Silverknife

22nd of October 2008 - What (the Hell) Happened

It seems like about time to explain just why I suddenly changed all my plans and flew home on Thursday/Friday, scrapping my entire journey without so much as a word of advance warning. I've given a bunch of people (very brief) explanations in email, but I want to cover all the reasons, of which there are a few, all interrelated. And for those who are wondering, I decided to come back on Monday night, while I was failing to sleep in the cab of Carlos(the mechanic)'s truck.

Reason 1: Safety. I've been living on a shoestring for a long time, relying on hitchhiking, sleeping rough, and the kindness of strangers to keep my budget very low. I've always said that I balance security and experience on every decision I make, and as most of you are aware I usually choose experience! But in this case, the risks are just too great. If I try hitching and sleeping rough in Central and South America, particularly in the more turbulent and crime-ridden areas, I'm very likely to die, or at least lose things I really need.

Reason 2: Money. I'm broke at this point. My plan was to carry on to the Yucatan region, which includes Cancun and other popular holiday destinations (and theoretically more English speakers), and get some work to save up, the way I did in San Francisco. But the kind of wages I'll be making anywhere in Mexico, particularly working off the books, are going to be so low I could be working for another year just to build a shoestring budget for travel onwards - I'd barely make it to Peru, let alone on to New Zealand as per the original plan.

Reason 3: I hadn't seen my girlfriend or my family for a year and a quarter. On the current schedule, I was looking at another year, maybe a year and a half before I made it home. It's just too damn long.

Reason 4: As many of you have gathered from previous posts, I already feel like I've found the thing I was looking for, or at least a large part of it. And what I've found is that once home, safe and secure and surrounded by my family, new aspects of that discovery - of contentment, or gratitude, or peace, or whatever - keep unfolding, and I'm constantly understanding it better. Makes me feel certain this was the right thing.

Reason 5: It just felt like the right thing! And I've learned to trust that instinct because it always seems to lead me away from bad experiences and into good ones. Further proof of that: I had to borrow the money for my plane ticket from my parents, but as soon as I got back they told me that my wonderful Auntie Rosemary in Belfast was sending me some money leftover from the estate of my Great-Aunt Mary, which has enabled me to pay them back half of it right away and have enough money to cover my expenses until I'm working again. That's a little hint that I'm still in the right path.

Reason 6: Just a couple of months ago, I would have been mortified to be giving up and coming home after all the big claims and promises I'd made to everyone - I'd have felt like I failed. Now, I could care less what anyone thinks about my decision. Funnily enough, that might be the most important reason to make this choice.

I'm going to keep posting on here, at least for a while - I'm not sure I could stop writing, even if I wanted to. Next I'll go over, for anyone who's interested, where I go from here. Then I'm probably going to write a few posts about stuff I learned from travelling this way, which might be of some use to anyone who's considering a similar journey (first: My final kit list, after 15 months of testing and refinement). And I'm going to have plenty of interesting things to do in the next couple of months which should be worth a few posts - my diary's already filling up!

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

17th of October 2008 - Home

At 5am Greenwich time the lights come back up, the crew come round again with coffee, creamy yoghurts and jammy pastries, and everybody starts readying themselves for arrival. We hit the tarmac and taxi in to London Heathrow Terminal 1 just before 6am on Friday. It's still dark beyond the windows as we wind our sleepy way through the empty, echoing corridors and cross glass-walled bridges over deserted baggage halls. Immigration is a doddle - a friendly officer with a strong London accent compliments my baja jacket and wishes me a pleasant journey home, then I'm out on the busying concourse.

Yet again and in a slightly nostalgic turn of events Barclays have blocked my card as it was used in a different country - to be fair this time I didn't even bother to inform them where I'd be as it doesn't seem to make the slightest difference. Nonetheless I need cash to get home.

I go outside for my first cigarette in fifteen hours, and ask three men, impeccably-dressed in long dark coats and tailored suits, if I can borrow a quid for the payphone. After some translation (they turn out to be Russian), one of them hands me his mobile and tells me to take as long as I need. With my card unblocked I thank them and turn to go, and the youngest of the three stops me and hands me a brand new Shell Formula-1 baseball cap and a Moscow fridge magnet, with a wide smile and good wishes for my journey.

Money procured I take the long ride up the Picadilly line to Kings Cross. Everything I see is familiar, but tinged with a mixture of exciting strangeness and long nostalgia. Every brick terrace, skyscraper and narrow London road we pass under the clear, dawning sky is a wonderful rediscovery, and the strings of London-flavoured conversation which wind around me, seasoned with a hundred world languages, are both refreshing and comforting.

I lug my backpack up through the tunnels from the tube to the glass and steel edifice of the new St Pancras International station. All this was under construction when I worked as a ticket inspector on this line over four years ago, now the stations are integrated under one huge canopy and rail traffic for the whole north of Britain flows through here, as well as the terminus for the Eurostar sub-Channel train. The voices around me are British, French, German and many I can't identify.

I go outside for another cigarette and the air is crisp and clean, a perfect clear, sunny British autumn morning, my breath hanging in the air in white clouds. Long-familiar London, always magical to me, is fresh and new after my time away.

I catch a fast East Midlands Trains service (called Midland Mainline when I worked this line), and on a whim disembark at Luton station, my old stomping-ground, to see who's still around. I spend half an hour chatting with old colleagues before hopping another train on to Bedford, past the hedgerow-bordered fields of my home county, the trees already changing to orange, yellow and red, the first real signs of autumn I've seen since I left.

I disembark at good old Bedford station at around 11am, and make a phone call. In ten minutes a silver car pulls up and I get to hug my dad for the first time in 15 months. He drives me home in a wash of emotions, through the town centre I've known all my life which seems suddenly impossibly small, and along by the beautiful River Ouse, lined with great, old flame-red trees.

At my parents' new house, a cosy detached two-storey outside the town centre, I get the tour and my dad heats up soup and makes me a cheese and onion sandwich while I sort through my kit. We take a short walk down to Castle Road so I can get the pork pie I've been craving for a year and a quarter. I tell my story of the last few days, and partway through unpacking I fall asleep on the sofa for four hours. When I wake, my mum is home from work. The rest of the evening is spent in reminiscence and catching up (and a wonderful venison stew cooked by my mum). I fall into bed feeling like I haven't slept in a week.

Now it's Sunday night, and I'm at my girlfriend Ellen's house in the little village of Rushden, about half an hour's drive from Bedford. Tomorrow, life starts again. I have to plan, make decisions, most importantly I have to get back in touch with people. Right now nobody knows I'm back except my close family and Ellen.

There's a soft bed with a warm girl in it upstairs, but I can't sleep - jetlag's messing with my sleep cycle. It's 1am, but my brain's still back in North America, where it's 7 in the evening. For now, I'm in a little pocket of quiet between two lives. And the journey's over. For now.

(Explanations will follow shortly).

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

16th of October 2008 - Departure

Night at Bonito Juarez International Airport passes slowly, as the crowds thin, the echoing white tiled spaces become quiet and the rows of restaurants and overpriced souvenir shops close for a few hours.

Around 1am I meet Diana, who I end up talking to for most of the rest of the night. She's a Mexican citizen but has Canadian residency - she's been living in Vancouver for some time with her two children. She's returned here to fly out to her hometown of Reynosa and get married, but within minutes of arriving she had her purse stolen, with her passport and Mexican ID, money and credit cards. She's scared and lost, not least because, as she tells me, getting documents replaced in Mexico is a longwinded nightmare.

She's inquired of the dozens of security staff and police who patrol the airport in dramatic-looking uniforms covered in gold braid and badges, but none of them seem to have any interest in helping her, except one young woman who gave her money for the phone to contact some friends - they'll be coming to help if she's still stuck here in the morning. In the meantime she's waiting for the airline desk to open so she can try and get on her flight to Reynosa without documents.

Diana leaves for the desk at half past five with my best wishes and hopes of a happy conclusion but not much hope on her part, and shortly thereafter I leave myself to make an early check-in for my own flight and get rid of my burdensome rucksack for a while.

Booking in for an international flight turns out to be a mildly annoying and involved process requiring trips to different windows, and at the last minute I have to pay an exit fee of two hundred and thirty pesos to have my visa processed for departure, which was not mentioned at any previous point. Fortunately I have some extra money in my account now, courtesy of my parents, and I'm able to go to an ATM and pay with cash.

The first leg of my flight will be to Chicago O'Hare airport, and on being handed my documentation I find that I will have to pass through an Immigration check between terminals while I'm there, even though I'm in transit. I'm seized by fear - I still have my exit visa for the States attached to my passport, which I was supposed to hand back at the border. Of course I have the very good excuse that I never saw a US border agent, but questions are bound to be asked.

To add to my worry, my paid-up Mexican visa is now stapled to my outgoing ticket, suggesting that it will stay with me on this leg of the journey and provide evidence to the Americans that I didn't leave the States until 10 months after my tourist visa expired. I'm in an intermittent cold sweat as I check through security and take my seat at the gate with a couple of hours to go until my 9:10am flight.

To my relief the Mexican visa is taken away with the rest of my ticket at the desk, and I take only my boarding pass onto the cramped Mexicana Airbus for the four hour flight to Chicago. Nonetheless I don't take my usual joy in that rush of acceleration and leap into the air, the vista of Mexico City falling away below us, the slow rise above the mountains into the white blankets of cloud.

At Chicago we walk off the plane and into Terminal 5, down a series of interminable corridors with brusque notices about bringing infections and foreign plants into the country, particularly voluble on the topic of Foot and Mouth disease (Hoof and Mouth as the US calls it). We are split into groups for arrivals and those in transit, and join long lines between winding red tapes to be interviewed by a US Immigrations Officer.

I'm trying to look nonchalant and cheerful while sweat runs down my back under my shirt. The exit visa may raise questions, my time of stay may have been shared with the Americans by Mexican immigration, or worse still they may have been tracking me my whole time in the US, and just waiting for an agent to encounter me and bring me in (a girl back in New Orleans who'd been working on an expired tourist visa was informed by a friend in the Immigration Department that they'd been tracking her for months, knew exactly what she was earning and just didn't have the budget to bring her in and prosecute her right at that time).

I think about being taken into a bare white room and questioned, missing my (uninsured) flight or worse still being detained indefinitely by Homeland Security - maybe they'll even slap a terrorism charge on me since I have no way to prove my innocence. I plan out every possible branch of the conversation - how far should I go in the lie, which story to use, at what point should I come clean and throw myself on their (probably nonexistent) mercy? It doesn't help that I haven't had a cigarette in over six hours.

When I'm finally called, I step up to the desk with a (hopefully) relaxed grin. "Hi, how are you doing, boss?" The big burly officer sitting behind it makes no expression, says nothing, just reaches for my passport and forms. I hand them over with an arm that barely shakes at all, and wait.

The entire process goes as follows: He instructs me to place my hand on the fingerprint scanner four times - left fingers, left thumb, right fingers, right thumb. He leafs through my passport, asks which flight I'm leaving on, I tell him. He rips my old exit visa out of the book and tosses it over his shoulder into a bin without looking at it. He points me to the door for baggage re-check. He wishes me a pleasant flight. I leave.

Washed over with relief and grinning inanely I re-check my rucksack for the onward flight, smoke an ambrosial menthol outside the doors with a crowd of other gasping addicts then hop on the monorail to Terminal 1 to get ready for my flight. Security check-in is fast and efficient, and the TSA (Transport Security Administration) staff, once again contrary to everyone's warnings, are polite and even jovial.

One huge black TSA officer looks at me, looks down at my passport (which seems the size of a postage stamp in a hand that could crush my head like an egg), looks at me again, back at the passport, then grins widely showing dazzling white teeth: "They didn't feed you in Mexico, sir?" I've lost maybe eleven inches off my waistline since that photo was taken.

I spend the few dollars still rattling around in the bottom of my shoulder bag on two cheeseburgers to tide me over and wait for departure. Now it's just a matter of killing time. Outside the Chicago skies are grey and gloomy, but I'm full of light and happiness.

It's my first time on the big Boeing 767. The interior is pretty luxurious compared to flights I've been on before (mostly domestic, in the US or between England and Ireland). First Class customers have amazing high-tech pods with a luxurious armchair which slides down into a bed and a huge TV screen/monitor with tall speakers. Business class have comfortable armchairs with their own desk and screen configuration. Even my own Economy Plus seat is wide and comfortable with a small screen in the seatback in front of me.

We hurtle down the runway and rise on massive twin jets at an adrenaline-pumping angle into the cloudy sky. I play with the onscreen map and flight stats, which show current altitude, airspeed, time to destination and a tracking display showing the current location and heading of the aircraft and our flightpath across the North Atlantic.

As the flight crew come round with pretzels and soft drinks, the sky outside is already darkening as we leave the sun behind and race ahead of the clock across the timezones. Soon it's dinner time, and I watch The Hulk while munching on lasagna and green salad. The cabin lights are dimmed, the aisles lit only by glowing screens and the odd pool of warmth from a reading light, and I manage to nap on and off for a few hours. Outside the window the moonlit clouds drift by under the wing, lit in green and red pulses by the navigation lights.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

15th of October 2008 - Market Day

I'm checking out at 2pm, so with an early start there's time to do a spot of shopping Mexico City-style before I'm once again loaded down with my baggage. I've spotted a Metro station called Merced, and I deduce from the icon and the relation to Supermercado (supermarket) that it's a market area, at least historically. I go to see whether it's still active.

The Merced is indeed still active, in fact it's hyperactive. An area spanning a full city block and overflowing into the streets around, it's a maze of stalls selling anything you can imagine, in which one can (and I do) get lost for hours. The stalls are generally clustered by type. One region sells Halloween decorations, model skeletons, masks and rubber spiders, another with handmade pots and woven baskets (some woven right there at the stall by chubby Native Mexican women wrapped in colourful blankets).

In another aisle I pass ranks of shining silver tools and kitchenware, tin baths and crockery, while further on are great waist-high barrels of sherbert in flourescent colours, piles of preserved fruit and coconut ice (gathering plague-like clouds of flies and wasps which I find more than a little offputting), and clear plastic bags almost my height full of crisps and bright orange Cheeto-like tubes.

I spend the morning happily immersed in the Merced, and get back to the Hotel Puente with just enough time to pack up my gear and purchases and check out. For the afternoon I move my base of operations to the airport, another of those vast, gleaming structures of steel and glass which could be anywhere in the world. I find a rickety table on the food court next to a power socket, write and read until mid-evening, then take one more Metro trip back to the Boulevard Puerto Aero to spend my last few pesos on a big torta of pork and milanesa (pounded, fried meat in breadcrumbs) to get me through the night, before returning to my table.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

14th of October 2008 - Playtime in Mexico City

I sleep late, and it's after lunchtime before I grab a ham torta and head down into the Metro to explore the city. It's a remarkable system, fast and efficient and clearly laid out in colour-coded lines, each station having a neat little icon representing the area it serves or its name - stations named after famous (mostly revolutionary) individuals having a thumbnail portrait of the person. I'm mostly using Google Earth for navigation now, and find a plugin which overlays the Metro network on the Mexico City area.

The Metro, like everything else here, is a hive of commerce. It's full of tiny narrow shops selling souvenirs, herbal medications (advertised by handwritten flourescent green posters with oddly out-of-place newspaper cutouts of athletes and bikini models, presumably illustrating the power of the herbs to bring beauty, potency and physical ability), toys and magazines.

There are miniature Domino's stalls at every station selling microwaved personal pizzas for 15 pesos. Every train is worked by two or three pedlars selling magazines, packets of sweets and children's goody-bags, some with powerful (occasionally deafening) portable backpack speakers through which they play samples of their wares, questionably copyrighted compilation CDs of pop ballads in photocopied sleeves.

There's clearly a great deal of political activism and speech in this city - everywhere are people with placards and masks, banners at the big intersections of the city, and the papers seem to be full of political protest on various sides. A man on the Metro hands out photocopied manifestoes and gives a rousing speech to the whole carriage, seeming to be decrying the actions of the current President.

I explore the Zocalo, the historic town square, where some kind of fair is going on - the square is full of marquees, most selling books on art, history and literature, some hosting lectures on a strange variety of topics - breast cancer and revolutionary history in the two I pass by.

At one side of the square I wander through the cathedral, a remarkable gothic building with extravagant gold leaf decoration, beautiful statuary and twenty-foot panelled doors of dark wood on three sides. While its weight of Catholic history means little to me, it has a powerful sense of peace and spiritual calm, enhanced by the beautiful, clear female voice singing prayers in Latin which echoes up into the arched stone ceiling.

Back into the Metro and just two stops on I emerge at the Hidalgo station to walk along the Paseo de La Reforma, location of many of the city's most dramatic modern buildings and beautiful monuments. Under the enormous brick arch of the Monumento a La Revolution some kind of gathering is taking place, a man with a megaphone calling out names from a clipboard to a sizeable crowd of well-dressed city people, but I'm unable to determine what its purpose is.

I roam the streets of the area for some time until I hit another Metro station, and work my way west to the gardens at Chapultepec, but find that they've already closed for the night. Tired but satisfied that I've used my day well, I head back to the hotel.

On the way I'm caught up in the latter part of Mexico City rush hour, which makes London look tame. Once each carriage is apparently as full as it can be, three or four more people will wedge in through the doors, bracing themselves against the frame to push back and compress us all into an even more efficient space. But there's no anger, no raised voices, bitching or elbowing as you'd find on the Tube - everyone gets along despite the incredibly cramped conditions.

I stop at another stall on the corner for a pile of fried pork and tortillas fresh out of the pan, and settle in for my second and last night in the hotel.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

13th of October 2008 - Change of Direction

It's a long night in the cab of Carlos's truck. There's a permanent population of two or three mosquitoes in there with me, their near-ultrasonic whining drilling into my head, and every time I stop moving and settle down I feel one of them land and stab a vein. My sunburned arms are now throbbing and raw, grating on the seats when I move.

Worst of all there is nothing to do except sleep, and I can't sleep. There's only one spot in the yard with enough light to read - sitting on a muddy tyre where white mercury light seeps through the fence from the striplights of the adjacent yard, which is full of rusting yellow bulldozers and diggers - and around midnight more showers of rain start to come down, sending me back into the cab time and again with the mosquitoes.

I read in bursts of five minutes between rain showers, sit in the cab smoking, and pace the mud of the yard. It's a jumble of rusting machinery, parts, generators and boxes, lit in patches by dangling neon and mercury strips, dark in others. Under a tarpaulin stretched from the top of the office to the ground a plump black hen is sleeping in a wire cage. Carlos's fluffy little white dog, somewhat bedraggled with the rain, naps intermittently under half a lorry tyre. I go for a walk, but the town is closed up for the night and there are police everywhere and the sounds of altercations in the distance - doesn't feel safe. I go back to the yard.

Around 3am, I reach possibly the highest level of boredom I've ever experienced - I really think I'm going to go insane. Then a slow feeling like breaking through clouds, and everything becomes calm. My racing thoughts are replaced with a smooth flow of ideas, and my situation and my journey come into clear perspective. The rest of the night seems to pass in a few minutes.

Once the sun is fully up, I say a fond goodbye to Fernando, Rafael, Giorgio, Carlos and Balderas, who are gathered round the truck in ernest discussion, and walk into Poza Rica proper to find somewhere with Internet access. I've changed my plans - I'm going to head for Mexico City instead of Yucatan, and I need a map update.

Having found a net connection in the mall I bring up Google Maps, but find that the route to Mexico City is going to be long and hostile. I find a tiny Banamex bank outlet and finally break my emergency hundred dollar bill into pesos, getting a better exchange rate than I expected - I have 1200 pesos to my name, a comfortable margin. Instead of hitching I decide to bus it.

