 15 miles, there seemed to be little point in going back so we continued.
Then we started climbing the mountain towards Lagos de Zampoteca, and the lightning started. Well, I thought, at least now when it flashes I can see how much of a drop it is. It would have been a beautiful ride by day around a mountain through pine trees, but at night it was harrowing, with tight switchbacks and steep slopes that forced me to drop the bike a few gears to slow down to 10 mph, as the cars behind me honked. This was not going to be a half hour ride. My headlight was too dim to see well on my own, so I tried to stick close to a car in front of me. As we crested the top, we passed a police truck, and both Cathy and I wondered if it was really the police. Eventually the road came to an end in another town, and we had to guess directions again a few times in the dark, as we descended extremely steep wet roads. Somehow, with one or two stops for directions, we made the right turns, and made it to the outskirts of Cuernavaca.
We descended into the center of town, and got lost a few times looking for the area with the cheap hotels, and then tried to find the one where we had made a reservation. At last, we made it to the Hotel America, where the management had no idea that we had called, and was not exactly falling over themselves to make us welcome. They allowed me to bring the bike into their interior courtyard, paved with marble - and as I tried the usual trick of driving up the curb and a few steps, the bike slipped backwards and I dropped it on the wet marble. It had not been a banner day, but at 10pm we were finally in a room. That night we decided not only were we not going to drive at night again, but we'd also stop wherever we were an hour before dark, around 5pm, and get a hotel, even if we hadn't gotten to where we wanted to be.
The next day we switched hotels, and then got ready for the evening's Day of the Dead festivities. We were expecting something spectacular - Halloween in Guanajuato had been pretty good, and that wasn't even a traditional Mexican holiday, but seemed to have been tossed in since it turned the Day of the Dead into a 3 day death-themed megafiesta. Turns out that for most Mexicans, the Day of the Dead is actually more of a family holiday, and there wasn't too much going on out in the zocolo or the town's main park. The biggest event was a group of 20-30 people doing a series of Aztec dances, in traditional costumes with giant quetzal feathers up to five feet long, and shakers made of nut shells around their feet. Most of them knew what they were doing, but it was slightly ruined by the inclusion of some new agey gringos in American Indian dress, obviously on the Flake Exchange Program, who looked like they had just put down their dreamcatchers long enough to finish their first Aztec Dance Workshop that afternoon.
In the center off to one side was the Day of the Dead altar, very beautiful with dozens of items from breads to chocolate that are traditionally offered to the ancestors, along with sand paintings of various Aztec gods and other scenes and dozens of candles as darkness fell. As the quetzal feathers swirled in place and the drums were pounded, ten meters away in a different square there was another group doing ballroom dancing, with a backdrop of tributes to people who had died of AIDS on the steps. It was probably a gay group, but it was all male-female couples dancing in the area in front of the steps - Mexico is still fairly conservative. Some of them were very good, and it made an interesting contrast to the Aztec dancers - the very new progressive side of Mexico versus the most traditional elements of it.
The biggest element of the Day of the Dead for most people seemed to be the altars - common in farmacias and tiendas, restaurants and appliance stores. These were not abstract confucist ancestors - they included pictures of the people, sometimes with charicatures that showed them as skeletons, and other comical depictions of the dead. We were told that people also built these in cemeteries where their family members were buried, but that didn't seem like the kind of event that tourists should intrude on, so we didn't see it. Another local custom was that the trick-or-treat of Halloween continued, as an excuse for aggressive street begging by kids. We bought some candy and gave it out to the kids with the plastic pumpkins who seemed non-plussed that they got something out of us but it wasn't cash. This actually worked well, because as soon as the rest of the child-swarm realized that all they were going to get was useless candy, they left us alone faster than if we had given nothing.
After dark we sat in a cafe getting some food and saw a group of people in skeleton costumes who actually were protestors - one of them let me pose for a picture next to him - but we never knew exactly what they were protesting. Soon after this, a Mexican man introduced himself to us in English. Virgilio Gonzalez was in his 50's, with his wife, his son who was close to my age, and his wife's employee, a woman I at first thought was the son's girlfriend. In a few minutes we were talking about our trip, and half an hour later he invited us back to his house for a drink. I was hoping this might be an interesting way to see the inside of the customs around the Day of the Dead, but they had no altar. I can say this for certain because he showed us every nook, cranny, closet and crawlspace in the house.
