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.
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.
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