The bus is big, luxurious, air-conditioned, costs 150 pesos for saving me a good two days' hiking, and is a welcome respite after Carlos's truck - I sink back into the cushions and by the time we're out of town I'm blissfully asleep.

Fortunately I wake up when we begin to climb...and climb...and climb. The road suddenly turns upward between rich, jungly hills, and begins to wind upward and upward, the valley floor dropping away below us in an ocean of moving green. We turn and twist through the ravines and gaps, ever-climbing, for over an hour, the mountains opening up around us, mist-shrouded and legendary. Here and there are tiny villages clinging on the edge of the precipice or peeking through the trees of the slopes below us.

The road flattens out, and now we're on a great plateau on a level with the peaks. The sun, a sullen red disc through shreds of grey cloud, sinks toward the horizon. Just before it starts to get really dark we stop at a service station. The air is bitterly cold, the coldest I've felt it anywhere since Burning Man, and ice-clear, tasting of frost. The bus's air conditioning, as usual, is overactive - I fetch my baja jacket from the rucksack and snuggle into rough blue wool, sleep a little more.

On we go as darkness falls, passing a string of orange light clusters stretching across the table-flat plain. Then the clusters get bigger, and clump and grow and enfold us, rising on the slopes of unseen hills. We pass through a network of toll gates facing every which way, a toll network the size of some of the villages we've seen, and join one of the vast slow flows of traffic into Mexico City.

Mexico City bus station is huge, like a dozen Tampico bus stations squashed together into a mass. It's full of uniformed taxi drivers, armed police, staff from half a dozen bus companies and hundreds of travellers of every description. I still see no non-Mexican people that I can identify, but a much greater variety of lifestyles than anywhere else. I finally see the extreme hairstyles, dyejobs, tattoos, youth culture movements and subcultural uniforms that I've barely seen elsewhere in Mexico. There's clearly a strong bohemian and anti-establishment movement in this City - at times this could almost be mistaken for someplace in San Francisco.

I have a range of choices from here - walk, local bus (of which there are dozens outside going all over the city) or one of the hundreds of licensed (and pretty cheap) taxis milling along the concourse. But I see signs saying Metro with a little underground-train logo, and reckon I'll try that.

Down a flight of steps and into a grubby modern station which could be straight out of San Francisco's Muni system. The crowds of punters swarm through here with briefcases and backpacks, business men in ties, college kids in slogan t-shirts, punks and trendies and families with armfuls of kids. After studying the map I buy a ticket for the airport Terminal Aerea station. It takes me a few trips before I realise that any trip on the Metro, no matter how far or how many changes are involved, costs exactly 2 pesos. Mexico City does public transport right.

The train, an old all-metal workhorse painted in gleaming red, arrives in thirty seconds (this will turn out to be almost universal) and whisks me away. We've moving along the edge of the city, and through chainlink fences on either side of the track I can see the great rivers of traffic which pour in and out of Ciudad Mexico, making it one of the most polluted places on the planet.

At the airport terminal station I walk out on the Bouldevard Aeropuerto and go looking for a hotel. I have most of my 1200 pesos left, and I can afford to live comfortably for a day or two - I'm also completely out of non-festering clothes, covered in mosquito bites, sunburned and exhausted. I need to rest.

It's a long walk down the boulevard past several big chain hotels which turn out to cost more than 500 pesos a night minimum. Finally, exploring the back streets, I ask some guys at a taco stand in my fragmented Spanish where I might find a cheap hotel. One of the men tells me to go further down the boulevard a few more blocks and I'll find one.

The walk down the boulevard is a little hairy, since it's partially closed for work and the sidewalks are torn up - for half a mile or so I'm walking on almost entirely unlit gravel between traffic cones. Mexico City doesn't go in for streetlights much, I noticed on the way in how even busy areas were mostly unlit apart from the neon signs of businesses. Finally the sidewalk reestablishes itself, but I walk past blocks of closed insurance companies, car rental places and showrooms without seeing a hotel.

I'm getting utterly tired and frustrated when finally up ahead I see a mess of lights across the pavement and on either side. Getting closer, I see that the sidewalk ahead is roofed over with tarpaulins, lit with dozens of electric lights and is the beginning of a sizeable street market bustling with life.

I continue into the low tunnel, past stalls, stands and little shacks where women in aprons shovel sizzling meat across the counter to businessmen and teenagers, grubby boys with hundreds of watches spread out on blankets, stalls walled with magazines clipped together with clothes-pegs, strings of furry animals, piles of cheap plastic toys, mountains of DVDs.

At the other end of the tunnel there is a huge four-way intersection over which the boulevard climbs on a road bridge, and every surface here is colonised by Mexican commerce, mazes of blue tarpaulin over villages of stalls, people cramming through the winding spaces between them and sprinting back and forth through the busy traffic.

The curbs are completely occupied by rows of battered vans and buses, each one with a long queue of mostly-suited people being urgently ushered inside to be distributed to various local addresses - as it turns out, there's one of the busiest Metro stations right here on the corner of the intersection, and a lot of people come home this way, grabbing a torta or tacos or ceviche before catching a bus on to their final destination.

I spy a sign on the other side of the intersection - Hotel Duque - and gladly head for it. The hotel turns out to be 250 pesos a night, more than I really want to pay, but when I find an equally nice-looking one just down the road for 230 I give in - right now I just want to collapse.

Inside and out the hotel is all varnished maple laminate with brassy fixtures, slippery white marble tile and pot plants everywhere. The hallways are echoing caverns with surreal photo-realist paintings of easter island heads in lakes and pyramids on levitating islands. My room is big, air-conditioned and comfortable, with cable TV, room service, and best of all a king-size bed with soft pillows and cool cotton sheets.

Freed of my luggage I make one more expedition back to the market for two deep-fried tacos filled with pork rinds, shredded beef, mayo, cheese and avocado, and feeling very decadent I order up a brandy and coke from room service for 20 pesos. I've seen a lot of contrasts on this journey, but rarely so dramatically in the space of a day.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

12th of October 2008 - Oops

I've decided to stay one more night in Tampico as I'm still feeling a bit weak and sickly, and after a fine breakfast of torta con pollo (with tender marinated chicken) I go to the bus station to take out funds for my rent...and my request is rejected. Insufficient funds. Deja vu.

I really can't understand it this time. I checked my balance before I left San Francisco, I've been keeping obsessive track of my spending, I should have another 250 pounds in there, enough to keep me going until the start of November at my current rate of spending.

I go back to the hotel and check my balance online - bottomed out. Crap. I check my transactions, and slowly the cause of my lack of funds becomes apparent. I checked the exchange rate from pounds to dollars when I first came into the States, and foolishly I didn't think to see if it had changed since then.

It turns out that the pound has been steadily falling against the dollar, and where a pound fetched just under two dollars last year, now it's worth only 1.6. This part of my funds has been coming from the residual balance in my UK account and some web design work I did recently. The difference in exchange rates, which I've then factored into my calculations of pounds to pesos, has left me considerably shorter on money than I thought.

My first reaction, of course, is panic. But that quickly turns into rapid planning and some comfort. I still have my emergency 100 dollar bill zipped into the hidden pocket in my rucksack lid. That'll keep me going for a good few days. All this means is that I'm going to have to leave for Yucatan immediately instead of tomorrow, and live very rough until (if) I can find work somewhere.

I quickly pack up my stuff, sketch a couple of maps of the major roads I need to hit, and walk out across the city towards highway 180, southwest to Cancun. The day is hot and humid but still threatening more rain, and I have to pause at intervals just to let some of the sweat evaporate. I work my way down parallel to the beach it doesn't look like I'll get round to seeing after all, and then out on avenue Alvaro Oberson, which runs out of the main part of the city.

I pass by the familiar franchises and chain stores, then come to an area of small blockhouses, separated from the road by a kind of moat, an angled concrete trench about twenty feet deep. Some houses are connected to the road by ramps, some are raised and accessed by a suspended walkway. They look pretty rundown and dilapidated, but the neighbourhoods are busy with women hanging out laundry, kids playing football in the still-muddy roads.

Finally I come along under a tall road bridge which, I realise when I see that it rises into the heavens to my left, is actually the underside of the Puente Tampico, the Tampico Bridge which carries a serious amount of traffic over the Panuco river on the main route in and out of this busy city.

I take a break before crossing, and I'm glad I do. The bridge is almost a mile long, and pedestrian traffic is via a very narrow (maybe three-foot-wide) path at the side, separated from the road by a shin-high concrete wall. The day is still hazy and there's no direct sunlight, but I can still feel the rays steadily burning my arms and neck. No space to stop and get out my sunscreen, though, I just have to keep trudging.

The view is worth it, though. I rise steadily above the shanty houses packed between emerald stretches of trees, seeing the tiny figures and cars milling around. Some streets are still like rivers after the rain - the backroads are pretty much just dirt, with little drainage. Then I'm above the river bank, still slowly climbing the curve of the bridge, with pocito hombres dotted along the concrete wharf below me with their fishing rods.

The river itself is huge, slow and thickly brown like hot chocolate, occasional little boats or drifting pieces of debris rolling past on the waves. To my left I can see through the hazy air to where it opens out into the bay.

I pass under the huge suspension cables of the bridge, past the uprights with their tiny metal grid inspection platforms which give me a wave of vertigo, and descend the other side. The opposite bank of the river is much less developed, mostly yards of rusted metal and little clusters of houses amid a sea of trees.

With relief I descend a worn flight of stone steps on the far side, passing through a cloud of huge dragonflies with black and white striped wings so broad I mistake them for butterflies at first. I sit on a damp grassy bank to rest, spray on sunscreen and guzzle water before coming round under the span and up the bank on the other side, next to the outgoing lane of traffic on the motorway. I perch myself on the crash barrier with my backpack at my feet and start hitching again.

It takes about an hour to get my first ride. Four teenage girls crammed into the cab of a four-by-four give me an exhilarating ride of about five miles out to Tampico Alta. I'm really going to regret it when I get back to lands where riding in the back of a truck isn't allowed. They drop me by the main tourist area with a warning that I'm looking red. I check in the glass of a shop. Yep, I'm looking like a lobster. No pain yet, that'll come later. For now I walk down the road to the edge of the settlement and start hitching again.

This time I'm only there ten minutes before another truck pulls up, with three guys in the cab. Fernando is the youngest-looking, clean-shaven with shaggy hair and a long chinese-looking ponytail under an engineer's cap, and speaks a little English. Rafael has the standard scrubby Mexican moustache and a baseball cap, and Giorgio is big and quiet and a little aloof.

The back seat is loaded with packages, toolbags and bike frames, so I sling my backpack into the bed and vault straight up there, and we move off. Giorgio drives with speed and no evidence of fear, and it's quite an adrenaline rush as we weave between tanker trucks and buses, horns honking, the trees rushing by on either side. After a few nervewracking bounces over potholes I sit down in the bed of the truck instead of perching on the tailgate.

A few miles on we pull in beside a side road, and I assume this is their turnoff and I'm on my own again, but apparently they've mistaken my manic grin for a rictus of terror and they're clearing the back seat for me. I'm rather disappointed, but it is cooler inside and I appreciate the soft seat. It's nice to have a bit of conversation too.

We travel on south through the long afternoon towards Poza Rica, where, as it turns out, the guys will be turning off for their destination in Puebla. We're into lush, tropical country now, almost jungle, the hills we climb and wind around thickly forested with huge palms, the calling of birds all around us.

The truck has seen a few miles, and begins to play up after a couple of hours - when we're stopped in traffic it sputters, and when the engine's turned off it clatters worryingly before starting. The smell of hot metal or a serious short drifts back to us at times. We stop a couple of times for the guys to fiddle with it - Fernando is a mechanic of some degree of experience, travelling with his tools, but seems unable to identify the problem.

We do make it to the edge of Poza Rica by dark, but when we pull over for another inspection it's clear there's a serious problem, and this time the engine won't start at all. With Rafael in the driving seat me, Giorgio and Fernando manage to heave it back up the slope onto the road and in the middle of busy traffic, pouring sweat and shouting curses in two languages, get it bump-started on the third try. It's a frantic sprint to get back on board - Giorgio makes the passenger door, Fernando and I get hold of the tailgate and scramble into the bed, a bus honking its horn at deafening volume behind us, for a nervous half-mile drive through traffic before it cuts out again and we have to repeat the procedure.

We roll stutteringly along the road through the edge of Poza Rica, looking for a mechanic who's still open. As with all the larger Mexican towns I've passed through there are a plethora of workshops - on the average Mexican wage few people can afford to get a new vehicle every couple of years, you just have to keep what you have working as long as possible - but we pass a dozen before we find a small, muddy yard with the worklights still lit and two pairs of boots protruding from under a lorry.

Carlos is skinny, with a grey moustache and a mass of short wiry greying curls beneath a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, and currently covered in drying mud. He looks over the motor, tutting through his teeth when he pauses in a continuous flow of chatter, then tells the guys what seems to be bad news before seguing into a story with a lot of arm-waving and graphic mime. The only word I can make out is "pinche" repeated at regular intervals, but that doesn't tell you anything except that Mexican guys are having a conversation.

Finally the owner of the yard, Signor Balderas, arrives. He's got a pristine white t-shirt tucked into his pressed blue jeans, clean-shaven and slow-speaking with an air of great gravity about him. He looks over the engine too, tut-tuts, and tells the guys he can fix it in the morning - they'll have to stay here tonight.

Everybody introduces themselves, and when Carlos and Balderas find out I'm English they're immediately interested. Fernando, Giorgio and Rafael are left standing against the truck with increasing expressions of boredom while the mechanics quiz me about where I'm from, my family, and how much Spanish I've learned. There are tests. I have to recite the basic verbs (of which I still know only a few), the numbers, answer questions. By now I'm swaying with exhaustion and my head's throbbing, but Balderas insists I repeat back the days of the week with perfect pronunciation before he gives me a big grin, slaps me on the shoulder and says "Very good! You learn fast." I seem to have passed.

He goes back to chatting with the guys, and Carlos takes me aside. "Did you eat? You want tamal?" he takes me to the low building which is the yard office, where the remains of his dinner sits in the white light of a loose mercury strip, swinging slightly in the cool wind, and gives me a tamal still wrapped in its palm leaf. He puts his arm round my shoulders; "I am your friend. You call me Charlie. Amigo, yes? Anything you want, you tell me." He gives me a big grin, showing two shining gold teeth to match his glasses.

We talk about my journey while he clears out the cab of his own truck, an ancient and battered machine parked to one side of the yard under the trees. "You sleep here tonight. Now, you still hungry?" British to the last, I tell him I'm fine, really, the tamal was great. Actually I can't tell if I'm hungry any more, I haven't eaten since about seven this morning and it's eleven now. He narrows his eyes with concern. "Is not enough! You will get sick. Come. You will have tacos."

He takes me along the road to the corner, where a little taqueria is still open and doing a steady trade. We take seats at a plastic picnic table and he orders me a plate of five little tacos, full of coriander and marinated pork fresh off the griddle. We talk about our families, and he tells me about his daughter with a father's pride "She is nineteen. Very beautiful." I ask whether he keeps a close eye on her boyfriends. "Not the eye, no"; he mimes pulling out a gun and pointing it with an intimidating expression, then dissolves into chuckles.

When I get back Balderas has gone home and the guys are lounging in their truck. Carlos goes back to work under the lorry with his assistant, a tall skinny guy with short-cropped hair and a permanent slightly bewildered expression, and I climb into the cab of his truck and stretch out on the seats.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

11th of October 2008 - Time in Tampico

Everything here is noise, on a level I've so far not encountered. My room backs onto a truckyard and warehouses where lorries come and go all day and night and (mostly horrendous) Mexican pop music blasts out from a radio pretty much 24/7. Dogs bark, cats fight, crows and other unseen birds scream with deafening volume at each other from the trees, one sounding with eerie accuracy like a child yelling in pain.

When I go exploring, half the shops have big speakers outside playing dance music - several times what I've thought was a nightclub turned out to be an electronics store. The taxi drivers indicate their availability for hire by honking their horns in continuous staccato beeps - it may actually be a form of morse code communication I just can't decipher. On a busy street it adds up to quite a racket.

Once again food is everywhere - there are a dozen restaurants within half a block of the hotel. I quickly find a favourite, a big open-fronted space with a counter at either end and two rectangular, enclosed ones in the middle, each with a rank of round plastic stools. I eventually realise that the counters are all separate establishments with slightly different menus and their own staff (distinguished by the colour of their aprons). A window in the back wall is another business selling twenty different kinds of fresh juice and other drinks and snacks.

Each enamel counter is augmented with collections of antique-looking wooden shelves, cupboards and random bits of furniture, and has its own mini-kitchen with well-worn but spotless burners, hotplates and sinks. The food is prepared right there as you order by two or three women who double up as cooks and waitresses (and when they're not busy they yell to the passersby in the street "Flautas! Gorditas! Cafe! Dulces! Comeda Mexicana!").

I give my allegiance for the week to the Cafe del Norte (second counter from the left, dark blue aprons with red trim) and eat two meals a day there pretty much every day. I try something different every meal - the long thin flautas with chicken, barbacoa (barbecue pork) and bisteck, huge torta sandwiches so stuffed with ham, pork, crumbly cheese, vegetables and avocado that it's impossible to get them in my mouth without a vigorous squashing exercise, huevos al gusto (eggs with fried potatoes, pepper and ham, and pretty much anything else you can think of according to which variation you order) and tamales.

Everything comes with a little jug of hot sauce, a plastic thermal dish of tortillas straight off the griddle and is washed down with Escuis (the most popular soda around here, in various fruity flavours or a cola variant), coffee, or huge (maybe liter-and-a-half) plastic beakers of filtered water, into which the girls juice half a dozen tiny limes and add a spoonful of sugar (soon my favourite drink option).

For breakfast one day I finally try the menudo, a huge bowl of spicy soup or stew made from...wait for it...tripe. Some of you may recall I've tried this deeply controversial dish, basically the lining of a cow's stomach, before, and did not become a fan. But the way these folks prepare it I must admit it's not bad. The big hunks of tripe are kind of slimy and rubbery with an unpleasantly biological aftertaste, but the broth is delicious, richly flavoured and aromatic. It comes with a compartmented tray of sliced (mouth-destroying) jalapeno peppers and finely chopped onions and garlic to adjust to your taste.

On Wednesday, the skies having cleared and sun starting to finally warm the air back up to its former furnace heat, I once again decide to hit the beach. Then I finally get sick. It's not severe, just a stomach upset but it stays with me for two and a half days, making me pretty miserable and requiring that I stay within reach of a guaranteed accessible toilet. I don't blame the handmade food I've been mostly eating (which is always piping hot and prepared with scrupulous care), but a plastic-wrapped chicken sandwich from the grocery store I bought the night before, which definitely had a funny taste to it.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

8th of October 2008 - Pinche Computadores, Rain on Tampico

I wake up on my first morning here to find that my iPod has gone further amok, and its 80Gb internal drive is corrupted and apparently unreadable. I've been using the iPod's drive as storage to supplement the EEE PCs tiny 4Gb drive, so it's holding pretty much all my data - a few videos which are eminently expendable, my music collection which I lost this week anyway and had only partially rebuilt, but more worryingly a huge collection of text files and random data I've accumulated over the years - basically my life in text files.

Anything from before I left home is still on my old PC, and safe at my parents' house, but pretty much anything since I departed is only on that disk - stupidly I don't have a backup, since I folded my box.net internet backup account when I got an Amazon S3 online drive, and technical problems have meant I haven't got round to uploading anything to that. The problem is not so much that I've lost really vital data, it's that I don't know what I've lost - I literally can't remember how much of that stuff is necessary, and how stuck I'll be without it. I do know that I had my last five blog entries on there, which I hadn't yet been able to upload, and rewriting them will be a horror.

