This site has now been retired. I've moved to my new site Silverknife, where you'll find new blog posts and all my latest projects and photos. These pages will remain for at least a while, as I know some of you are still looking through the archives, but I'm reposting my travel journals and many other articles on the new site. Come and check it out.
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.
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