While planning for our trip, we happened upon a theory. Combining the quest for enjoyment with a severely limited six-month budget, we primed our imaginations with visions of clifftop infinity pools, beachfront lounge chair piña colada service, top-notch restaurants, and spa treatments. Then we sadly tempered ourselves with a strict and small per diem for food and lodging, etc. We loaded the full camping set-up into El Cuervo prior to departure and we've become good at zeroing in on the $12-per-night hotel options. In order to qualify for indulgences, we would have to go the frugal route on frequent occasion. So the theory was born: ¨Camper to Pamper.¨
Theories are meant to be tested. Ironically, the originally pro-pamper part of this duo has become the trip's banquera, guarding and strictly maintaining the budget, gathering receipts, taking copious spending notes, and plying Doug's memory for what he spent on those cervezas on Tuesday night. Doug, on the other hand, finds himself lulled by impeccable surfside accommodations with hourly sunglass-wiping service.
But Mexico! A ferry ride across the Sea of Cortez to Topolobampo put us and El Cuervo on the Mexican mainland's tierra firma. We drove south and camped one seaside night at the aptly named Stoner's Surf Camp, San Blas, in the coastal state of Nayarit, ironically our last camping experience to date and in one of the buggiest places on earth, indeed at the inauguration of the rainy season, which they call invierno (winter) down here. In San Blas we escaped remarkably annoying jejenes (gnats) in the rolling surf. Emese took a lesson from Mexico's former longboard surfing champion, known internationally (in San Blas, anyway) as Pompis.
Then on to Tequila (on May 5, or Cinco de Mayo, a holiday which, remember, means nada to the Mexican people - except those that export tequila to the US). This was an exciting leg of the journey for El Cuervo, as Tequila is the home of the Cuervo, Jose Cuervo. Now, road life is chock-full of unfulfilled intentions due to wrong turns, missing information, timing, and, I guess, sometimes tequila. In honor of our trusty ride, we paid the equivalent of $20 (pamper!) to tour the Jose Cuervo distillery at 4pm, which gave us a nice hour to meander around town. Not. Note to travelers: know when you're crossing the time zone line. We missed the tour by an hour, having earlier unknowingly traversed this invisible line. I'm sure the tour's very impressive. The town is nice and very proud of its namesake fire water.
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Guadalajara deserves more than a brief description - a high-energy and cosmopolitan city with some of the trip's best architecture and art (including some amazing Jose Clemente Orozco murals). After about two weeks in sparcer locales, we both felt a sweet sense of home being in a big city. A walk through the historic city center, a senses-assaulting stroll through the central market maze (a vegan's nightmare, see pics), steaks at a simple but great diner (not right after the market), and drinks at La Maestranza, a cavernous candle-lit bar adorned from floor to 6-meter-high ceiling with a couple of centuries worth of bullfighting posters and other memorabilia of the cruel, beautiful Spanish tradition. Most interesting, though, was the shouting match that the local crowd got into over the bar-wide TV choice - a local futbol match or the De La Hoya-Mayweather boxing match live from Vegas. The fight fans won.
The hilly, gorgeous, richly cultural, and musical Guanajuato hit a high note for us. The city's traffic system is tucked neatly underground in a spaghetti network of tunnels left from mining days. Speaking of underground, I guess I should also say don't miss the mummy museum, with century-old but startlingly intact corpses preserved by the area's dry climate - lucky us), and the mine tour, including a shameful historical account (we had a vivid and excellent guide) of the brutal enslavement of indigenous people who were worked to death extracting vast veins of precious metals for the vast enrichment of others. We got to go pretty deep into the mine on huge carved steps that would make an American trial lawyer dance. I had perhaps the best drink of my life from a Guanajuato street vendor on a particularly hot, dry day: Agua de Fresa - blended strawberries, water, and sugar on ice. Ahhh. We enjoyed sopa azteca and dinner with our near-expat friend, Yoli. Here, too, Emese began amassing her soon-to-be-world-renown máscara (mask) collection.
San Miguel de Allende was impeccable and crawling with American folks. Here I got sick for the first time - eating French food at an American owned restaurant. But here in San Miguel the tenor of the street was sweet and local, especially on mother's day, celebrated in Mexico on May 10. Every child of every age was with mama, flowers were everywhere, and special services in churches and plazas honored mothers city wide. As it should be! Salud, prosperidad y amor to mamas everywhere!
You may or may not know that Mexico City has a welcoming committee! I'm not sure how they knew when we were arriving on this particular Thursday, as we didn't announce it, but as we plodded down the city's traffic-clotted northern spur, two Mexico State police officers waved to us from their car. What a ceremonial fuss they made! Lights going, mono-tonal music blaring from their loudspeakers. They couldn't wait for us to stop so they could meet us face to face. Now, in the US, when we visit someone, we often bring a gift - a bottle of wine, a plant or some other nice thing. Apparently this is the cultural expectation here, too. They're funny about it in Mexico. You actually negotiate what your gift is going to be. Ours was the equivalent of $80 in various Peso notes - all we had actually.
And one welcome isn't enough in Mexico City! Not 45 minutes after the state cops made us at home, a DF (Distrito Federal) city cop took us through the same open armed (and armed) ritual. When we told him - quite embarrassed - that we had spent all of our appreciation on the state cops, he just smiled and shook his head, apparently amazed and pleased with the model kindness and energetic initiative of his jurisdictional counterparts.
Most travel guides will advise you not to drive in Mexico City. Some explicitly advise driving an arc around the place. For a metro area upwards of 19 million inhabitants, that's a wide arc. We live by our guides, maps, and GPS. Our Lonely Planets are holy (well, most - avoid the 2nd edition Panama book, outdated anyway). But sometimes you've got to buck good advice, take matters and a steering wheel in your own hands, and white-knuckle it straight into the corazon of the world's second most populous urban jungle.
We had white knuckled straight into a dia de no circulo - roughly translated as, "Don't drive today!" In an effort to curtail, or at least moderate, the metro area's paralyzing traffic and choking smog the authorities limit the weekdays one can drive in its bounds. If your license plate ends in a 1, as, say, ours does, you cannot drive in the city on, say, the day we were driving, Thursday. No exemptions for turistas. We had heard about this, but we took our chances. Who knew they'd be so gung ho to offer their bienvenidos?
Despite or maybe because of the sheer volume of teeming humanity in this city, it is exceedingly cosmopolitan and historically, culturally, and politically rico. We loved it: riding the metro for 20 cents; touring Teotihuacan - the vast, barren, and impressive pyramid city on the outskirts of DF built by a people long gone and inherited by the Aztecs; drinking pulque at an excellent seedy pulqueria on a rainy afternoon (inherited from the Aztecs, pulque is mildly fermented juice from the maguey plant, served at room temperature, and said to cure everything from guilt to senility); endless public art (Diego Rivera murals!) and monuments; dinners and nightlife in the Colonia Roma; museums and the sprawling Zocalo and its sinking cathedral; Parque Chapultapec on Sunday afternoon - from our fond official welcome to our reluctant departure four days later.
Another note on Mexico City graciousness: After a day of touring Aztec ruins and tilting cathedrals, we were hosted at one of Mexico City's most traditional and excellent restaurants, Los Girasoles, by our DF-native friends Patrik and Pamela. ¡Gracias a Uds! Here, fearless Emese ate like the Aztecs once did in this same Valley of Anáhuac: ant larvae, worms, and crickets, served on the same plate. Impresionante.
¡Viva México!
Coming soon(ish): Oaxaca, Puerto Escondido, San Cristobal de las Casas, Palenque, and Emese's "Diez del Pais"!