I spend most of the next two days in increasing frustration trying different data recovery software to no avail - nothing is coming back off that drive, and every piece of repair software I try hangs when it tries to work on the disk. Finally I boot a Linux distribution off a memory stick and lo and behold, it's able to access the drive and pull off at least some of the files. I'm able to recover a fair chunk of my text files, all the potentially important stuff including my missing blog entries. Relief.

Other than that I have a pretty good time of my first few days in Tampico. I explore the local area and wander the streets, experiencing again that feeling of texture, of an environment and a people that resist (or at least are so far unaware of) the worst of homogenization and bland modern living.

The houses and shops are a hundred bright, cheerful shades, and mostly impeccably clean. It's achieved largely by hand, too - wherever I go I people working busily with brooms, and they clean the pavements and gutters outside their shops and houses too. The polished tiles of the bus station are scattered with damp sawdust before a team of fast-working staff come through with the brushes, which I suppose helps lift dirt and grime from the surface.

There's more of the now-familiar Mexican free enterprise - numerous little carts, hand-pushed or on bicycle bases, selling every manner of food and trinkets. Outside the bus station are two shoeshine stations which do a steady trade with the commuters and travellers. At one intersection I see a boy of maybe nine or ten, expertly spinning a set of fire poi (petrol-doused padded weights on light chains) to entertain the stopped traffic, then running up and down the rows of cars to grab tips before the lights change.

On Tuesday afternoon, over a torta con chicharrones (slow cooked pork rinds, the kind of tender, tasty offcut I used to love cooking myself), I make plans to go and find the beach in the morning. But by early evening dark storm clouds are gathering, and the forecast isn't looking good.

About nine o'clock I become aware of a new noise over the general din - a soft but rising roar overhead and all around. I look out of the window to see rain pouring down in sheets, near-solid walls of water falling, and at the same moment a brilliant flash of lightning turns the sky white. Looks like the beach is off.

I walk down the hall to the stairs and look out along the roofed courtyard which forms the middle of the Hotel Central. At the open far end I can see the rain sluicing down through the light of the streetlamps. Above, it's hammering on the corrugated plastic roof. Rivers of water are pouring down the walls onto the darkened tile below.

Instantly ten years old again I run up the stairs in my sandals, nearly slipping on a wet patch where the rain is coming in through chickenwire-patched windows above. I find a little lounge area looking out over the top of the stairs to the courtyard, with wicker couches and a coffee table, deserted and in darkness between the electric lights in the adjacent hallways. The far wall is a decorative cement gridwork beyond which the storm rages. The drumming noise from overhead is hypnotic, the rolls of thunder echoing in across the courtyard.

Suddenly I see something skim up the wall from the courtyard, pause for an instant then run along the side of the hallway and disappear behind a chair. I chase after it and move the chair to find a gecko, pale pink with orange eyes, which freezes for an instant before vanishing into thin air.

I sit on the landing for over an hour, just listening to the rain overhead, watching the lightning flashes, hearing the gurgle and splash of water pouring down all around, watching puddles slowly spread across the twilit tiles. At some point I move downstairs and watch from the window at the end of my hallway - the roads have become rivers, and wrist-thick spouts of water are coming down from every rooftop. The air slowly cools from steam-room Mexican heat to freshness, and when I finally sleep, it's deep and long.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

5th of October 2008 - Tampico

I've updated the map again with my last few stops since Houston.

In the morning the rest of the family go to church, and Jesus and I sit outside, talking. I lounge in the doorway, he sits against a telegraph pole, exchanging greetings and a few words with almost everyone who passes - a family with two tiny wide-eyed girls in pigtails, one carrying a pink parasol, teenage boys pushing bikes, two workmen painting the house next door (one of whom we both notice, with a remarkably unconvincing wig, prominent chin and moustache, is the spitting image of Sammy Davis Junior).

We talk mostly in English, about life, travel, philosophy and spirituality, and yoga, which Jesus is very interested in but hasn't tried for himself. He tells me about the town and the area, the industry and commerce here, more about Mexico in general. We speak mostly in Engish, my Spanish not being up to a fullblown conversation, but I break in whenever possible to compare and learn new Spanish words when they come to mind.

When the family return it's everyone I met last night, packed into two cars. Food is in preparation almost immediately and I'm soon summoned to the table. Dinner is eaten in shifts at the small table, and I eat with the two teenage boys and Jesus and his brother in law. It's a feast of bisteck, green salsa, crumbly quesa, delicious tomatoey tamales steamed and served in neatly folded palm leaves, and piles of tortillas, with more food arriving hot and fresh from the kitchen all the time.

It's an energetic, fast-paced meal, everything on the table being passed back and forth at lightning speed, with occasional collisions and apologies as someone gets hot sauce on their sleeve or drops a tamale, accompanied by rapid-fire conversation which I try to follow and pull out bits of information where I can. There's a lot of sports discussion, and the others obviously defer to Jesus's experience on anything American.

When we're done, Jesus tells me to get my gear together and he'll drive me out to the highway to catch a ride. Martha is still wringing her hands and worrying that I'll be robbed or killed, but she gives me her email address and I promise to write to her as soon as possible. A round of goodbyes in the crowded living room and we're off. At the door Martha presses a bag into my hand, with a banana, two little pears and a big packet of chocolate biscuits. "Lunch" she says in English, smiles and waves us off.

Jesus drives me out on Highway 70, and drops me by an extraordinary building - a crumbling castle with turqoise onion domes and minarets, which turns out to be a restaurant. The soft clink of cutlery and sounds of conversation drift out to me as I walk to the side of the road. I'm waiting less than twenty minutes before my first ride, which is also my first experience of the only form of transport I'd say was as much fun as flying: Mexican truckbed express.

We barrel up and down hills and through small towns, back through those imposing jungled mountains and between fields. I'm standing at the back of the truck bed, which is fenced in with waist-high metal railings. In front of me are two taciturn guys hanging onto the front railing and looking resolutely forwards. The front of my hat brim is pinned back against my forehead by the rushing wind, the hot thick air hammering into my face - it's like being endlessly hit with a warm pillow at jackhammer speed. We're probably doing no more than thirty, but it feels like seventy from up here. By the time we arrive in the little town of Tamuin my arms are aching from hanging on, I'm covered in a light film of dust and I've lost all feeling in my face. But when I check in the window of the truck, I'm still wearing a huge manic grin.

The two other men disembark with me and our ride turns off up a sideroad towards Tamtoc. We sit down, breathe the still, hot air, I pass my Pall Malls around and guzzle water to wash the dust out of my mouth. It's a typical Mexican village high street, with a cafe, butcher's, several tyre shops and a shack selling coco frio - coconuts straight from the fridge. We're sitting on the knee-high concrete ledge which runs round the outside of a concrete blockhouse, a one-man police station which checks the papers of passing cargo lorries.

Across the road a whirling vortex forms, lifting leaves and debris from the shoulder of the road then throwing up a thin, perfect and opaque twisting cone of dust thirty feet high - the first dust devil I've seen. It moves onto the road, disappearing as it crosses the tarmac then reappearing in the dust on the other side before dissipating between the shacks.

This is my longest and possibly most frustrating attempt at hitchhiking, over three hours in the sweltering afternoon heat as driver after driver either passes straight by or waves an apologetic hand and turns off up the side road to Tamtoc. Beside me an elderly man sits in a warped plastic chair, a wooden cane on the ground beside him, occasionally offering comments and advice which between my poor Spanish and his lack of teeth I have great trouble making out. Nonetheless he tries to help me out, talking to the few truck drivers who stop and trying to convince them to take me with them, but they're all going to Tamtoc anyway.

The memory of my invigorating ride soon fades, along with the joy of the road and of newness, replaced by a thumping heat headache, a layer of sweat and an ache in my elbow as I try and keep my arm up for just one more car. Finally I move down to the bus stop a hundred yards down, and keep my thumb out with forlorn hope for another hour until the next Tampico bus arrives. The price is eighty dollars, not backbreaking but another bite out of my budget. Nonetheless the wash of icy-cold air which pours over me as I talk to the driver makes my mind up for me.

We pass through dozens more of those tiny towns, and the road to Tampico turns out to be long and winding - it takes us maybe three hours to get there, at least half as long again as I had estimated. Finally we enter the lake country near the coast, great bodies of still water amid green fields on both sides of the road, and then into the outskirts of the huge sprawling city of Tampico.

There's something about these cities that just grips me - I think it's the texture and variety of their layout. There are no homogenous, even pavements here - along the front of a row of shops a flat stretch of footpath might go up concrete steps onto a raised platform, which is then completely colonised by stalls and the outdoor cooking stations of restaurants (which keep the heat of cooking away from the cool interior), then turn a corner into a grove of trees coming right out to the edge of the road, then spread into a broad tiled courtyard, then turn into rough dirt or stop dead at an ancient brick wall.

After over half an hour of winding through the back streets of the city where the houses push right within inches of our windows, up and down hills and through tunnels, we emerge onto a broad two-lane road lined with hotels and turn into the bus station. Inside it's pretty much like the others, a little more expensive and high-tech maybe.

I get a cup of coffee in the station cafe and find a sputtering internet connection, but my search shows no youth hostels in Tampico, although pushing a little further I do find that there are dozens in the coastal towns of Yucatan on the peninsula, a good sign for my next step. I have about enough money for another month if I can stay within budget (which I'm not managing most of the time). My hope is that I can find work exchange in a hostel again, and get some work in the town for a few weeks, get me a little further south, rinse and repeat.

I check my backpack at a very reasonable rate of 5 pesos an hour, and go searching the area for hotels. To my relief the prices are very reasonable, and I soon find a huge old structure directly opposite the station with rooms from one hundred and thirty pesos a night sin clima, a ridiculous 13 dollars or six pounds fifty.

The Hotel Central turns out to be a rambling building, the hallways of rooms opening off both sides on three levels of a long narrow central courtyard, roofed over with corrugated plastic, with a raised platform partway down supporting potted plants and a pair of antique couches. Almost everything is tiled, and where there aren't tiles everything is painted bright blue. My room has a tiny bathroom with real hot running water, a barred window looking out onto a truckyard, and I can actually get an internet connection from some obliging business next door.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

4th of October 2008 - Ciudad Valles

When I wake the family are still asleep, so I take some time getting my stuff together and read a little more, but by half past ten there's still no sign of them and I need to get moving. I write a note in what limited Spanish I can put together, trying to sum up my thanks for their generosity, leave my email at the bottom, and slip out of the house.

Everybody I've spoken to so far has raved about Ciudad Valles, so I've decided to go there today and continue on to Tampico tomorrow.

Once again I decide to walk out of the city and see it properly. Ciudad Mante is much like Victoria to look at, with narrow streets and old houses surrounded by brightly-painted stone walls. There are already a lot of people out and about on bicycles or on foot, rather less in cars. Everywhere are dogs of indecipherable mixed breed, lying panting in the shade - it's already at least 35 degrees Centigrade.

I work my way out along a long street of small storefronts and houses, noticing the contrast in the old and new, money and poverty - I pass a series of small cafes and shops fronting straight onto the road, some with steel shutters still down at this time on a Sunday, then a row of makeshift shacks made from salvaged wood and steel sheet, then round the corner to see a vast Sorianna supermarket almost next door.

Finally the road ends at a set of roundabouts with a stone monument in the centre bearing a truly disturbing huge gold-painted head of somebody significant. The signs here are confusing, but three guys lounging by the little police office at one side of the main roundabout are able to point me to the correct carretera.

After about an hour slowly wilting in the sun with sweat pouring down my back, a surprising brand new Ford Ka pulls over and I'm picked up by a nice couple from Mante whose names I totally fail to pick up even after two or three repetitions. We travel through the most beautiful country I've seen yet - through ravines in a wall of steep mountains, thickly forested, almost jungle. We wind back and forth with the peaks looming over us like vast green waves waiting to crash down and swallow us whole.

They drop me on the other side of the mountains in a small village, and I step into a tin-roofed cafe to get a bottle of pineapple Escuis and chat with Georgio, who is restocking the shelves of Bimbo snacks and cakes. He has a bit of English from working in Dallas for a while (like several other Mexicans I meet he was sent home after 9/11 when the Immigration Department ramped up their ID checking program) and we split the conversation fairly equally between our languages.

I go back to the road and drop my bags on the hard shoulder in front of a makeshift metal shop where about ten men and boys are moving cast-iron railings around and working on several trucks in a fairly relaxed manner, with plenty of breaks to exchange jokes, sing along with the radio and shout greetings and friendly abuse at passers-by. Back in the darkness of the lean-to, showers of white sparks fly from an arc-welder.

It's swelteringly hot and humid now, I'm covered in an even layer of sweat which never quite seems to evaporate and feeling a little dizzy. I stick it out for about an hour and a half with almost every one of the few vehicles which pass giving the characteristic downward-pointing "I'm only going nearby" gesture, and finally drag my stuff back down the road to the blessedly air-conditioned Transpais office and buy a bus ticket instead. It turns out to be only 40 pesos, about 4 dollars.

On the bus and bouncing down the potholed road toward Valles, I'm starting to feel that slightly stretched, pressured sensation of culture shock. It's the weight of little differences building up in the mind, compounded by the language gap which makes every conversation an effort, even when it's partly in English. It makes me want to withdraw into a safe place and shut myself off with the familiar. I bury myself in Elmore Leonard's "Get Shorty" and intermittently try to nap.

Arriving in Valles I find myself in another near-identical bus station a little outside the city proper. A short way up the street I catch a local bus into the centre, hoping for a cafe where I can sit for a while and sink into my ebooks and music, write a little, rest my brain. I have no plans for where to be tonight, except that if I'm going to come back on budget I can't afford a hotel room, so my fallback position is to come back and stay in the bus station as in Victoria - the road out to Tampico is nearby so I can walk straight out there at dawn.

Valles city centre, or at least the region I arrive in on this Saturday afternoon, is complete bedlam. Mexican free enterprise here is jacked up to a crazy rush of business being done on all sides. Even the bus station is a mass of tiny offices and stalls hawking every manner of purchase, and the narrow streets are crammed with stalls and shops, vendors yelling across the packed crowd. There's barely room on the pavement for regular pedestrians, let alone me with my backpack.

On another day, without my luggage, I might revel in it, but now it all hammers down on my already tired and strained brain and I just want to be somewhere peaceful. I find a sidestreet leading back out of the quarter the way I came, and seeing trees in the distance I walk until the noise recedes behind me, hoping to find a park to relax in.

The trees turn out to be just the gardens of big old houses on the main road ahead, and in the event I end up in, of all places, a Domino's pizzaria, because it's quiet and air-conditioned, and it's got power sockets, and it's there. I spend a couple of hours trying to recover a bit of my energy, reading and munching some very average wings (the cheapest thing on the menu). When it starts to get dark I just walk on out of town. From what I've seen from the bus, Valles just looks like another big city anyway.

Outside it's still hot and humid, and the birds are setting up a crazy sundown chorus, flocking from tree to tree twittering and squawking. By chance I find myself back on the road of the bus station, and after some hit-and-miss navigation I'm outside the station, having a cigarette and preparing to find a reasonably comfortable seat and wait out the night, when the matronly Mexican lady next to me tentatively starts a conversation. She speaks no English, but I manage to determine that she is Martha, she works as a nurse (enfermera) here in Valles and she's waiting for her son Hugo to pick her up.

When Martha finds out that I'm spending the night in the bus station she's aghast. "Muy peligro!" (very dangerous). She insists that I come to her parents' house instead, her brother and her brother-in-law will be there and they speak good English, her brother Jesus worked in Chicago for several years. I acquiesce, again surprised and amazed by the generosity of a total stranger.

Hugo arrives shortly in Jesus's car, and as we pass through the town Martha points out landmarks - the cinema, the hospital where she works, and of course the good restaurants and cafes. Her parents' house is on a little sidestreet apparently on the edge of the city. What must have once been part of the front room has been partitioned off and turned into a tiny store which they operate themselves.

Inside, the small living room is packed with people - Martha's brother, her sister and brother-in-law with their two-month-old baby, her mum and dad, her teenage nephew and neice. I'm introduced around as an honoured guest, and sit on the couch talking to Jesus, whose English is indeed very good, while Martha and her mother bustle about in the kitchen.

Most of the others clear out after half an hour, and Martha brings me and Jesus to the table for a fine meal - shredded bisteck and tortillas, another variety of frijoles charros, hot sauce, stringy quesa and pieces of fresh green avocado (which I've always found fairly unpleasant before, but in context is a wonderful element of the meal), and a big mug of sweet, strong milky coffee. She keeps coming back with more tortillas, asking if I have enough, is there anything else I need?

Finally Martha settles, nibbling on some fruit, and the three of us have another of those complicated bilingual three-way conversations while their parents and nephew watch US baseball on the television. I talk about my journey, and Martha finds a map for me to show where I'm from. They're keen to hear about my own family, and I find photos on the laptop to show them of my parents, brother and sister, aunts and uncles and other relatives, as well as some from my travels in Canada and the US. Martha finds photographs of church conventions she's been to in the US and Canada too, rows of clean, neatly-dressed Mexican, American and Canadian folks smiling a little awkwardly into the camera.

Jesus is looking to go north again - he installs kitchen worktops and floors, another Mexican who was working in the US but got removed after 9/11, and now he's considering Canada. I tell him about the rush of money into Alberta and all the construction going on up there last year, and he's very intrigued, asking for as many details as I can give him.

Finally Jesus shows me upstairs to a small narrow room with two beds - one is his, the other is for me. Jesus kicks his nephews off his own bed and settles down to watch TV while I take a blissfully refreshing shower in a tiny concrete room off the stairs - the shower is just an angled pipe jutting from the wall and the water is cold but it feels like heaven getting the sweat and road dust off me.

An open doorway on the other side of the room opens into a bare space, basically an unfurnished attic, glassless windows in the front wall opening straight onto the open air. A cool breeze blows through, lightening the hot damp air in the room. Jesus lies on his bed watching boxing and Mexican action movies while I read. We exchange a few words at intervals, and finally sleep overcomes me and I doze off.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

3rd of October 2008 - Hitching to Tampico

I wake to find that my new media software has, for some inexplicable reason, wiped all my mp3s. My tunes are the things that keep my spirit up during long waits hitchiking, and I feel pretty lost without them. I spend the morning in the restaurant grabbing back a few albums and munching on more molletes, and finally head out about 1pm for the highway.

I decide to walk to a hitching spot in order to see more of the town, and I don't regret my decision. Away from the town centre and heading out to where Mexico Highway 85 leaves Victoria, the town is beautiful. It rises out of a valley on green slopes covered in trees. The road winds up through multiple loosely-connected settlements, and behind and below me I can see half the town with rolling hills and mesas in the background, misty in the distance.

It's hard work going uphill with my gear and I stop in several places just to sit and look over the view. It's not good to stop anywhere for long, as it's pretty much impossible to find a spot where giant ants don't immediately start trying to climb my legs.

Finally I follow a long curve of the highway to where it straightens out and widens, and start my day's hitching. The highway is pretty rough, the tarmac broken and potholed, and the verges are a jungle of bushes and trees, but there's a well-used path running along the side which is easy to follow - people actually walk here, and I pass many little groups of children and adults going to and fro with shopping bags and boxes.

As usual it's impossible to go anywhere there isn't food and commerce, and every couple of hundred yards there are groups of stalls and carts selling food, fresh fruit, drinks and snacks. Clouds of aromatic charcoal smoke from grills and ovens drift across the path. I stop in a given spot for maybe half an hour, and if I have no luck I move on, mainly to keep ahead of the midges. After an hour and a half I'm sweating and dehydrated and my water's running low - it really is incredibly hot out here - so I stop at a tiny cafeteria for a bottle of fizzy fruity something and a refill of my water bottle.

