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 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.
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