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.
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.
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