I sit outside on a plastic chair, slowly cooling to a comfortable temperature in the shade, exchanging a few words with the owner, and his son of two or three plays peek-a-boo with me under his dad's huge stetson hat. At the urging of his mum (who's been watching with amusement), he brings me a pear, and I give him a purple rabbit finger puppet I've been carrying in my pack since San Francisco with which he's very pleased.

Finally, after a few more stops out along the road, I'm picked up by Hugo in his remarkably battered station wagon. Hugo speaks no English but we're able to put together a conversation with a lot of pointing, mime (I'm becoming almost completely unselfconscious about performing intricate games of charades to get my point across, with sound effects when necessary - "Moooo....carne asada!") and referring (and adding) to the collection of words in my notebook.

Once we're out of town the scenery is just stunning. I'm expecting dry yellow landscapes, striking but harsh, but this is the sierra and the landscape is an emerald green I've rarely even seen at home in England - more like Ireland than anywhere. Mile after mile of beautiful rich vegetation, trees and big cacti stretch around us, the horizon puncuated with round hills and mesas themselves carpeted with thick greenery.

Hugo drops me in the tiny town of Zaragoza at a petrol station, and I step into the cool to rest up at a plastic table over another bottle of something fizzy. The humidity here is pretty high, and any movement starts the sweat pouring off me. When I walk back out to the highway, I'm picked up within twenty minutes.

I'm riding with Octavio and his wife Valentina, whose little son gazes at me wide-eyed for the whole of our short trip while he munches messily and with much apparent enjoyment on a fruit tart. Octavio speaks a little English. He lays tile for a living, good work in this country where two out of three buildings seem to have tiled floors throughout. Apparently marble is very cheap here, quarried in huge quantities near Monterrey, and that's mostly what he works with.

They drop me a few miles on at the turnoff to Ciudad Mante, their destination. It's totally empty out here, just miles of sierra on all sides, and the sun is approaching the horizon. The distant mesas are gathering thin layers of mist, glowing faintly in the rosy light of sundown. I begin to wonder if there are banditos out here, and whether anyone's going to pick up a lone stranger this far from civilisation.

Time stretches on, and it's definitely starting to get dark. Nobody who passes shows any intention of stopping. I decide to call it a night and walk toward Mante, however far that is. If worst comes to worst I can sleep out here, and hope the snake and scorpion populations won't pay me undue attention if I'm not moving. I knew I was going to have to sleep outdoors at some point, and I've known other people who've done it, so it can't be that dangerous.

As it turns out, I only get about half an hour down the road before a brand new SUV passes me, gets a little further down the road then stops and backs up next to me. Luis is pretty surprised to find me trying to walk out here, and urges me into his truck, pushing aside a black case and stethoscope to make space for my backpack in the back seat. There's a white coat hanging over the back of his seat; he's a doctor working for two of the hospitals in the area, and living in Mante.

Luis speaks a pretty good smattering of English - he used to work on a hunting ranch near the border, he explains, "And I listen...and repeat. Listen...and repeat." His brother in law speaks much better English, having travelled in America, and he announces "That is where I will take you now, to see him".

Ciudad Mante turns out to be a long way from the turnoff, maybe forty-five minutes driving. We work our way slowly down numerous winding, interlocking back roads, following a little rio in a concrete trench. Here and there alongside the road are small settlements, clustered shacks with braziers and bonfires glowing red in the gathering dark.

When we finally enter Mante it's a riotous, noisy town, more energetic than what I saw of Victoria. Music pumps out from all sides, from Mexican, US and European contemporary music to seventies and eighties pop (very popular here) and surprising bursts of progressive dance and drum and bass. One of the Axxo corner shops has speakers outside pounding out salsa music at a deafening level and beautiful girls in skintight leggings and shirts dancing, promoting Tecate beer.

We stop at a house on a dark side street and Luis disppears through a tall iron gate, but returns after a few minutes alone "He is still sleeping. We go to my house. You will meet my family."

Luis's house is at the end of another roughly-paved and narrow side-street, and is a clean, new-looking flat-roofed building painted a cheery peach colour, with decorative wrought-iron grids over the windows. Inside is a small living room packed with stuff - two big soft couches, a tall unit of carved wood holding a big TV and surround speakers, numerous craft items, a kids baseball launcher for batting practice (his son, two years old, is a baseball fanatic).

He shows me some of the items he's made himself - a wrought-iron frame stretched with dark brown, richly textured leather like a shield, cut through with cross shapes, a lamp base made from the inverted trunk and branches of a cactus, naturally swiss-cheesed with evenly-spaced holes, a beautiful carved wooden frame for a mirror. He also has a collection of blankets made by the local indian tribes, and immediately hands me two little place-mat sized blankets, cream woven with multi-coloured designs and tassles. "Here, to remember us by." I'm speechless.

Soon Luis's family returns and I'm introduced to his wife, Lupita, slim and quiet with long hair in a ponytail and a wide smile, his two-year-old son Luis Fernando who has a thin link gold bracelet and matching necklace and a very grown-up debonair air about him, and his eight-year-old daughter Valentina who is already putting on a lot of eye-rolling teenage attitude, particularly when urged to use her limited school English by her father.

Luis insists I must eat with them, and we go to a local taqueria to get food for dinner. He drives with little Luis sitting calmly on his lap, gazing around at the night streets and yelling out whenever he sees a cat. "Gatta! Una! Una una!" One of his toys, a rubber scorpion, is on the dashboard, and I find a rubber spider in my pack to accompany it which seems to bring him a lot of joy.

Dinner is wonderful, and my hosts want me to try everything - grilled onion, charcoal-broiled bisteck (beef steak), flame-grilled whole jalapenos (fortunately not too hot), a big bowl of frijoles charros (beans with little bits of bacon, chicken, peppers, lemon juice and garlic), the ubiquitous little tortillas, spicy green salsa and of course bright red hot sauce.

Over the meal we have a complicated three-way conversation with Luis translating between myself and Lupita whenever my Spanish is inadequate (which is still most of the time). I keep my notebook next to me and take a note whenever I find a new word, and Luis is endlessly patient with my enquiries. We talk about travel, then get onto philosophy and religion, and only wind down when Luis begins to look as though he's going to fall asleep on the table - he's been on long shifts and had about five hours of sleep in the last two days.

Lupita insists that I stay the night in their spare room, and Luis clears the bed of the children's toys, brings me a fan and bustles about worrying that I have everything I need until I flatout order him to go to bed - he's swaying on his feet. The generosity of these complete strangers brings me almost to tears. I lie on the bed with the window open, crickets chirping outside as the breeze slowly cools, reading until my head begins to drop onto my arms and I drift off.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

2nd of October 2008 - One More Day in Victoria

I breakfast on a couple of sweet rolls from the next-door store, and spend the morning at the restaurant sipping coffee and trying to find a good travel guide to Mexico - they seem annoyingly hard to track down, apart from very specific guides to the major tourist destinations. In the end I settle on just heading for Tampico, the coastal town nearest to Victoria, which looks like it's got nice beaches and plenty of life to experience.

Lunch is molletes, soft round rolls covered in refried beans and cheese. I drop my laptop back at the hotel and spend the afternoon exploring the town. The sheer level of competition here is amazing - some streets have more than twenty restaurants serving very similar menus, and I can't believe they're all doing effective business. Keeps standards high, I suppose. For some reason there are also an incredible number of vets - one street has three.

My Spanish is coming along slowly. Mostly I'm just expanding my vocabulary - I keep sitting down with the conjugation tables and trying to learn my verbs and grammar but my brain just switches off, so I suppose I'll have to learn them from context. I can mostly say what I want to say, if not particularly elegantly, but I'm still having a hard time understanding what's said to me, even in situations (as in the restaurant) where I know a lot of the words. When I do understand someone it's usually because I'm anticipating the type of thing they're going to say, and my brain's primed for it. That too will improve, of course. My grasp of the numbers is already a lot better.

In the evening I go looking for chicharron - Mexican pork rinds in sauce - but nobody has chicarron, so I settle for a flauta with picadillo instead, which turns out to be pretty much minced beef. It's seasoned and good though. I get some of my stuff packed and settle in to read, ready for the morning and my first attempt at hitching in Mexico.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

1st of October 2008 - Learning More about Mexico

Sorry about the delay, folks, hope you haven't been worrying. First no internet access, then I had a bit of a data crisis - my iPod drive, which I've been using as pretty much my sole data storage, got corrupted at some point. I'm running data recovery programs on it right now trying to get some of my stuff back - fortunately pretty much everything essential is stored somewhere else, and I was able to get back the four or five blog posts I'd written but not yet posted.

I splash out and breakfast at the hotel restaurant - huevos rancheros, scrambled eggs with hot salsa, crispy fried potatoes and of course refried beans on the side - and try to get some more information together about travel in Mexico. I hadn't really registered how my information resources had been depleted - I traded away my Hostelling International book somewhere in North America and lost my copy of the Practical Nomad somewhere else.

I've gotten kind of complacent about my ability to get a picture of an area, because everywhere I've been I just talk to people and opportunities present themselves. But here, of course, the language barrier means I can't rely on people for that kind of information, at least until my Spanish gets a lot better. I didn't buy a guidebook for the above reasons, and frustratingly a lot of the good travel sites seem to be premium. I have a bunch more bookmarks to try, but decide to update the blog and catch up on email for now.

Ciudad Victoria has been a perfect or a very bad choice for my first destination, depending on how you look at it. I haven't seen a single non-Hispanic person in town since I arrived, and I haven't yet met anyone who speaks English. That means I've had to work harder on the language than I would otherwise, but also limits my options as far as gathering information.

On the way back to the hotel I'm struck by the spirit of commerce in the town. On every corner, every road, every niche between buildings there's some kind of business. A rough side-street with grass growing up through the tarmac has shops for the repair of shoes, tools, mobile phones. It's a different kind of business here, what seems like the real expression of American free enterprise. You don't join some big organisation or look for help from somewhere else, if you have a couple of square feet of space and a makeshift roof, you start a business.

The major streets around the bus station are lined with stalls and little wagons selling tortas, flautas ("flutes", essentially long thing burritos), gorditas, drinks and dulces (sweets). At every intersection there are men waiting to approach the stopped traffic with newspapers, bottled water, straw hats and handmade toys.

Of course there are the familiar corner shops too, often with ancient rust-flecked tin signs advertising soft drinks and magazines that may or may not still exist, and larger corporate intruders like the huge Grand Supermercado, pretty much indistinguishable from any chain supermarket. I buy my dinner from a franchise just for variation, a cavernous restaurant attached to the Super. Their No. 1 combo is four gorditas (little round pita-like pockets) filled with meat, green beans, crispy potatoes, cheese and different spicy sauces.

I'm taking reasonable health precautions and seem to be doing okay so far - drinking only water from my filter bottle, no ice in drinks, no fresh salad. I've had a little mild stomach pain but I think only from the unfamiliar spicy food. I'm expecting to get sick at least once, it seems to happen to most people, and I'm not going to overprotect myself - I will eat from street vendors as long as the food doesn't look really festering. Security vs experience, as usual, and if I'm going to give up experience I might as well just go home.

Tomorrow hopefully I can find some more information on the area and worthwhile places to go, and I'll get back on the road the day after. For now I've got a Victoria Cerveza on the go, and a pineapple tart to munch on, the evening is cool and Mexico is just fine.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

30th of September 2008 - Vida en Ciudad Victoria

It's half past one and I'm half-dozing when we pull into Ciudad Victoria bus station. I descend from the bus and collect my luggage, bleary-eyed. But within a few minutes I'm awake and grinning. I made it into the unknown, and here's everything I'm looking for.

Bus stations in the US feel half-dead, cold and somehow empty even in the middle of the day. Here it's the middle of the night but the station feels alive and vibrant. It's bright and full of people, staff and customers bustling to and fro. A long counter is serving food and drinks. Music comes from TV screens showing Mexican music television.

The bus station is attractive, mostly painted brick, with a patch of neatly-trimmed small trees in the middle of the bay. The floor is concrete and spotlessly clean, with a tiled area of chairs next to an all-night farmacia.

I get a cafe sin leche from the counter for 10 pesos (about 50 pence), and sit down in the tiled area to decide on my next move and watch some music videos. The bands are roughly divided into two categories - smirking boy bands singing upbeat ear-candy and slightly older mariachi-style bands playing tunes with a lot of brass and soulful-but-still-cheery vocals.

Almost all of the videos are pretty funny and self-deprecating - Mexican bands seem to be a lot more willing to make fun of themselves than the music celebrities I'm used to. In one of the mariachi videos the lead singer goes through several scenes failing to charm a beautiful girl, to be saved in each case by the fat, moustachioed saxophonist who transforms (in a cloud of pink smoke and hearts) into a short toga and tiny wings (although still wearing his white stetson), sneaks up behind them on exaggerated tippy-toes and shoots her with a glowing pink arrow.

On the way in I've seen a number of hotels, but I want to find a cheap option and even if I give only a little credence to the dire warnings I've had from everyone it doesn't seem smart to go exploring a strange Mexican city in the dark. I decide to get something to eat from one of the many restaurants and little food stalls dotted around the area, and wait out the night in the bus station.

I exit to the concourse. It's a cavernous tiled space, also spotlessly clean, with rows of benches, half a dozen modern ticket counters with big maps behind them showing destinations across the country, more TVs at regular intervals, a number of little stores and another food counter backed by a big mural of smiling anthropomorphic buses in peaked caps. There's a shrine to the Virgin Mary opposite the main doors, with a couple of candles in glass jars burning in front of it, and many staff and passengers stop to cross themselves as they pass it.

Outside, I spot a restaurant directly opposite the station, cheerfully done up in fresh yellow paint with a list of its offerings handpainted along the front. It's empty apart from me and the owner, a big, slow-moving and solemn older man. Music plays from a radio by the counter. I study the menu, seeing familiar options I've tried in the US but wanting to try something different.

Not knowing what most of the stuff is, I point at random and plump for the entomatadas. They turn out to be the usual tortilla rolls covered in a good rich tomato sauce (en-tomata-das, "in-tomato...things"), sprinkled in curd-like Mexican cheese and accompanied by the usual refried beans and a pile of salad which I carefully avoid, going on numerous health warnings. My Coca-cola comes in a tall thin glass bottle of unfamiliar design.

I stay in the bus station till morning, listening to my iPod and reading in bursts when I'm not too tired to focus on the page. Buses keep coming and going all night, and the station never empties. The staff at the ticket counters wander to and fro, chat with each other, flip channels on the numerous TVs. Finally it starts to get light outside, and I go exploring for a cheap hotel.

The town, or at least this area of it, is mostly what I expect and pretty much what I hoped. It's a little rough and run-down, with frequent patches of waste ground and empty lots even between relatively new buildings. Everything here seems a little old, a little worn, but wherever buildings are in use they are clean and hand-swept, and neatly painted in clean, bright colours.

There's a lot of noise and bustle, even this early in the morning. The roads are busy with mostly older-model and rather battered cars, interspersed here and there with a new, expensive-looking vehicle. Crossing the roads is a little hairy, as there are almost no pedestrian crossings - you just have to judge the complex flow of traffic for a gap and go, as I learn watching the locals do it.

I do a round of the local hotels and find that the first one I came to is the cheapest, a small welcoming peach-coloured building directly opposite the bus station charging 220 pesos per night, around twenty-one dollars or ten pounds fifty for a room sin clima (no air-conditioning - that's an extra eighty pesos). I stumble through the exchange and get my key from a giggling twenty-something girl at the desk.

The building is narrow and on three levels. My room is at the end of a long hallway with the two levels above forming balconies. Maybe once open to the sky, now the building is roofed with corrugated plastic sheeting through which soft green light filters down. The walls are thick stone, the floor quarry tile, and it's cool and quiet. There are two wicker benches in the hallway, and black metal brackets on the wall hold platic pots with bunches of artificial flowers. On the end wall is a large mirror with a wooden frame polished to a rich sheen.

My room is roughly twice the size of its queen-size bed, and has a wooden chair and small set of shelves, a large ceiling fan and a television. There's a frosted glass window looking out onto an air-shaft, and a clear one onto the corridor. A black metal-framed lamp that looks like an old London streetlight is essential, as not much light filters in from the window. The bathroom is large and completely tiled, half of it slightly sunk and curtained off for the shower. It's clean, cool even without a/c and smells faintly of flowers.

Once showered and changed my energy has returned, and I go looking for internet access, finding my Spanish learning resources pretty inadequate. The bus station has wi-fi although I can't get into it, but the most expensive hotel I looked at earlier (charging 870 pesos per night) is showing an open network. I hunker down in front of an empty building nearby and manage to grab a few documents and a couple of Spanish-English dictionaries before some really big scary-looking red ants start crawling up my leg and I abort the operation.

Back at the hotel with a can of Gladiator energy drink ("Furia Azul" or Blue Fury flavour, featuring the Mexican wrestler Mistico on the can, although it's actually a Coca-cola product) I spend a couple of hours hammering some more basic vocabulary into my head until I fall asleep over my keyboard.

In the evening I go back to try and get some email done, and after some time searching for a more comfortable spot within range of the wi-fi I realise there's a rather nice restaurant forming part of the hotel complex. Inside I slowly work through a milkshake and later a pretty good cerveza (beer) and manage to catch up a little before hunger gets the better of me.

The prices here are steep, so I walk back up to the bus station area and buy a really good chicken tortilla from a restaurant two doors down from my hotel, where the cool evening air blows in through the open doorway and broad front window. Three little girls are playing with a wooden top outside, and watch me curiously from the doorway, whispering together, while I wait for my food.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

29th of September 2008 - Finally Mexico

A double update today, folks, still catching up - go back one to get the first new post.

I grab a sandwich from the corner gas station and hike down the road to the one from which the bus leaves, balanced between nervousness and excitement. When the bus comes it's full, and I'm the only white person on it. Many of the other passengers have sizeable piles of luggage, black binbags full of stuff strapped up with tape - that's pretty much the same on any bus in the US.

We're driving through montonous near-desert and I fall asleep almost immediately, waking when we stop at a rundown station in Harlingen to change buses. Most of the rest of the passengers immediately board an adjacent bus, which is apparently going straight to Matamoros, the Mexican town just the other side of the border from Brownsville, but the gas station could only sell me a Brownsville ticket so I'm waiting another half hour for mine.

As I stand at the side of the shed watching them load up, two Border Patrol agents come into the station, both wearing Aviator style mirrored shades under their dark green peaked caps. One is leading a big sloppy mixed-breed dog with a fair bit of Alsation in it, which he encourages into the open luggage compartments to sniff over the luggage while his colleague goes into the office. Luggage apparently found clean, he takes the dog back to the white landrover parked outside the station then returns to enter the bus itself.

I see him facing down the bus, talking, then begin checking documents. A minute later he comes back out with three Hispanic guys in front of him, three generations it looks like, and he and his colleague push them up to the side of the bus, palms spread against the metal, then cuff them. At this moment my own bus pulls up between me and them.

I sit on the bus waiting for the bus to leave, wondering if a green cap is going to appear on the stairs and I'll have my dramatically-expired tourist visa checked. I feel oddly calm - there's really nothing to do about it at this point if I do get stopped. It may be they'll just make sure I leave the country and say no more about it. And as a white person there's a fair chance I won't even be checked. Nonetheless, when the door slides shut I breathe more easily.

I sleep again, and soon we're pulling into Brownsville station. To all intents and purposes we are in Mexico now. Most of the signs are bilingual, and if there's only one language it's Spanish. The staff and customers are all Hispanic. From here I can get a bus to almost anywhere in Mexico, and I want to get clear of the border quickly, having heard that the border towns are pretty unsafe. I pile my gear on a bench and peruse the map of Mexico and Central America I bought at the gas station.