He was extremely proud of it, since he had risen from very humble means as a driver at the Four Seasons in Mexico City for rich travellers. He had bought some land in a brand new subdivision in a very nice location on a high hill overlooking Cuernavaca, and explained to me that the other gates and landscaping of the surrounding houses were knockoffs of the way he had done his, but they had missed the subtler features of his creation like the electrically controlled security gates. It was about the size and typical construction of a Queens row house, but out of concrete, with some really nice woodworking and tile work - I assumed that he was showing it to me because he had done it, but actually he had contracted it, so I guess the point was that he could afford it. I tried to keep the admiration up as we saw the guest bedroom, their bedroom, the storage area, the extra bathroom...
We then heard about the business that the wife had launched in making bathroom cosies for toilet paper rolls. She was apparently now the main breadwinner of the family due to her entrepreneurial spirit, and the girl was from a village where most of the people were sewing for her. I never did figure out why she was spending the night if she wasn't the girlfriend of their son. As they showed us the bathroom sets and asked if $20 was not a good price, Cathy and I were both wondering about their motives in bringing us there - I felt like someone invited to dinner by Amway salespeople. But aside from the social climbing aspect, they were nice, likable people, and the wife insisted on giving Cathy one of the corn silk dolls that she collected. After the tour and a discussion of the career prospects of their kids, we had a beer, did a few toasts, and their son dropped us back at our hotel. I felt like I had done an incidental guest appearance on the Mexican version of 'Keeping Up Appearances'.
The next day the hell ride started taking its toll on both of us. I've also unwisely experimented with chilaquiles for breakfast, which were some kind of small tacos in green sauce that really looked like food that could make you sick, and probably did. Since Sunday, I've had turista as well as a high fever every day in the afternoon into the evening. The first attack came Sunday when we went into Mexico City for the first time. We've been keeping a really aggressive schedule of visiting cultural sites in Mexico - mainly because we want to leave central Mexico, where all of the big grimy cities are, but I don't want to go without seeing as much of the cultural sites as I can. It's one of those Catch 22's of a trip like this - I will probably never have a better opportunity to see all of the things in Mexico City and the surrounding area, which makes me feel obligated to see as much as I can, which in turn makes the whole thing feel like a forced march.
We headed into Mexico City early Sunday morning by express bus from Cuernavaca, in heavy rain as the bus sped around the curves up and down the mountain. Our main target was the Musuem of Anthropology, but we were also hoping to see some of the art museums in the area if we had time. We were both feeling a little off when the day started, but as we marched throught the park to the museum it progressed and I started feeling very weak, and I actually found myself having to sit down in some of the galleries in the museum, in between running to the bathroom. Having turista made things truly miserable, since about half of the toilets in Mexico have no seats, and it seems like the other half have no toilet paper. You end up learning to bring your own, but it is still never a pleasant experience. I'd guess that they all start with toilet seats - maybe most of them make their way to small shacks in the outskirts of the city too poor to afford to buy one. The bathroom in our hotel was an anti-theft compact porcelain job where something like a seat was built in - a might bit chilly when you have shakes and a fever in the middle of the night. Add this to the fact that most Mexican bathrooms have a basket for the used toilet paper, since the plumbing for some reason can't handle it, and being in the bathroom here is a really pleasant experience.
By the afternoon I was really starting to be out of it. We were there to see the Sun Stone, Aztec, Maya and Teotihuacan artifacts, and exhibits of the other civilizations like the Olmecs, but we quickly pared down our schedule. We did manage to zip through an art museum on our way back to the subway when I had another spike in energy, and then we got out of town. We found the southern bus station and tried to get tickets, and even though a bus for Cuernavaca left every 5 minutes, we got the wrong tickets 3 times, which meant a trip through a security checkpoint with a metal detector each time. We finally got on a bus, and I pretty much passed out... from time to time, I came out of my delirium to catch a few minutes of 'Save the Last Dance', the movie that the bus was playing, and wished I could get back to visions of tarantulas and snakes. I must have looked like death warmed over - as we got out in Cuernavaca in the rain she got us a cab because she didn't want me to try to walk back. That evening I was delirious with fever for a few hours, and as I came back to coherence there was a huge spider-like thing on the wall.
"Hey... am I hallucinating?" I asked.
"What do you me- oh my god what the hell is that!"
I rose from the dead to due my manly duties and managed to get it outside with a cup and a book cover, without killing whatever it was.
Later that night we were watching BBC World news, and in between news bits they kept showing an ad for a travel show - which featured some greying Brit sitting on a street corner with a burrito saying - no joke - "Mexican street food is among the best in the world," which made us burst into laughter each time they showed it.
Since then, I've been trying to do work on the website until I get sick every afternoon - a really dreary routine, but the website is coming along quickly. Cathy also is sick now, we think from a combination of altitude and the very past pace of sightseeing we kept up in Guanajuato and here. We're going to lie low here until we're feeling better, which may take a lot more hamburguesas and a lot less chilaquiles.
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