| Driving through Mexico is a somewhat different experience than driving through the United States, though not a completely alien endeavor. The first thing we learned was that on a lot of these highways – the ones that are not the big , improved autopistas that are something like our Interstates – there’s plenty of room to pass slower traffic, as they’re set up something like a three-lane road. If you see a faster car is moving up behind you, you just move over to the right and they can zip on by. On that first leg of highway, once we managed to find our way out of Matamoros, was actually in very good repair, unlike some of the back Texas roadways that had brought us that far. Our first stop was a Pemex station, as we had two little girls desperate for un baño. These gas stations typically have a convenience store of some kind associated with them, and I herded the girls inside while Dave escorted Rommel around to find his own baño. I said to the clerk, “¿El baño?” She started talking a mile a minute, and in response to the confused look on my face managed to gesture to me that the bathrooms in the store were closed or broken or something and that we could go over to another building. Turns out that much of the time the bathrooms are connected to the gas station itself, rather than inside the convenience stores. So we found our way to another building that looked something like a garage and located the door for damas. Another peculiarity alien to us for the most part: there was a man outside the restrooms collecting admission of two pesos per person and handing out toilet paper. At this point, we had not exchanged any money, so I had no pesos. The fellow was satisfied with a quarter, which amounts to about twenty-five pesos (a few moments later, Dave apparently was able to get into the men’s room free). City driving in Mexico is a whole other ball game. We had a taste of that coming across the border in Matamoros, but since have struggled our way through Ciudad Victoria, Tampico, San Luis Potosi, Queretaro, Salamanca and Morelia. Other than the state of semi-organized chaos, as people pretty much do their own thing, the most maddening thing was the scarcity of directional signs or, when the signs were there they were unclear – and this issue had nothing to do with language barriers! It might have helped to have a better map, which we eventually got but only after we had settled in our new home. And then there’s the well-known phenomenon of the ever-present speed bumps. These can be a bit of a pain, as can be imagined, but I have come to appreciate them in certain instances. Rather than having stoplights all over the place – in fact, I’m not aware of a single stoplight here in Patzcuaro – the speed bumps slow down traffic, giving you opportunity to pull out into a busy intersection as the oncoming cars creep over the barrier. As for the landscape in this beautiful country, I have to admit I didn’t know what to expect. In short, it went like this: flat, scrubby fields turned to rolling green hills, approaching the edge of the Sierra Madre Oriental; the Gulf of Mexico was distinguished by dozens and dozens of thatched sun shelters; the first half of the road west to San Luis Potosi wound up and down lush mountains, a strange combination of familiar and tropical vegetation; high desert valleys led again to mountains, dotted with lakes. All along the way, we saw church towers, cows, roadside memorials, cows, ancient adobe buildings, clusters of dwellings hugging sides of mountains, cows, walled haciendas, some horses, a few ostriches and more cows. Oh, and burros. Rather than using those big lawn mowers to control the vegetation beside the roads, people put their livestock out there, sometimes tethered and sometimes not. Oh, and speaking of lawnmowers and roadside landscaping: we’re so accustomed in the U.S. to see Mexicans mowing and blowing the lawns of our country ... On a median in Tampico, I saw a large crew of men cutting the grass with machetes. Can you imagine? So after our miles and miles and various hotels – all of which were more than we had wanted to pay, thanks to both having a dog and being concerned about security and/or clearance for our overloaded vehicle – we arrived at our destination, tired and perhaps a little disoriented and ready to settle in for the long haul. # # # |
Patzcuaro 992 km
| Typical roadside in central Mexico. |
Pen's Essays - 6
| Lush vegetation in the Sierra Madres Orientale. |
| Mountains, mountains and more mountains. |