Ciudad Victoria seems like a good destination for my first day. It's a goodsized town or small city, and looks to be well located to jump off to lots of interesting places, particularly the coastal town of Tampico. But when I read off the prices on the board, it seems that bus travel here is even more expensive than the US - it will cost me almost 200 dollars to get to Victoria.

Heart sinking, I pick the cheapest destination on the list - San Fernando, just a little hop down the road and still a big bite at 87 dollars. But when I go up to buy my ticket, the woman at the desk asks me for nine. Confused, I look back and forth from her to the board...and finally realise that they use the same symbol for Mexican pesos as they do for dollars. I switch my choice back to Victoria, at a cost of twenty dollars American.

When the bus arrives, provided by the huge Mexican operator Transpais, it's one of the most comfortable I've ridden on, with big cushiony seats and lots of legroom. We pull out of the station, turn two corners and we're on the customs bridge. Below, a concrete-lined trench carries what is presumably this part of the Rio Grande.

Having driven for about a minute, we pull into a parking lot and disembark again. We're ushered into a glass-walled room which strangely has one of the bridge's massive pylons coming down through the ceiling and grounding in a square of gravel in the floor, and called up one by one to a window.

This is Mexican customs and immigration, so I'm not too worried about my papers, assuming they're not going to go out of their way to help out US agencies. My passport is checked, and the bored-looking agent behind the window asks for some other proof of my address. I don't have it, but he just shrugs and hands me a flimsy piece of paper - my entry visa, stamped for a 180 day stay. He doesn't stamp my passport itself.

Back outside we are herded around by two customs agents, and brought up one by one to press a mysterious button under two lights, one red and one green. It turns out to randomly choose between the lights - when it falls on red a buzzer sounds and your luggage is searched, but it doesn't land on green once and the agents are getting annoyed. When my light comes up red the agent lifts my backpack onto the table, glares at it for a moment then gestures for me to put it back on the bus. We're back on the road five minutes later.

We carry on through the other side of Brownsville and into Matamoros. The buildings are what I think of as classic Mexican - blocky buildings with big open tiled areas, painted into bright primary colours, here and there interspersed with beautiful Mission-style houses with white walls and red tiled roofs. The streets are busy with scooters and cars, mostly older and more battered than one would expect in the US.

Matamoros bus station, where we have to change, is fully enclosed in high walls and manned by watchful security guards. The driver of our bus held onto my ticket back in Brownsville, and now he disappears without further comment, to my mild concern. I'm unable to locate him after a search of the lounge and ticket desks, but finally run into him on the concourse where he hands me an entirely new ticket for reasons I can't discern. Now there's nothing to do but wait an hour and a half for my bus on.

I need to use the bathroom, but find that they it's protected by a 3-peso coin-operated gate. Having no cash on me but a 100-dollar US bill I haven't been able to break or change, I'm in a bit of a predicament. Finally I ask at the Transpais desk and a staff member exchanges it for 1,050 pesos in big blue and red bills. I purchase two croissant-like rolls from a vendor for 16 pesos and have change.

Since I'm now actually in Mexico, it seems like a good time to start learning some Spanish. I've never been one to overprepare for these kind of challenges - I finished almost all my college assignments with an hour or two to go before hand-in time. My ticket jacket from Kingsville and various bilingual posters teach me a bunch of useful words for use in bus travel, and I have a one-page Spanish primer on my laptop which I copy into my notebook and gives me some basic structural words and grammar.

By the time I'm ready to line up for my bus I'm able to ask the driver if I need a tag for my luggage, and exchange a couple of phrases with a kindly older lady on the bench next to me. It's satisfying and fun to be sinking straight into a new language in this way. I start collecting new words in my notebook like stamps and noting down the ones I need to look up.

It's dark now as we get out on the road. The highway is pretty rough, and we bump and rattle along, but the bus is again comfortable, well-equipped and apparently well-maintained. I say apparently because after fifteen minutes we get stopped in traffic, and the driver can't get it moving again. From the puffing and hissing noises as he works the controls it seems to be a problem with the air brakes. After ten minutes we get started again.

In-bus entertainment is selected by the driver from what seems to be a sizeable digital library. He pages through numerous folders on the screen above his head and plays a Jean Reno movie, Roseanna's Grave, dubbed into Spanish. I can't make out the dialogue but most of it seems to involve Jean Reno running around, waving his arms and screaming, so the language barrier isn't too severe.

Soon we come to another Immigration post - I've been told that the serious checks take place a little south of the border. But when we stop moving in the queue of vehicles for the post, the bus fails again. After ten minutes of hissing and grinding, with two men outside on the road waving other vehicles past us, the driver manages to get it going backwards and pulls us up onto the hard shoulder. He disappears, and we are left to wait.

It takes over an hour and a half before the driver sticks his head back in and calls us all out onto the road. Another bus has been brought up behind, and we and our luggage are hastily transferred to it. The road is mostly empty by now, and when we finally pass through the immigration post there are no staff evident and we roll straight on through.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

28th of September 2008 - Procrastinating Just a Little Bit More

I decide to stay one more night in Kingsville, frankly out of nothing more than the desire to put off the crossing into Mexico. I don't know why this part of my journey is intimidating me so much, except that it's unknown, more alien than anywhere I've been before. And it's easy here, with a comfortable room and wi-fi and all mod cons. But I'm resolved it'll only be one more night.

I've had a bit more money come through from web design work I've been doing on the road, and when I check my balance it's a good bit healthier than I expected, so I have an acceptable financial safety net. That makes me feel safer about the changes to come.

The bugs here are unbelievable. On the way down with Don we drove through great clouds of butterflies, apparently passing through as part of their migration pattern, and Kingsville is swarming with beetles, flies and insects of all kinds.

The outside wall of the McDonalds on the first night was covered in different kinds of moths, and the parking lot of the Whataburger was a virtual sea of crickets and huge cockroaches, hopping and scuttling, so many that it was impossible to avoid stepping on one with every other step. I remarked to one of the staff that it was like a biblical plague and she said "That's just South Texas, sir."

I count eleven different kinds of fly and beetle on the window of my motel room, and when I step out into the warm night for a smoke I have to whip the door shut behind me to avoid dozens of them getting in. The night is alive with buzzing and clicking and humming, some of them creating an extraordinary resonant sound I can't believe comes from anything smaller than a football. A big green beetle clicks loudly against the shade of one of my lamps all night.

I decide to part with two more things from my backpack. My Camelbak water reservoir with its drinking tube is just extra weight, if a minor convenience when I'm walking with the pack on, but my Trangia camping stove is something I've been struggling with dropping for a couple of months.

I've maybe used it a dozen times since I started travelling, it's bulky and heavy and obtaining fuel for it is a wasteful process - I can only carry a few uses of it, so I have to buy a full bottle of denatured alcohol and throw most of it away. Granted it gives me more options as far as food (and the option of morale-boosting hot coffee) and I will be heading into areas where I'm more likely to use it, but these days pretty much anywhere I can get uncooked food I can get packaged stuff too, and I don't have the space or facilities to keep uncooked food with me for any length of time anyway. I give both to Muhammed.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

27th of September 2008 - Procrastinating Just a Little

I end up spending the rest of the night in a Whataburger restaurant, reading and writing up the blog. I find a corner booth with a power socket for my laptop, order a small burger and watch the crowds come and go. It's a cross-section of smalltown American life. First hordes of parents and children returning from a school sports meet - they fill the restaurant to capacity, chattering and yelling, and queue up at the drive-through.

As they disperse towards 1am, the seats fill with teenage night-owls. Even at three or four am there are groups of teenagers as young as thirteen or fourteen gathering here. And of course there's a steady stream of truckers and cowboys, cops and drunks. Around 3am there's an influx of serious men in the green overalls and shoulder patches of the Border Patrol, coming off duty on the patrol line just south of town. The parking lot is full of white jeeps.

When I go out for a smoke about 2am, I get chatting to the team leader, a boy who seems to be about 18 with braces on his teeth, a jewelled cross necklace over his orange Whataburger shirt and a huge belt buckle featuring three more crosses encrusted with fake gems. His description of life in Kingsville is less than enthusiastic - there are really no work options at his age except one of the numerous fast food jobs, and it's pretty grim work.

There are fights in here pretty much every weekend - they employ a security guard friday through Sunday and usually have to call the police at least once each of those nights, although it's often because drunks fall asleep at the wheel in the drive-thru lane and impede traffic. This is a relatively mellow branch, though - the Whataburger on the main drag here, where his girlfriend works, has five or six security guards on duty at the weekend.

When we come back inside and I order a vanilla milkshake, he waves my money away. "Nah, man, it's just easier this way." He grins with his mouthful of gleaming metal and ducks back into the kitchen. The milkshake is creamy and good, so thick I can barely suck it up the straw.

At around 5am the incoming team leader comes to my table. "Are you hungry, sir? Cos I made this burger on accident and it's just going in the garbage otherwise..." It's a massive Double with Cheese, loaded with salad and strips of crispy bacon.

Finally the sky begins to lighten and I lug my gear back under the highway and start talking to drivers at the gas station. After two hours it seems that either only locals use these pumps or drivers heading south are very wary of picking up a hitchhiker. Instead I walk along down the highway to the next gas station, from where, I'm told, a bus goes on to Brownsville.

The Valley Transport bus (a subcontractor of Greyhound) turns out to cost $27.00, not an impossible bite out of my budget, and I decide to take it, but once I sit down to wait my mind starts turning around. I'm exhausted, my feet are a mass of pain inside my workboots, I have almost no clean laundry and I haven't showered in two days. It seems justifiable to have a night in comfort, get clean and in a better frame of mind before heading into unknown territory.

The hotel next door is way too expensive, so I hike back up the road (taking around an hour - this place is really spread out) to a Motel 6, and arrive on my last legs. The manager, Muhammed, is a kind and friendly guy from Malaysia, who not only knocks seven bucks off the price of my room but when he hears where I'm travelling gives me his card and tells me if I get to Malaysia to drop him an email and he'll help me out if he can.

In the air-conditioned comfort of my room I finally and blissfully pull off my boots (the calluses on my soles have softened to a layer of corpse-white skin, most of which peels off once it dries out and hardens again), shower with sighs of joy and wash my clothes in the basin, hanging them all over the room to dry.

I'm still carrying my washball, and I cannot recommend this thing strongly enough if you're going travelling on a budget. It's the size of a tennis ball, costs about 10 pounds and genuinely gets everything clean and sweet-smelling, even if I've been wearing it for two or three days without a shower. I've probably used this one fifty times and barely reduced the size of the balls of magic stuff inside.

Finally clean, and feeling a hundred times cheerier, I get dinner from Gem's Pancakes on the corner (seasoned chicken tenderloins, potato salad and okra, with a cup of soup and a loaded box from the salad bar), settle down with a House marathon on cable and sew myself a new pouch for my electronic gear from a leftover leg of my last pair of jeans.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

26th of September 2008 - Slow Progress

I've gotten a few days behind on updates, and while it's been nice to have a backlog, I don't know when I'm going to have internet again, so I'm going to put up four posts in one go and catch up. Click here to go to the first of the new posts.

I'm up at 7am, rested and feeling optimistic again, and spend an hour in the Jack In the Box using their free wifi to send some emails over a dollar menu chicken sandwich and a surprisingly good coffee. Then it's back to the corner.

Rosenberg is definitely not a great spot. It's another two hours before I get a ride with a younger Mexican guy, who again can only drop me a couple of stops down at a truck stop on another identical onramp. There's no traffic coming out of the adjacent town of Beasley so I start canvassing the drivers as they return to their vehicles. I've said before I don't like this method of hitching - it's more pushy, it's harder for people to say no and it just feels too much like begging. But in this case I don't seem to have a choice.

And it yields results. As usual the commercial drivers can't take me because their insurance won't cover them if they have non-employees in the cab. But a black guy with two sparkling gold teeth driving his own truck offers to take me fifteen miles down to El Campo. It's the longest ride I've had so far, but when I examine my map I've made depressingly little progress - El Campo is only halfway between Houston and Victoria, and after Victoria it's around 200 miles to Brownsville and the border. If I can't make better speed than this it'll be days before I reach Mexico.

Things don't improve much in El Campo. After another two and a half hours on the onramp I walk back to the intersection to the ever-present McDonalds rest stop and start talking to drivers again. But the second person I talk to is Don, who makes my day. He lives in Kingsville, south of Corpus Christi, and he can put me down within 70 miles of Brownsville. What's more, Kingsville turns out to be the best place for me to be this afternoon - just south of it is the edge of the Border Patrol zone, in which hitching will be very problematic if not impossible. I decide to stop in Kingsville for the night and try to find one ride from there which will take me straight over the border.

Don's a laser imaging professional who has business in Houston - he's going home to his family after liasing with his colleague, who is imaging a section of tollroad in the city as part of a redesign. He's also a Mormon, ex-Navy, a diehard Republican voter and a gun owner, which makes me think conversation is going to be difficult. But as it turns out he's a reasonable, relatively open-minded guy who's open to debate on all kinds of issues, and we get along well.

On the way down the 77 to Kingsville he warns me about the area. There are illegal Mexican immigrants all over this road, and many of them are, according to a study he has read, felons. There are rattlesnakes everywhere, big ones, right out on the pavements. And Border Patrol are all over the place.

He's concerned for my safety and frankly I'm nervous too, but at this point I don't feel like there's any way back. I knew this was going to be a risky endeavour, and I've faced risk before. I've chosen repeatedly to trade off safety against experience. The only reason I can give him is that I've been travelling on almost pure optimism now for over 14 months, and it keeps working out.

Nonetheless, now I'm here, sitting in a McDonalds by the highway south of Kingsville, and I'll be honest with you, folks - I'm scared. I've never wanted more to be safe back at home, watching TV in bed with my girlfriend, or eating dinner with my parents, or just back with my friends somewhere in the U.S. where things are safe and people speak English and I know roughly where to go for work.

About an hour ago I started thinking about curtailing the trip right here and flying home. But even if my remaining funds will cover it I can't fly home from anywhere in the U.S., so my only option is still to cross the border and head for a Mexican city. And, stupidly but I suppose humanly enough, the major thing I'm worried about is wimping out on all my grand plans and looking like an idiot. So I'm going to stop here tonight, and tomorrow I'm going to talk to drivers.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

25th of September 2008 - Getting Out of Houston

I'm up just in time to say goodbye to Kelly before he leaves for work, and finish my packing. Once I'm all set, Tracy takes me out for a breakfast of kolaches, the delicious polish sweet buns stuffed with good things - I have a sausage and gravy and a barbeque one. We drink cinnamon coffee from the Buffalo Grill and plan my departure.

I've decided to leave via highway 59, which goes southwest to Victoria. From there I can pick up the 77 south past Corpus Christi to Brownsville, and cross the border into Matamoros, Mexico. Once across I want to get away from the dangerous border area as fast as possible based on everyone's recommendations, so hopefully I'll get a ride somewhere around Brownsville that takes me straight across and some way out on the other side.

Tracy drops me at a gas station on 59 somewhere around the 602 beltway which encircles the city centre. First we have to spend some time driving up and down to find an intersection not being manned by police officers - a lot of the lights are still out and cops are filling in on traffic control. I don't know the local policy on hitchhiking but the police are rarely in favour of it.

I walk up to the first intersection and put my thumb out, but there's something about the way the traffic is running that makes me feel like this is a bad spot. After an hour of no responses, I pack up my gear and walk on a mile or two to find a more promising location. Beside me the feeder traffic is busy and beyond it the freeway traffic grinds on, a slow mass filling four lanes.

I find a new spot I'm satisfied with, on a more open corner, and start again. About an hour and a half later I'm starting to flag in the hot sun, but hope arrives in the form of a sweet Hispanic woman with two cute kids in the back of her minivan, who offers to take me a little further down. I'm grateful enough to not be paying real attention to our lane, and when she drops me off I suddenly register that she's misunderstood and taken me right off the 59 by over a mile.

The walk back to the highway is something of an adventure in itself. None of Houston is particularly pedestrian-friendly, but this is that strange hinterland to be found on the edge of pretty much any North American city, islands of retail and residential properties connected only by the road where pedestrians are a foreign species. I climb banks, walk across debris-strewn wastelands overgrown with grass and brush and at one point have to wade through a stream where the bridges have no hard shoulder to walk on.

Another culvert is too deep to ford and I have to sprint across a traffic bridge, pack and all, in a too-short gap in traffic, and vault over the wall onto a grassy bank on the other side before the next burst of vehicles reaches me. On the other side of the wall I sit down and pull off my shoes and socks to let them dry, but suddenly realise there's a cop car parked on the waste ground less than a hundred yards away. I get moving again quickly.

Next it's the dash across the roads under the highway to reach the southbound side, between the huge concrete pillars that support the 59 itself. I'm exhausted and feeling stressed but once again I realise - what am I rushing for? So I settle myself on a beautiful green stretch of soft grass just outside the fence of a motel complex, take my shoes and socks off again, put my hat over my eyes and take a little nap while my socks dry, the traffic rolling slowly past just a few feet away.

I've had one new thought about this contentment thing. I always thought that peace was to be found in the exact middle of a scale with resentment or dissatisfaction at one end and total gratitude or a feeling of debt to some higher being or force at the other. I thought you could only be at peace and content with your situation while you felt neither one nor the other. Now it seems like contentment and joy are just a little closer to the gratitude end of the scale.

By the time I start hitching again, the rush hour has arrived and traffic on the 59 and its feeder roads has slowed to a crawl. Nobody looks to be in a good mood and it looks like a ride may take a while coming. Nonetheless I put my thumb out and hope, but when a response comes ten minutes later it's from inside the complex.

Debbie is in her fifties, with blonde hair in a bob cut and rectangular glasses. She can take me a little further down to the edge of the city at Sweetwater Boulevard, but there's a hitch - she has no gas money and her tank's almost empty. I offer her ten dollars, more than I'm trying to spend total on any day, and she fetches the truck.

As it turns out, Debbie's homeless. Her home was destroyed in the hurricane, and like many others she's on the long waiting list to get help from FEMA, the Federal department responsible for helping disaster victims. In the meantime she's living in a motel she can barely scrape together the money for. Everything she owns is in the back of the truck, which itself is borrowed from a friend of hers.

Debbie drops me on Sweetwater Boulevard with good wishes and some leftover Mexican food, and I sit against the twenty-foot wall of what seems to a residential complex to eat before moving on. Again this is pedestrian-unfriendly country and I walk along verges and run across roads with no foot crossing facilities to reach a promising corner.

This time I'm picked up within two minutes, by Joe, a Hispanic guy from San Antonia wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a white vest. He's a carpenter and cabinet maker, now working for an air-conditioning manufacturer. Again he can only drop me a little further down, to an intersection near Richmond, but it's better than nothing.

At Richmond I wait for about an hour on another near-identical onramp corner before Darren picks me up and drops me a couple more exits down in Rosenberg, promising that this will be a good spot. He's in construction and has a trucker cap, a thick Texas accent, a very big cup of coke and ice and a very small dog, his ex-wife's lasu apsu Josie, who promptly makes herself comfortable on my lap and peers happily out of the window.

Rosenberg is not a good spot. I arrive as the sun is approaching the horizon, and spend almost three hours on the corner with no response except for one guy who makes the extra effort to roll down his window and give me the finger. By now it's after nine, fully dark and I'm exhausted enough that my legs are giving out under me. I decamp to the Mexican restaurant a couple of stores down and give in to a torta, a mexican sandwich filled with ham, bacon and sausage, mayonnaise and slices of tomato. It tastes pretty amazing. I use the hotel next door's wireless internet to update the blog.

When the restaurant closes at ten I'm planning to move down to the Jack In the Box on the other corner (many of which are 24-hour) and try to send some emails, but I'm asleep on my feet. Instead I walk away from the intersection a little way, cross the highway and find an overgrown field with a soft, spongy covering of grass and moss. I don't even need to lay down my mat, and it turns out my new baja jacket has an extra benefit - the loose weave allows me to pull down the hood to cover my face entirely against mosquitos and still breathe easily. I rest my head on my sleeping bag roll, tuck my arms into the capacious sleeves and drift off. The traffic on Highway 59 sings me a lullaby, and I sleep for nine hours.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

24th of September 2008 - Time Well Spent

It's Wednesday night and I'm getting ready to leave Houston in the morning. It's been a great few days catching up with my friends and the things I love about this city.

On Sunday afternoon I go with Kelly to the Flying Saucer beer fanatic's pub in central Houston. It's a big wood-panelled bar with widescreens showing sports, comfy sofas and booths and every wall covered in custom-made plates which are given to customers when they attain 200 different beers sampled. The waitresses wear short kilts and t-shirts reading "Beer Goddess", the waiters have shirts that say "Beer Knurd". I have my first pint of St Arnold's Amber since my return (rapturous) and sample a citrusy Leinenkugel Sunset Wheat with chicken nachos.

On Monday Kelly drops me on Westheimer (a long street of interesting stores which runs into the center of the city) on his way to work, and I wander into town exploring. I end up at the vast Galleria, the largest mall in Texas and seventh largest in the U.S. It's got over 375 stores and an ice rink located on the food court. Inside it's an eerie, cool and relentlessly clean space which dwarfs its human occupants.

Afterwards I'm picked up by Tonya to have dinner with her and her brother Eddie. Tonya's busty, big-eyed and unstoppable, talks all the time and approaches everything she does with an almost-scary determination, as well as enormous love and care for those around her. She's running the Marine-Corps Marathon for the second time this year. Eddie's slim, with thin-rimmed glasses and swept-back hair and a very Oscar Wildeian air about him, fond of finely crafted bon mots and quotes, but also a really sweet guy. He's a car fanatic with a beautiful silver-grey Cadillac Seville to his name. We eat at Lupe Tortilla where their lime-marinaded fajite steak is to die for.

Tuesday night Kelly and I go to a late showing of the Coen Brothers' "Burn After Reading" at the Alamo Drafthouse, my favourite cinema on the planet, where you can order from a selection of 22 draft and 43 bottled beers (plus seasonal selections) and a full menu of great food while you watch the movie. Have a look at the menu for a flavour. I try the Mad Dog in Heat Wheat, another orangey selection which goes nicely with a big medium-rare Alamo Burger and crispy thick-cut fries.

I spend the days catching up with online tasks, playing on the Wii and bonding with the cats. We get to be fairly friendly after a brief period of uncertainty on their part, they'll all come up for a stroke or a headscratch and Mankey starts coming meowing to me for the Sock Game, which he usually plays with Kelly as Tracy prefers not to be bitten and scratched.

The human involved puts a long (necessarily) thick sock on their arm, and Mankey kills it. He starts with pouncing, worrying and some pretty enthusiastic biting, of which (when you're lucky) the sock takes the brunt, then takes a vicelike grip on the material (and, if he can manage it, a good wad of skin), straddles the arm and waits for it to die with a look of intense concentration. Then he moves to bracing his legs against your arm and tugging, which can be excrutiating but his grip can be dislodged with a gentle finger in his mouth. Finally he snuggles up to the sock and licks it, and once the process is complete he has to run to his food bowl and symbolically eat his kill.

Kelly has explained this game to me in detail, as the official keeper of all cat lore. Tracy and her cats are inseparable, but Kelly is a kind of Cat God. He can walk into the room and call and they'll all come running, he knows exactly what they want from the slightest noise or posture, he spends long periods lying on the floor communing with them. He can tell you when Mankey really wants "stretchies" (having his front legs stretched back to ease tense shoulder muscles, which the cats love and will come running and roll over for) or when he's just lulling you into a false sense of security so he can savage your hand. He knows when they're thirsty, when they're tired, and how to pick up Miko (she'll only stay if you have your arm supporting her body lengthwise, paws dangling, and your hand cradling her head). It's remarkable to watch.

On Wednesday Tonya, Eddie and I pick up buffalo chicken wings from Wing Stop (in Hawaiian, Teriyaki, Lemon Pepper and Cajun flavours - Texans take their wings seriously), an amazing selection of good beers and we play cards through the evening. I've already decided I'll be leaving in the morning, so this is our last and very sad goodbye. She gives me a parting gift - a NASA shirt featuring the patch and crew names for the mission which went up earlier this year to install a new research module on the International Space Station. The mission was flown by Tonya's friend Ken Ham, whose wife Michelle showed us round the space centre last year and who I met in the simulator area preparing for this very mission.

Knowing it's our last night Kelly, Tracy and I stay up later than ever. I play Wii Sports with Kelly and watch TV and chat with Tracy. When I finally settle in to sleep it takes me over an hour despite my exhaustion. Tomorrow is the big scary one, the run for the border and the crossing into my first non-English-speaking country. Fear wins over excitement this time, but I wouldn't turn back for anything, and finally I catch a few hours.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

20th of September 2008 - Change of Direction

Kenny, Bill and I all wake up almost simultaneously. Bill heads straight for the shower but Kenny's looking concerned and anxious for the off. When I emerge from my own shower they're in the middle of a discussion. We haven't made as good a time as planned, and Kenny doesn't want to be away from home for the extra two days it'll take to get to Graceland and back. I'm not overly broken up about it - it's an easy-come-easy-go situation and Graceland was bound to be hideously touristy anyway.

Instead we head south into Texas. We'll be going all the way down through Dallas to Houston, a boon for me, after which the boys will turn east along the coast, along Interstate 10 toward New Orleans.

Midmorning we stop for breakfast at the Hitchin' Post, a classic Texas diner. Everyone smokes, including the waitresses, who sit down to chat with regular diners inbetween carrying around armfuls of loaded plates with cigarettes hanging out of the corner of their mouths. I have a juicy, greasy, medium-rare sirloin steak and eggs over easy, with hash browns and a biscuit swimming in (rather lacklustre) gravy.

Then it's back on the highways of Texas, lined with billboards for Lone Star beer ("Secede from the world of other beers!"), barbecue restaurants and churches of that peculiarly North American stamp, which all seem to be about God blessing you with success in business and power in your life.

We pause at a mall so I can borrow a power socket at Barnes and Noble and text Tonya to say where I am, negotiate the intricate tangle of highways around Dallas/Forth Worth, and hit the 602 ring road which circles Houston city centre around five pm. There's clear evidence of the hurricane's damage here - the trees are bedraggled and broken, litter and branches are strewn everywhere and many buildings have boarded up windows, broken signs and warning tape across doors.

On Tonya's instructions, Kenny and Bill drop me at the Memorial City mall outside Target, I find a socket for my portable devices inside Target's Customer Service area, text Tonya back and settle in to wait. The staff members I talk to say that about 30% of the city still doesn't have power, and lots of people come in here to charge their cellphones and other devices off that same power socket. A woman comes storming in to complain that there was no change at the till and she had to walk all the way across the store for her 33 cents. "I feel like I've gone back 30 years! I FEEL LIKE I'M IN THE DARK AGES!"

Finally Kelly Tice arrives, much delayed by traffic. He's around six foot six and skinny, with a great gentle calm about him which belies his fast wit and dark sense of humour. He and his wife Tracy are hosting me while I'm here, as Tonya has several people staying at her house while their power is out. The Tices had power again after two days and water after one, the only things left to fix are their cable and internet which are going on and off.

Back at the house I'm reunited with Tracy (a complete contrast to Kelly, she is about my height, chubby and fast-talking, but has just the same gentle, caring nature and dark sense of humour) and their three cats - skinny, aloof Jonesy, soft and beautiful every-colour Miko and largely insane black-and-white boss cat Mankey. Kelly's been marinating steaks and the evening passes with lots of stories, good food and my first introduction to the Nintendo Wii console, which despite my tiredness ends up delaying bedtime till about 2am.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

19th of September 2008 - Storms Over Oklahoma

The hotel's complimentary breakfast is uniformly horrible, so we head straight out for Santa Fe and eat at a good Mexican restaurant Bill remembers. He's got business to transact here - he's a good craps player and makes a nice profit for the morning at the Cities of Gold Native American casino. Kenny slips me a twenty to play the slots, and I manage to win a respectable two dollars and thirty-six cents. Although I lose the twenty.

I've lost the battle again and I bought a pack of cigarettes on the way out of Vegas yesterday. At a gas station both Kenny and I are intrigued by the Camel Crush cigarettes advertised outside with the slogan "Squeeze, click, change". It turns out they're kind of a silly gimmick, a regular cigarette with a capsule of menthol concealed in the filter. If you want menthol, you squeeze it to crack the capsule.

Kenny's very excited about them, buys us a pack each and insists on showing them to everyone outside, including a very large biker who repeatedly refuses to try one and looks like he's ready to hit Kenny. It doesn't seem to dampen his excitement.

We stop at Jackalope, a folk art store full of fascinating furniture and artifacts from Asia, Europe and Africa - it's like the house of one of those old British collectors, with Turkish rugs, Indonesian temple bronzes and Indian tapestries jammed up against beautiful laquered Chinese cabinets. Overhead are rails hung with chased metal lanterns. By the front doors I find a solid metal swinging bench of incredibly elaborate design, covered in moulded figures and scenes, the bench hanging from thick hand-beaten chains which are themselves masterpieces of decoration.

Back into Albuqerque, then we rejoin Interstate 40 for the long drive east toward Memphis, Tennessee. The miles stretch out, and time slows then stands still as we turn petroleum, sugar, caffeine and fat into distance. Conversation runs out and we just watch the miles tick off. I wish I'd remembered to pick up a book, and wonder if the unprepared English brain can actually be destroyed by American road travel. I'd sleep, but I've got more caffeine in my bloodstream than haemoglobin.

We're following a trail of old Stuckey's service stations across the country. Clearly once a thriving chain, the buildings are now getting dilapidated. The red and yellow signs are faded brown and almost unreadable, the concrete and tarmac of the forecourts worn down and grown through with weeds and grass. Still open and serving, they look like historical sites.

When we stop at one of these decaying stores to gas up, I find a beautiful dark blue hooded baja jacket, light and thin enough to pack away in the newly cleared space in my backpack. I've been looking for a thin hooded jacket to complete my wardrobe of layers for all weather, and this one's only ten dollars. I sit outside with the hood pulled up and smoke a cigarette, looking out over the bare highway and yellow hills while the guys make their purchases.

When we set off again, the fluffy white clouds are starting to build up into anvils and thunderheads. We pass into the storm as it's getting dark. Huge raindrops hit the windscreen with loud smacking noises, and the wind gusts around the cab as we sit comatose inside.

Thick forks of lightning hammer down on the hills all around, often arcing from cloud to cloud in mile-long curves before dropping to the ground. As each one hits, the deep grey curtain on each side of the road becomes for an instant an expanse of rolling prairie, every tree standing out chrystal clear in the flare before it all disappears again. The thunder shakes the windows. We stop under the cover of another nowhere gas station to check the cargo isn't getting too wet, as the puddles grow on all sides.

We finally get out from under the storm and make it to Oklahoma City for the night, checking into a relatively luxurious Courtyard Mariott hotel. The couch is welcoming but I'm still getting the caffeine out of my system and feeling the slow jetlag of the two timezones we've passed through since Kingsland; it's 2am local time by the time I fall asleep.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

18th of September 2008 - Free

I'm up early, just in time to say goodbye to Deidre before she leaves for work. By nine my gear is packed and I'm ready to go.

My plan is to take highway 93 towards Kingman, then the 40 through Flagstaff, Phoenix and Tucson (all in Arizona), Las Cruces (New Mexico), El Paso, Fort Stockton and San Antonio (Texas) then either straight on to Houston or make a diversion to revisit Austin first.

I'm planning to take a bus out on Flamingo to reach the freeway, but Deidre's wonderful mum Kaye offers to take me out to Boulder City, which takes me a nice chunk of the way along the road to Kingman. She drops me at the curb on the other side of Boulder City and presses a bag of grapes and two Payday bars on me - then three five dollar bills. "It's not much, just a dinner." I hug her goodbye, out of words, and carry my gear to the gravel bank by the road.

It's a beautiful morning, bright but not yet too hot, just a few little whispy white clouds overhead and a nice cool breeze. I'm in a shallow canyon surrounded by low grey-yellow rocks. Part of me wants to be in a hurry, worrying about getting to Houston, money, where I'm going to sleep tonight. But it's easier than ever to squash it down. I breathe deeply in the clear air, smile a big relaxed grin and stick my thumb out.

After ten minutes a Boulder City cop car passes by and the driver barks over his tannoy "No hitchhiking! Move along!" before driving on. I ponder moving on, but don't really see how I can get out of his jurisdiction on foot, not knowing how far the town extends. I decide to stay where I am, and if he comes back I'll just explain I have no other way to get out of here.

Nonetheless I'm nervously watching for the police car to reappear, but I'm only there another fifteen minutes when Roy pulls up in a minivan and tells me he's going to Kingman. Roy has a jovial energy, a mixture of a dozen accents and a straight white beard down to his waist, and he's playing Bob Seger on the stereo. Definitely a good first ride.

Roy lives just outside Kingman and has just been visiting relatives near Vegas, but in his time he's hitchhiked all over the States, and he used to travel with the carnival across the country and up through canada, running a game: "Throw a dart, burst a balloon, win a prize!" I tell him I saw a carnival back in Fernley and considered joining up; did people still just run away with the carnival? "Oh, yeah. We used to have a joke: 'I'm going to run away from the carnival and join a home!'"

He's originally from Roswell, New Mexico. I ask him about the alien landing. "Well, I tell you what. My grandmother lived just three and a half miles from where that spaceship crashed. She went out there, and she saw it all. And that wasn't no weather balloon, and it wasn't no experimental aircraft, and those weren't any humans they pulled out of it. "

Roy drops me at his turnoff, on the road into Kingman. It's wide yellow desert on both sides of the long straight road, which disappears over the horizon in both directions. Little brown lizards with thin black stripes and blue-grey tails scuttle back and forth among the scrubby growths around my feet.

I actually have to pause for five minutes and soak up the joy that almost overwhelms me. Here's that contentment again - nothing to do except be, nowhere to go except the next place, wherever it might be. No fears for the future, no regrets. I'm waiting barely ten minutes when a big grey flatbed truck crosses the median from the other side of the road and Kenny leans out of the window "Hey, get your shit in the back!"

Kenny is 38, with black curly hair under a gold baseball cap, black shirt and jeans. He's originally from West Virginia, and has a wife and kids there he's hoping to bring to Louisiana soon. In the passenger's seat is Bill. He's older, with a bushy white moustache and a leather cap, a strong New Orleans accent and a calm, measured speech.

Kenny and Bill are returning from Las Vegas where they got an excellent deal on this truck - Kenny's planning a whole new life based around it, he works moving heavy machinery and doing odd jobs around New Orleans. They're friendly, open and funny guys.

I compare notes on travel with Bill. He's travelled all over the world building and maintaining power plants, and has a wealth of stories. For many years he lived in New York before moving down to New Orleans for the climate.

Kenny is mostly quiet, interjecting with funny comments and occasional bouts of road rage. Bill admonishes him after he enthusiastically shouts abuse and flips off a truck trying to overtake us at a narrowing point in the road. "Well, I just wanted to show him he was a moron. I had to show him, because I didn't want him to go through the rest of his life thinkin' he made a good decision there.

Once they know how far I'm going, the guys want to take me on as far as Albuqurque. It switches my route to the northerly one rather than the road along the border I was planning on, but won't add much to my journey time, and I'm enjoying their company.

Coming into Arizona the guys are debating their route. "You ever been to the Grand Canyon, Mark?" "Actually, I've travelled all around here but I keep missing it" "You've never been to the Grand Canyon? Well then we gotta go to the Grand Canyon!"

We come up to the edge of the Canyon through forests of scrubby trees and little winding roads between blocky wooden lodges. The view is beyond the capacity of any camera or description. I thought I'd be prepared by film and TV, pictures and writing, but nothing can compare to looking down walls of rock and across a gap which can hold cities, filled with its own peaks and ranges and valleys.

We eat at a restaurant with long windows looking out over the canyon - I have a fantastic pulled pork sandwich and seasoned steak fries which Bill insists on paying for. Kenny tells me "While you're travelling with us, you're travelling for free, bro."

We roll on east into the red plains of Arizona, joking and talking and marvelling at the expanses of plains and mountains on all sides. Like most Americans on the road they eat and drink almost continuously, and insist on loading me up with snacks, jerky and drinks - Kenny's drinking an almost continuous series of big cans of Monster, Rockstar and Starbucks Doubleshot, and insists on bringing more for me at each rest stop. I'm buzzing with caffeine, nicotine and sugar and dazed by the endless miles. This, I realise, is why Americans are insane.

It gets dark as we hit New Mexico, and return to that American hinterland of night travel, the endless miles of straight unlit highway and the harshly lit oases of service stations, each seated on a battered and broken stretch of concrete on a near-identical dirt road. Here and there we pass or are passed by the apparently mile-long moving walls of cargo which travel the railways of the US.

We stop for the night at a chain hotel in Albuquerque. I'm tired enough to crash out right away on the couch in our two bed room, but before we fall asleep Bill and Kenny have to decide on our route tomorrow. Bill says: "You know, we could just go to Graceland - it's only a day out of our way. Why don't we go see Graceland while we're out here? Mark, you want to go to Graceland?" I think for a minute...what do I have to rush off to? "Hell, yeah!" "Okay, let's go to Graceland!"

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

17th of September 2008 - Vegas Time

I've had a great week and a half in Vegas, although nothing particularly blog-worthy. Just revisiting a bunch of our old haunts - Archi's Thai Kitchen, clubbing at Piranha, more karaoke and a fair bit of yoga. I've also quit the cigarettes again, having come to that magical tipping point on the second night here. It was easy at first but I'm starting to feel tense and irritable and craving again, and I'm not 100% sure it's going to stick quite yet.

I've trimmed down my kit still further, and replaced my IBM Thinkpad laptop with an Asus EEE PC for just an extra 25 bucks. It's a really dinky little machine with reasonable power at around half the size and less than half the weight, and does pretty much everything I need on the road. Using my iPod hard drive for storage and getting wi-fi wherever I go I'm fully portable, and my shoulder bag is considerably lighter.

That's going to be a blessing tomorrow, when I hitchhike on to Houston. My gear's basically all packed, all I have left to do tonight is plan my route and sketch out some maps in my notebook for the major roads I'll need to take. I estimate it'll take me two or three days to reach Houston, unless I'm very lucky for rides.

I've delayed a few extra days, partly because over the weekend Hurricane Ike struck the coast of Texas, cutting through Galveston and on into Houston. It was relatively low-powered by the time it reached the city but still caused a fair amount of damage and disruption - my friends were without power and water for a little while and a lot of people evacuated, bringing transport to a standstill in many areas. Apparently things are getting back to normal now.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

6th of September 2008 - Back in the Vegas Groove

Hi folks. Just letting you know I'm safe and sound, had a couple of very good days hitchhiking and I'm making a bit of a deviation before hitting Houston.

It's Saturday afternoon, and we're back at Blue Sky Yoga taking a class with Bum, a skinny, quietly spoken hippie with enormous warmth and love for everyone and a lighthearted approach to the class. He plays a mixture of chant and trance music as he takes us through the poses, and after our silent meditation in Shivasana pose wraps up the class with All You Need is Love at a healthy volume.

I find that I've lost a lot of flexibility (and particularly balance) but that it's easy to sink back into the yoga mindset, and the workout feels like it sweats all kinds of contamination out of my system and leaves me feeling washed clean and energised.

In the evening we make a triumphant return to Dino's bar at the bottom of downtown for Danny G's karaoke jam. We're there until well after two in the morning with a group of Deidre's friends and acquaintances through the solar network. My legs still shake on my first song ("500 miles" by the Proclaimers with the obligatory scary intensity and attempted Scottish accent) but by the time I'm called up again (my favourite karaoke song "Sweet Transvestite" from the Rocky Horror show) I'm in the mood and enjoying myself.

I finish up with with Tim McGraw's "Live Like You Were Dying". It's pretty cheesy cowboy-pop stuff but it's got a special significance to me as the story (a man who decides to make the most of his life after a cancer scare) is kind of a parallel of my own journey out here. It's also the song which was playing in the taxi the first time I left Jewel in Reno. Deidre, of course, rocks out on some Janis Joplin and other legendary rock and country hits. I still haven't seen her performing her own songs, but at karaoke she's unbeatable.

It's good to be home again. Turns out I've got a whole lot of them to choose from.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

5th of September 2008 - Thumbing to Vegas

I'm out by the freeway onramp at around 6am, and it's just getting light as I write my sign and step up to the curb. It's a good spot, with lots of visibility and relatively slow traffic, but I'm unsure how hitchhiker-friendly this town is likely to be - on the plus side it can't be as bad as southern California, where I got twenty miles in two days and ended up taking the train. Still, starting early I have high hopes of reaching Vegas in time to see Deidre sing at the First Fridays art and cultural festival.

Traffic is bad and the freeway ends up backing up onto the onramp, presumably doing no good for the mood of my potential rides. After a little over two hours a station wagon passes me, gets partway down the onramp then stops and backs up. Jason, a twenty-something motorcycle mechanic with a small yappy white dog in his lap, is reconsidering taking the freeway at all in its current condition, but decides to chance it and offers to take me to his turnoff.

It's only a couple of exits down in Sparks, which is essentially still part of Reno city, but as usual I decide to take what I can get - just to get a change of scenery is a major morale booster, important in a long day's hitch. I've seen time and again that when my mood's up rides come much quicker, responding to my positive body language I suppose.

I arrive on a desolate corner of freeway by the Sparks onramp, just as the day is really starting to get hot. It's almost another two hours before I get a ride and I start to wilt a little, trying to stand where possible in the narrow band of shade cast by a lamppost behind me. In fact nobody stops voluntarily, but a car pulls up from a sideroad and stops to wait for an opening and I run up to the window - this kind of more pressured hitching I don't feel as comfortable with, but it's blazing hot, I'm very tired and I just want to get moving.

Chris (whose occupation I never find out or forget in a daze), is another twenty-something, in a smart black shirt rolled up to show the tattoo sleeves on his forearms. Again, he can only drop me a couple of exits down but again I take what I can get. He leaves me at a service station on the other side of Sparks, an area called Vista View. I trek across to the onramp side, drop my gear on a little verge of beautiful green grass and sit on the base of a Work in Progress sign, propping my sign on my knees.

It's a tangled intersection, traffic is sparse and I can't get close to the actual onramp. I'm sweating in the near-100-degree heat and lack of sleep is catching up with me. After an hour or so I finally decide I need the rest and morale boost of a nap, so I flop down in the grass next to my backpack, tip my adventuring hat over my eyes and fall fast asleep within minutes.

When I wake up about an hour later I'm dehydrated but feeling a hundred times better. I'm back on my feet with my sign within a couple of minutes, once again feeling optimistic. But it's noon now, I've barely started my 500 mile journey and Deidre will be singing around nine I reckon (annoyingly I've forgotten to check the schedule for First Fridays).

Shortly I'm passed by a county sheriff's car - he either waves at me or gestures me to get the hell away from the road. It doesn't seem like an agressive gesture, but nonetheless I'm very glad when another station wagon pulls up beside me (this one painted in a rather beautiful blue-green organic design) and Casey gets me moving again.

Casey's been working in construction, laying hardwood floors, but the bottom's dropped out of the market and he's about to try retraining for cable installation - he's got a wife and their first kid on the way, so things are tight. He drops me a whole town over, only 40 miles down the road but the most progress I've made all day, at the Pioneer Crossing rest stop/casino outside Fearnley. I get out of the heat for twenty minutes in the casino's deliciously air-conditioned interior, down a big glass of Coke over ice (the bartender kindly doesn't charge me) and get back out by the exit, which opens onto Highway 50. From here I have maybe 50 miles to Farrell, where I can join Interstate 95 all the way to Vegas.

This time I strike gold, because within twenty minutes Jenny picks me up in her motorhome. Jenny is a gift from the playa, an older woman on her own (a group who hardly ever pick up hitchhikers) who is not only going most of the way to Vegas but has just come from Burning Man. Like me she was attending for her second year. She was a Lamplighter, one of the robed volunteers who light hundreds of lanterns along all the main roads and promenades of Black Rock City. She says she felt I was a Burner even before she saw the dust on my backpack.

The rest of the day is a joy. Jenny and I get along splendidly, share stories, find common interests in music and our philosophy of life. She's equally happy to have picked me up, since she has another two or three day's steady driving to (of all places) Austin, Texas and she's been finding the hours alone pretty boring.

We chat, debate, sing and joke all the way down I95, through the amazing scenery of central Nevada, craggy red rocks and hills, beautiful blue lakes and of course miles of yellow desert with blue mountains in the distance. Finally it starts to get dark, and Jenny decides to stop in Beatty for the night - it's been a long day and she doesn't like driving the unfamiliar motorhome at night.

The rest stop in Beatty is still almost 120 miles from Vegas, and I now have a difficult choice. It's half past seven in the evening and it's almost entirely dark. I've never tried hitching in the dark before and we're out in the middle of nowhere with sluggish traffic on the road. It has been a very long day and I'm exhausted and low on confidence even after the blessing of meeting Jenny. But Deidre's singing tonight, and I love the idea of being able to just show up at her performance and surprise her (she knows I'm coming sometime over the weekend, but I haven't told her I'm on my way today).

Jenny tells me she'll get a room here, and if I want I can crash with her and start again in the morning - she doesn't think I'll make it tonight, and she's worried about my safety hitching here and now. I go back and forth, back and forth - and finally decide to go with the greater adventure. I thank Jenny for her offer and tell her to go get dinner, and I'll go back on the road. If I haven't had a ride by the time she gets back, I'll take her up on the room.

Adrenaline running high I drag my gear as fast as I can to the curb just outside the rest stop exit and stick my thumb out. There's a shout from behind me: "Hey, darkwad!" Darkwad is the term for Burning Man attendees who don't light themselves up at night, creating a serious hazard for themselves, bike riders and vehicles. "You need a light!" Jenny runs back up and presses an LED torch into my hand. "Good luck. I hope you're not here when I come back."

And I'm not. Inside of ten minutes I'm picked up by a US Marine Drug and Alcohol Counseller on his way home to spend the weekend with his family, and we're shortly barreling through the darkness toward Vegas. I'm checking my watch every ten minutes and trying to compute our arrival time, but once I figure we'll be there about half past nine I relax, sit back and listen to the Blue Collar Comedy channel my kind host has permanently running on his Sirius satellite radio.

It's a little after nine when the vast pale glow of Vegas begins to inch over the horizon, and maybe ten minutes later I sight the deathray, the huge laser beam which drives into the heavens from the peak of the Luxor casino pyramid. We weave through the freeways as familiar signs begin to appear on all sides, the City of Sin stretching away on all sides in walls of neon and shining mirrored windows.

My ride drops me right in downtown, in the very middle of the First Fridays festival. It's substantially bigger than when I visited the event last year, stretching over several intersections with marquees and tents showing all kinds of art, food stalls and improvised stages. It's almost ten o'clock, and I know I've missed Deidre's performance because the event is about to close, but I'm beyond excited to have made it all the way here in a day and to be reunited with one of my favourite people on this continent.

I work my way down the length of the festival, scanning the crowd, sure I'm going to see a familiar face somewhere. But in the end I have to admit defeat and call her on her cellphone. "How's it going, Deidre? Where are you?" "I'm at First Fridays, where are you?" "On the corner of Casino Center and Colorado." The response is mostly indecipherable happy yelling noises.

I finally locate her outside the art gallery where we attended Blue Sky Yoga classes in December and January. She's with her friends from the solar power division. Our first hug has to make up for eight months apart.

Back at the house I'm reunited with Deidre's mum, Kaye, we swap stories, I load up on pizza and salad (I haven't eaten since my last chili macaroni MRE, eaten on the corner of the freeway in Sparks twelve hours ago) and we pass out on adjacent sofas in front of Love Actually (our seventh viewing this year, I believe).

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

4th of September 2008 - A Day at Dreamers

I pack the last of my gear in the morning and check out of the Sundance Motel. The pack is still lighter and walking with it has become relatively easy, but I check it at the Silver Legacy's transport desk to free me up for moving around during the day.

When I get to Rum Bullions I find that the wifi hotspot has been password-protected - someone's obviously noticed me "borrowing" access. I feel no particular resentment toward them, it's their connection after all and I've had good use of it at no cost. Instead I go on down to the river and find that Dreamers have free, fast wifi access for customers. I settle in for the day with a first chai and continue catching up.

In the course of the day I come into contact with Eric, a remarkable guy with an amazing life history. He's a Burning Man veteran and a lifetime traveller, having fished commercially all around the States (including Alaska), England and Scotland, motorbiked through Central and South America (and lived in South America for three years), and had all kinds of adventures. We talk and swap stories whenever I break from online activities, and converse with a number of other Burners coming and going, from late leavers whose playa experience is done for the year to DPW stalwarts taking a short break from teardown and cleanup duties before returning to the desert.

An installation is being set up right next to the cafe - solar-powered glowing "trees" made from scrap metal, every one different, with wind-driven spinning and moving parts. It's finished by the time Dreamers closes.

I feel like I'm done with Reno now, so I decide to hitch out for Vegas in the morning. Deidre is singing at Vegas' First Friday art festival tomorrow night, and I want to try and make the show. It'll take some pretty good hitching luck as I have around 500 miles to cover.

I spend part of the night wandering the river and the town, catching maybe an hour's sleep on the rocks which line the Truckee river, and a couple more on soft sand behind a shed in the park.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

3rd of September 2008 - Reno Downtime

I spend another two days at the Sundance Motel, a lot of that time spent blogging and catching up on email. I find a great spot at a table outside Rum Bullions with a view over the Silver Legacy casino floor and up at the mine and skydome, a power point right behind me and an unprotected wi-fi hotspot I can tap into for internet access.

On Tuesday evening Trancer and Euphonia return from the desert, and I meet them in town for dinner and more swapping of stories. They're flying out in the morning.

I wander the casinos quite a bit when not blogging. I have a weird relationship with these monuments to money and hedonism. They're vaguely nauseating in their noise and flash and tackiness, but there's something compelling about the manic activity, the sheer weight of humanity pouring through looking for entertainment and riches, the scale of their excess.

I'm still feeling the consequences of my midweek transformation. It seems as though my "default setting" has gone from yearning to contentment without me even realising it - whenever I'm not making a conscious effort to plan or to revisit the past I find myself gravitating to being in the moment, appreciating what's around me. I feel peaceful and joyful pretty much all the time, and the horrors of decompression don't seem to be hitting me. I find something of joy wherever I am, and I'm not worrying about the next step. I'm also finding myself a lot less inclined to snack or drink, and I have no interest in turning on the TV. Cigarettes still have me in a deathgrip, but my other vices seem to have receded. I'll have to wait and see how this effect lasts, and what it becomes with time.

I had been planning to mail my kilt home, but in the end I decide to give it away - who knows who I'll be and what I'll want when I eventually return home, and I can't see wanting it badly at another point in my journey. I give it to Cathy, who I meet in the motel laundry room and who falls in love with the kilt when she sees me taking it out of the washer. She works long hours for poor money at the 7-11 by the college and her life's pretty tough, she's living from motel to motel with her husband and two-year-old son. It's nice to pass it on to someone who'll appreciate it.

My next decision is when to leave Reno for Vegas, but I feel no particular rush to plan - I'll feel the time to leave when it comes, and when I've finished what I need to finish here. However, I can't justify the cost of the motel any more, so I decide to check out in the morning. I can always sleep by the river if I stay another night or two.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

1st of September 2008 - Exodus

I pack my stuff in the cool early morning, make my emotional goodbyes with the members of the Camp of Doom, grab a piece of scrap cardboard and walk out to the exit road. A neighbouring camp kindly add my one bag of rubbish to their truck (the Doomers are overloaded already) and I find my stripped-down pack surprisingly (relatively) light and comfortable.

I crouch in the dust by the side of the road as a slow stream of cars and trailers roll past me, and make my sign ("RENO. Need Blackjack and hookers.") It's only fifteen minutes before a big old RV rolls to a stop and Dr Bill offers to take me on to Reno.

Dr Bill is around forty and balding, but with the body of a weightlifter. He's been here teaching the Continuous Female Orgasm (through manual stimulation), which has been one of the most popular workshops here - he had to add an extra class because he turned away as many people as he let in. He's a sweet, philosophical guy with whom I share a lot of beliefs, and we have a great conversation as we roll out to the road. We have a great combination of conditions - getting away early, the early exodus which cleared out a lot of the city on Saturday and Sunday and clear weather this morning.

The traffic is moving steadily and we reach the fork onto the main road within an hour or so, a dramatic contrast to last year when Deidre and I spent six hours at a near-standstill in a dust storm. At the corner by the "Welcome to Black Rock City" sign we pick up two girls who are also hitching - Claudia is in her forties, blonde, thin and muscular, and builds the window displays for Macy's in San Francisco - I've been sitting in Union Square looking at her designs for ten months now. Bonny is younger, red haired and freckled and has an air of quiet calm about her.

We drive and converse, munching on Dr Bill's huge residual supply of food from the RV's fridge, stop only briefly in Empire for cigarettes (Claudia, Bonny and I all ran out a couple of days ago and we sit round a picnic table by the road puffing ecstatically) and make Reno by early afternoon.

I check back into the Sundance Motel, my post-Burn residence from last year. It's pretty grungy (it's gone downhill in the last year) but relatively cheap, and right now all I need is a bed, a shower and laundry facilities. My clothes are in the machine in half an hour and I'm making orgasmic noises in a hot shower with enough pressure to bruise the top of my head, watching layers of grey dust wash out of my skin and swirl away down the drain. My gear is strewn all over the room, everything a uniform shade of white-grey under its layer of dust.

In the evening I get a call on my cellphone. "Mr Hewitt?" "Yes." "We believe you may have smuggled a large amount of playa dust into Reno. There is a substantial portion of the Black Rock Desert missing at this time, and we believe you may be responsible". It's Mel from the Camp of Doom. Her and Randy have just arrived from the desert themselves, checked into a hotel and they've just finished their own ecstatic first-shower experience.

We meet up outside Fitzgerald's leprechaun-covered faux-Irish casino monstrosity, and I give Mel and Randy a quick tour of the interesting spots on Virginia Street, Reno's main drag. We hit a bunch of different bars carrying on a constant stream of stories and reminiscences, get Awful Awful burgers at the Gold Nugget diner ("They're Awful big...and Awful good!") and end up at Rum Bullions in the Silver Legacy, an "Island bar" under a huge replica silver mine and a giant sky-dome which is painted and lit to suggest twilight twenty-four hours a day. We drink rum cocktails (and share one flaming concoction out of a mildly hideous porcelain volcano), and stagger off to our respective rooms promising to never lose touch.

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

31st of August 2008 - Return to Burning Man, Day 7

The city is breaking apart now, dismantling itself hour by hour as the weekenders and early leavers pack away their camps and join the queue of cars stretching across the desert away from the city. A lot of people left during the dust storm, maybe thinking it just wasn't going to stop, and the turnout for the Burn was much smaller than expected. Now we're winding down toward the Temple burn tonight. Everywhere are bare spots of desert where once were elaborate camps and structures.

I spend most of the day at the Camp of Doom, helping to tear down (about half of them are leaving on Monday morning) and then just hanging out. I feel like I've become part of the group now, and it's a good feeling. I had planned to join a camp this year but just didn't get organised - next time I'll definitely sign up with a theme camp and maybe come in early for setup, get to see the city before the bulk of its citizens arrive. There's always another way to approach the week.

Mid afternoon we are visited by Dave. Dave looks exactly like Tom Cruise with a beard and dreadlocks - his mannerisms, voice, expressions and energy are so alike that we repeatedly come back to debating whether he really is Tom Cruise travelling incognito. Dave is higher than I've ever seen anyone, incredibly loud, manic, keeps breaking off from frenzied storytelling to scream his girlfriend's name (she's standing on the other side of the shade structure) at the top of his lungs before returning to his diatribe without any apparent concern, and attempts to come on to every single woman in the camp by gazing into their eyes and saying with great emphasis "Do you want to have sex...with me?". But he does everything with a huge smile and so much love and warmth that we can't help but like him. Half the camp are laughing so hard we can barely stay in our chairs.

The only one not amused is Bex, who's been having a very hard couple of days. After Dave/Tom propositions her the first time she turns him down politely but firmly, and asks him to leave her alone. He then tries the same thing twice more. The third time, he returns to regaling us while Bex leaves and returns with a heavy five-foot length of two-by-four and stands behind him, expressionless, while we all make frantic gestures to him that it's time to leave.

After he finally moves on, Ben and I are debating the implications of Dave/Tom's approach to social interaction. He's basically a loud, obnoxious, totally oblivious nutter - but because he's so warm and positive, nobody (except Bex) can help but love him. We're both naturally quiet guys who have learned and are learning to be more outgoing and outspoken, and the idea is intriguing. We decide to try a thoroughly scientific experiment.

Taking two folding chairs, we set up on the edge of the camp beside one of the main roads running in and out of the Wheel, where there's still a lot of foot traffic, and for around two hours every time a woman passes, of any age (over 18) or description, we give them a big grin and shout "Excuse me! Would you like to have sex...with me?"

The results are remarkable. Both of us get a lot of "maybe later" and "not right now", but within half an hour Ben nets an attractive Frenchwoman who not only responds positively but then starts actively trying to get him back to her trailer. He's not particularly interested, but with his bluff called and protestations of "it's just a science experiment" it takes him ten minutes to get rid of her. Soon after I attract a tall thin blonde who silently approaches, crouches down in front of me and kisses me with enough passion to make my hair stand on end, then leaves. A little later I get Annie from the camp across the road, small, dark-haired and gentle, who takes me back to her trailer, feeds me pizza and slices of steak and says that sex later is definitely not out of the question.

I repack my own stuff and give away everything I'm not going to need from here on - el-wire, my santa suit, the purple robe we found on the playa, my spiked bracelets and a number of other bits and pieces. It's satisfying to have so much extra space and reduced weight in my pack. The only "luxury" item I'm hanging onto is my purple and black silk dressing-gown, and I might ship that home at some point. I've finally given up on contact juggling so I give my one remaining practice ball away, and plan to make some poi when I get back to the world - I've tried spinning poi a little in Center Camp and found it feels a lot more natural to me, I like the dance aspect of it too.

In the early evening the dust rises again, but only lightly, as the remaining citizens converge on the Temple out beyond the Man. As I walk out I come alongside a gathering crowd walking in step along the lantern-lined Promenade and singing Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody". I join in, as do dozens of others passing us and behind us, then I move ahead and hear their voices fall away behind me.

When I reach the Temple the crowd is, as last year, smaller and much quieter than the gathering for the Man. This is a very different kind of event - the Saturday burn is raucuous, loud and frenzied, with pumping music from the art cars and yelling from the crowd. Here people sit quietly in contemplation. The art cars slowly fade out their music. This is a time when people look back over their week, their year and their lives, get in touch with their journeys, think about the people they've lost or left behind. For myself and many others, this is the real climax of the week.

I find a great spot at the back of the circle, with just a couple of rows of people already there, and take a seat. I have a perfect view of the temple, standing out white and crisp in the floodlights as the safety crews and fire officers make their final checks, every angle standing out sharply. A procession of Temple Guardians make their way round the edge of the circle just inside the gathering crowd, ringing bells, playing Tibetan singing bowls and chanting. The crowd are almost silent now. A lone female voice, as last year, comes over the speakers. She is singing in Hindi.

When the torch-bearers finally emerge, circle and dip their torches to the base of the structure, the flames leap up very fast. The Temple has obviously been doused in some flammable solution, because the flames run rapidly over every part, the white wood looking silver-grey with an aura of perfect, searingly white fire that seems to surround it but not touch it. Everything is silent now except for the crackling of the flames. Behind us the cold night wind is blowing past, in front we're blasted with heat by the burning structure.

Slowly, the fire eats into the building, the huge solid beams beginning to fill with flame, embers glowing through the icons and runes carved into them. It takes a long time, the crowd growing a little restless. Most keep silent, a few yell and shout but only briefly - the momentum of this event, the calm of it, is pretty powerful. Pieces fall away in stages, the lighter beams and decorations first, simplifying and stripping the design until only the structural frame remains. Then the diagonal braces drop one by one, and the beams first lean then collapse, the crowd producing one wild whoop as it comes down. The Temple is gone. With perfect timing, as though it's been waiting, the wind whips up again and the air starts to fill with dust.

Slowly we rise, one by one, and disperse. The art cars are starting up again and heading for the city, and I hitch a ride on a little covered car full of people in panda costumes. The dust is getting thick now, the air very cold, and we huddle together in the bed of the car in a protective group hug. The driver, also in a panda suit, wearing goggles and clutching a cigarette in his teeth against the rising wind, cranks up the music over the noise of the storm as we barrel on towards the now-invisible lights.

They drop me off at 9:30 and B, and I walk home along the curve of the city. The dust is thick, the worst night whiteout I've seen so far, and I can barely make out the lines of lights which delimit the road. Many camps are now missing and the city is becoming shapeless. Center Camp, for the first time, is no visible guide. More buses and trailers are moving out on all sides. I end up at around 6:00 in front of the yard of Black Rock Power, who install and hook up the biodiesel generators for the core of the city. No Burner structures are visible, just the sillhouettes of huge industrial engines and cranes against the faint glow of lights dispersed by dust, and it's as though I've stepped accidentally into a different world. I feel very alone and lost.

Finally I round a corner onto 6:30 and ahead I can see the halo of Center Camp and hear the snap of the flags in the wind. I walk in on a wave of relief and comfort. Ahead and behind are other Burners, huddled against the storm, heading for that oasis of light and welcome.

Inside, the marquee is like a refugee camp. Every bench and table and space on the floor is jammed with figures in goggles and masks, hunched over, exhausted and battered. Elaborate costumes have mostly been put aside at the end of the week, and a general Mad Max vibe predominates - functional desertwear and leather, scarves and bandannas and thick boots.

As I walk across the central circle under the open roof, a few drops of rain begin to fall, refreshing and shocking. They splash into the thin layer of dust which covers the floor pattern. I stand under the open sky and let the scattered drops bounce off my skin.

I spend the night in Center Camp until the storm slowly subsides again, refugees from all over the city gathering and breaking away in little knots. Many people have their luggage or backpacks piled up next to them, waiting for a clear window to leave the city. Several have handwritten signs "Need a ride to Reno", "L.A.", "Bay Area".

I end up sharing my sleeping bag duvet with a quiet little dreadlocked hippie chick called Maia, exchanging stories of travelling the country - she's been hitchhiking since high school, working on farms and doing odd jobs. She's got so many amazing stories - when she leaves here she's going to house-sit some guy's yacht on the California coast, and learn how to crew it.

When I return to the Camp of Doom to start packing my stuff, I find that Annie came back looking for me after the Temple burned.

A few highlights for Sunday from the Black Rock City Events Guide:

6:00am: Sunday Sunrise Teaparty at Love to Bone camp. "Need some caffeine for your long drive? How about a relaxing herbal infusion before turning in for the day? Little white gloves optional."

3:00pm: Take My Tent Down, hosted by Vino the Dog. "Come participate by taking my tent down and packing it in my truck for me while I watch and drink beer."

12:01am: Pack your shit and go home! "Look. It's over. Go home already. See you next year. Oh, and take some extra trash if you can. Drive safe."

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

30th of August 2008 - Return to Burning Man, Day 6

Once the sun's up and the chill is off the morning, I finally get out to get some photographs of the art on the playa, and to explore some pieces I haven't seen yet. Most are better shown than described, so I'll leave it for my photographs to give you an idea of them (whenever they get cleared). The most striking (and least photographable) is the Sapphire Portal, which I read about several months ago when it was in the planning stage.

It's a circular, matte blue enclosure, utterly nondescript from the outside. Inside it is equally simple, with a small angled shelter in the middle. People are sitting and lying all round the edges in the shade of the wall, and some under the shelter in the middle. The atmosphere is so reverent I don't like to get my camera out. The whole enclosure is filled with a powerful subsonic hum with strange harmonics, and it produces an indescribable sensation, unearthly and confusing. For the people who are staying here it's clearly very spiritual and uplifting, from their blissful expressions. For me it quickly creates a feeling of disquiet and foreboding, and I get out of the Portal pretty quickly. The feeling doesn't pass until I'm a good distance from the installation.

I stop at this year's Temple too. David Best, legendary Burning Man temple builder for many years, has stepped down this year, and the job has been taken over by the Basura Sagrada art group. In contrast to Best's sparse, delicate Japanese-style design last year the temple is adorned all over with medallions, chains, banners, wind chimes and spinning decorations. It's very Burning Man, and feels very airy and organic. This year the theme is loss (last year's was the Temple of Forgiveness), and all over it are messages from citizens to people (and places, and even aspects of themselves) they have lost. They are sad and joyful, celebratory and mourning, loving and bitter. Once again walking around it is a very moving and emotionally overwhelming experience, and I shed a few tears before I finally leave the shade of the structure and carry on across the playa.

I end up at Babylon, the ten-storey tower built out of welded steel which is visible all over the playa. It's utterly industrial-bare, just steel girders and non-slip steel plate all the way up to the top, but with occasional signs carrying messages about the project and its intentions. It was built by a family in memory of their father is all the information that is given.

In several places I hear the rumour that it was actually built (or at least commissioned) by the Hilton family in memory of their patriarch. Give credence to that if you wish.

At the top is an extraordinary view of the city from 100 feet up, and a microphone which projects anything said into it, through powerful loudspeakers, all across the city. I don't feel I have any particular message to convey, and the whole installation leaves me kind of cold and wondering about its purpose - maybe it's the rumours of its origin but there is something strangely false about the project that I can't shake off.

Halfway back down I stand and look over the city again, and finally summon up courage to do something I've been meaning to do all week. Burning Man is about expressing yourself and pushing your boundaries in an environment where no-one is judging, no-one is mocking. A safe place to test your limits. And one of the most popular ways is going naked.

For me, with a long history of body issues and self-consciousness, this is a big block. I've become a lot less self-conscious this year, what with shared wash facilities on campsites, cramped space and limited privacy in hostels, and just generally being out around people a lot. But this is still a big and scary step. Nonetheless, I decided at the beginning of the week that I was going to try it, at least for a little while.

Standing on the fifth level of Babylon, I slowly slip off the silk dressing-gown I'm wearing. I'm jumpy and nervous, looking around for someone to come up or down the stairs, not wanting to be seen, until I realise...that's kind of the point! Then I just stand and look out at the city. People come and go, and the world doesn't come to an end. Nobody screams, nobody laughs. I'm just another naked guy at Burning Man.

It's enormously freeing. At first scary, then easy, then exciting. I can feel the wind and sun on my skin, I'm comfortable, it feels good. I'm not afraid. I make my way down the tower and walk back to the city. I pass people on the way and I'm still a little tense and nervous about their reactions, but they're totally cool with it. I have a couple of good conversations with people around the artworks on the way back, in fact.

I'd probably go longer, but I've run out of sunblock and it's not smart to expose body parts not used to the sun without some protection. I clothe up again once I reach the city, feeling like I've made a big step and challenged my fears nonetheless.

Soon after I get back into the city the wind picks up drastically, and ominous white clouds gather along the horizon. A dust storm is coming, and it's a doozy. I return to Center Camp as the outriders begin to turn the air opaque, and then visibility drops to zero and there's nothing but dust as far as the eye can see.

The whole inside of Center Camp is whited out, the first time I've seen it (and many more experienced Burners say the same). There's no escape. It gets into everything, squeezing behind goggles, into your ears, filling the folds of your clothing. You can't help breathing it, it coats your teeth, sandblasts your lips and skin. The heat is stifling as the dust traps it in. I've been okay through the previous storms this year and last, considering it all part of the experience, but this one finally breaks my spirit.

I go back to the Camp of Doom for company. Almost all the Doomers I know are back at camp and we dig in for the long haul. They share crisps and nuts, I dig out my substantial collection of crackers and peanut butter which have gone uneaten from my MREs. We huddle under the shade structure in goggles and masks as waves of dust sweep in and out. There's nothing to do but hold on. We tell jokes, reminisce, shout slogans, try to keep each others' spirits up. Some of these guys have been out here for two or three weeks now, helping set up the city, and they were sick of dust before I even arrived here. I can't imagine how miserable this must be for them. My camera has finally given up in the face of overwhelming dust, refusing to open its lens array.

It starts to get dark, and the question is raised as to whether the Man will even burn tonight. The staffers in the camp are radioing back and forth trying to find out what's happening. The city is shut down, all major events arrested as everyone huddles against the storm, staff being redeployed to provide information and support where it's needed. Word is that they won't burn the Man in the whiteout, it's too risky drawing all those people out into zero visibility, not to mention handling explosives and fire. But their permit only lasts till tomorrow, and they can't actually dismantle the Man now the pyrotechnics are installed.

The storm finally clears around eight, just as it's getting fully dark, and all of a sudden things are back on track. The all-clear is given over the radios and we follow the chatter as staff are scrambled to make the arrangements for the Burn. The camp split up, some are too knackered from the storm to trek out into the desert and decide to watch from the Regional Center on the Esplanade, but I, Mel and Randy and another Doomer called Amy with whom I've been chatting much of the day walk out on to the playa and head for the foot of the Man, his arms dropped in preparation for the gathering.

The art cars are already ringing the Man when we approach, a solid circle of neon and noise, pumping out a hundred different beats and melodies, crowded with cheering, partying celebrants. More are arriving all the time, boats and fish and spaceships and giant cassette players passing us as we walk in. Inside the ring is the gathering crowd, sitting behind a flashing LED-lit circle. We find a spot on the edge of a fire lane to sit down.

It takes a long time to get the event organised. Staff are still scattered, and in particular the hundreds of members of the Fire Conclave who will be providing the spectacular coordinated fire dance display before the Man goes up have dispersed all over the place during the storm and uncertainty. Slowly they trickle in, Rangers begin to line up to control the crowd, activity around the base of the Man escalates.

The crowd are tired, cranky and rowdy. The population has been swelled by hundreds of weekenders and tourists who sometimes come here just for the Saturday night (At a cost of 300 dollars - why?), who seem almost willfully ignorant of the ways of the city. I've been getting silly questions all day; "where can I buy water?", "is there an internet cafe?", "can I buy postcards?" - not silly in the context of the default world, but this is a challenging, complex event in a hostile environment which demands some preparation of participants, and many people seem to have come out here without gathering the slightest bit of information about Burning Man or the city.

People are throwing out huge armfuls of glowsticks, pure moop fodder, half of them to be dropped in the dust by the time the Man comes down. The Rangers are kept busy endlessly moving on people who try to sit in the fire lane, apparently having no idea why a wide, perfectly defined area with cranes parked all along the back has nobody sitting in it. Hundreds more try to walk straight into the circle, past the barriers. Amy finally gets up and joins the staff helping to herd these wanderers.

The noise and commotion rises, the time drags on, and I decide I don't want or need to be around this many people right now. I leave and walk out to a quiet patch of desert, out in the darkness beyond the art cars. It's calm and quiet, still warm but with a refreshing breeze blowing. I don't feel angry or disappointed, just that I've been here, it's done, I've been part of this, and my week is already complete. I have nothing I need here. I just want to watch.

Right as I sit down the Man raises his arms to the sky, and the first fireworks go up. The Conclave has been cancelled due to lack of time, and the Burn goes ahead. A series of massive explosions (petrol, I'd judge, from the red heart which emerges through black smoke into white mushroom clouds) rise up the tower and engulf the man, setting everything but his right arm aflame.

The crowd are whooping and yelling, but out here it's quiet as I look up at the huge figure slowly filling with fire. Flame licks up the tower, spreading from level to level, until it's all one inferno. Finally the man begins to collapse, bringing the levels of the tower with him, and the whole thing falls into a bonfire. I stand up and walk back to the city, feeling nothing but contentment.

A few highlights for Saturday from the Black Rock City Events Guide:

11:00am: Learn to Knit Something Fun! At 100th Monkey Camp.

12:00pm: You have Super Powers at Prometheatrics. "Magic. Luck. Whatever you call it. Come learn the secrets of your innate superpowers from the Jedi Masters of Flow Temple."

4:00pm: The Running of the Larry Harveys, hosted by Snowflake Village. "Dress in your favourite cowboy hat, khakis, and dreamy expression. The horde of Larrys will pursue a mad arsonist toward Center Camp."

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites:

29th of August 2008 - Return to Burning Man, Day 5

I sleep a few more hours until just after dawn, and wake up to the coldest morning yet, my breath steaming in the air. I stay inside my sleeping bag with the hood pulled up and smoke through the gap. After a couple of minutes a big, bearded guy appears in my narrow field of vision and holds out a cup. "Here, you looked pretty cold. Brought you a chai."

This is Henry the Blinky Guy, who every year sells LED blinkies and uses the profits to bring hundreds more to Burning Man with him and give them away for free. We spend a happy couple of hours chatting, with various friends coming and going to join the conversation and go on their way again.

Just as it's getting comfortably warm, a Center Camp staff member passes by yelling "We need volunteers for the cafe!" I've been intending to volunteer anyway and this seems like the perfect opportunity. I put my hand up, get my name in and run quickly back to the Camp of Doom to top up my water before starting work.

The cafe is a raucous, friendly and very busy work environment - there are queues all the way back from all seven or so serving points at this time of day and it never really gets quiet. Supplies are held in trucks parked against the back of the serving area in open bays, we have a tiny covered kitchen in which to wash up and rows of thermal urns for the hot and cold drinks.

It's staffed entirely by volunteers of varying levels of enthusiasm and expertise, often a completely different crew for every four-hour shift apart from a few veterans who are mostly the managers and runners. It's an intricate dance as we move and spin in the narrow space between the counter and the trucks at the back, but spirits are high and Burner love is everywhere. Halfway through the shift the manager screams "Dance break!" and turns the music right up - our queues of customers just have to wait as we dance energetically up and down behind the counter, some jumping up on the counter itself to shake their asses for the appreciative crowd. Then we dive back into our work.

I'm given the job of maintaining the row of thermal pump jugs containing milk, soymilk and simple syrup (sugar solution). It's steady but not overwhelming work keeping the jugs full and there's plenty of time to banter (and flirt) with the queues of customers coming and going. The pump jugs are on their last legs, and I discover that for some mysterious reason I'm the only one who can get them to produce with any reliability, so I turn it into a bit of a performance, making a mystic pass over the jug someone has been frantically pumping on with no results, then pressing down on the button and producing a clear stream of syrup or milk. It's fun.

I having enough fun to stay on for the next shift too, making six hours at the counter. By then the full heat of day has descended and we're all pouring sweat as we run up and down with supplies. I'm glad to escape at three and go back to the camp where a number of the guys are relaxing under the shade structure.

Camp of Doom is composed in large part of Burning Man staff members, forming a good cross-section of the people who make the event work. There are DPW, the hardened multiskilled lunatics who build the city, Gate staff who check cars for stowaways and weapons on entrance, Greeters who give warm welcome and information immediately afterward, Perimeter who patrol the edges of the city looking for anyone trying to sneak in, and a number of others. Bex the camp leader is the Regional Contact Coordinator, maintaining communications with the regional representatives who provide information and support to local burners and proto-burners.

Coming back to Center Camp again I find a marching band contest in full swing. Various bands have formed among the camps around the city, some have been playing together for a long time, others are more recent creations. They are all accompanied by performers and supporters, stiltwalkers, acrobats, and of course spinners and dancers of all kinds. All are impressive but the Lloyd Family Players samba band blow them all away with exquisite timing, charisma and powerful rhythms which carry the crowd away. Center camp is packed like I've never seen it before, and everyone is moving to the beat of the drums.

When the contest's over I walk out onto the playa to see the climax and fireworks over the Flaming Lotus Girls' installation Mutopia. I pass through a forest of neon-lit art cars to reach the installation, a garden of giant flame-throwing plants built out of welded steel. Propane-fueled flame jets flutter from every leaf and flower, haloing the plants in orange fire. It's interactive too, the roots of the flowers dotted with levers and buttons which cause leaves to snap up and down and huge flame jets to shoot out at all angles, some apparently within inches of the heads of the crowd.

In front of Mutopia I run into the Camp of Doom again, who are dressed to the nines and indulging in their personal decorations of choice for the week - fake moustaches, bloody noses and lips and missing teeth. They look like a pretty fearsome crew and they're on the warpath seeking chemical glowsticks, the number one source of moop (matter out of place) on the playa. They get handed out like sweets by some camps, and a huge number of them, once burned out, end up being dumped in the city or the open desert, a vast job for the cleanup crews.

All the Doomers are members of COG, the Coalition in Opposition to Glowsticks, who hand out laminated cards authorising the user to confiscate all glowsticks found. They've actually brought a large net with which to capture serious offenders who try to escape.

We hang out, watch the flame show and talk. I get a chance to talk properly to Mel and Randy, who I've met briefly at the camp. They are the Dublin regional contacts for Burning Man (Mel is from Ireland, Randy from California), and I find an instant and joyful rapport with both of them, particularly Mel - we talk and swap stories for over an hour, barely noticing the time go by.

The Doomers come and go with bundles of confiscated glowsticks, yelling "Doooooom!" and their new catchphrase "That's some creamy pain!" at intervals, Randy runs into a guy who's wearing the exact same ghillie suit/yeti costume (which prompts a wrestling match), I get told off by a Flaming Lotus Girl rep for lighting a cigarette off a Mutopia leaf with flames whistling past my ears (it seems like a good idea at the time - please note, I am still not drinking).

Finally the group disperses and I decide to walk out to the Man for a last photograph from the top of the tower, but find it already fenced off and under construction for the Burn tomorrow night. The area around it has become a construction yard of huge cranes and temporary shelters, illuminated by blazing white floodlights from all angles which create a glowing halo in the drifting dust over the night playa.

A few highlights for Friday from the Black Rock City Events Guide:

12:00pm: Ice, Ice, Baby at Camp Arctica. "Make a mad dash to camp arctica to help beat the world record of the most people singing the vanilla ice hit song."

12:30pm: Roaming Playa Ice Hockey Game at Tsunami. "The Lake Lahontan Syncronized Swim Team will be looking for a pickup game with sticks & ice puck. Fishnet stockings are required equipment."

2:00pm: Nuclear Reactor & Fusion Workshop at Pandora's Lounge & Fix It Shoppe. "Come get some basic assistance with Nuclear Reactor and Core Fusion System repair and maintenance."

Technorati Tags: black rock city, burning man playa black rock desert cafe center camp volunteering marching bands camp of doom mutopia flaming lotus girls

If you've particularly enjoyed this article and think others would enjoy it too, click here to share it on these sites: