Vamanos

I told everyone at home that before making the final decision to cross the Rio Grande (well not actually the Rio Grande; that is further east in Texas, but you get the point) that we’d camp out near the Mexican border and hook up with some like-minded travelers and scope out the situation.

That didn’t pan out too well. At Patagonia Lake State Park, AZ., we made tentative inquiries to see if others might be on the same agenda. I chatted up one guy at his campsite.

He didn’t know where Canada was and had only a passing familiarity with Mexico’s whereabouts, despite the fact we were a scant twelve miles from the border and he was berating his children in Spanish.

Florence didn’t fare any better in the lady’s room when she attempted small talk with a woman showering in the company of her Doberman.

So we buggered off on our own.

Surprisingly, crossing the border was a snap. We pulled up to an “Alto” sign, waited a moment, saw a green signal and drove in. That was it. No guards, no snotty inspections; nada.

The searches and machine guns would come later.

Old Mexican lady with cat,,, duhPaperwork and bureaucracy are a Mexican national pastime. We made the mandatory stop at a Migration Station twenty kilometers south of Nogales to obtain our tourist visas and vehicle import permit. The place was dead as a morgue. A single overhead bulb illuminated the official – and his pistol. Nearby a fan rotated lazily, accomplishing nothing.

The señor was friendly enough. He helped us with the myriad forms then sauntered into the parking lot to confirm our VIN number. He returned, conferred at length with his superior, stamped everything in triplicate with three colors of ink and jubilantly announced that our application had been successfully processed.

We headed out the door. He ran after us, pointing toward an adjacent building which housed the Bancarita. That’s a bank cage where you pay a detached teller to issue a receipt, which you detach and return to the guy with the gun.

He examines the proof of payment scrupulously to ensure you haven’t forged it outside the baños, confers with his superior a little longer and then confidently hands you the paperwork.

We waited.

“Vamanos” he waived. “Feliz viajes. Happy travels. Enjoy Mexico”

Twenty kilometers down the road we encountered our first roadblock. A fleet of Policia Federales – all driving black Dodge Chargers – had closed the southbound lane and, Uzis cocked, were searching every vehicle from top to bottom; except those of the touristos; we were waived through with a grim smile, a gaggle of gun barrels pointed at our van.

A great challenge for neophyte Mexican travelers, particularly those foolish enough to locate themselves in remote coastal campgrounds, is getting used to the local cuisine. Roadside taquerias offer irresistible tortas stuffed with carne, smothered in green mole and served by hand. This is a quick, tasty and inexpensive way to eat.

The real test is quickly locating a baños when your stomach instigates a gringo rebellion. Adding insult to injury, a spider the size of a coconut usually guards the “Caballeros” door.

We spent a week in San Carlos on the sea of Cortez, which was probably a little too long given the remarkable places we’ve encountered further south. We were biking around San Carlos one day and came across an interesting hacienda across the street from the malecon. (Every seaside Mexican village worth its salt has one of these concrete pedestrian walkways fronting the ocean.)

Dan Blocker (“Hoss” from Bonanza) built this extraordinary house. But he never spent a night in the place. Before it was completed, shy of his 44th birthday, he had a coronary the size of a ten-gallon hat. It’s a huge beautiful, unique home – the current owners gave us a tour. It is listed fully furnished at US$299,000.

That is a hell of a deal. We thought about making an offer but instead ended up whiling away the day in a swinging chair at a beach bar getting loaded with a bunch of fellow Canucks.

When I awoke in the morning thoughts of sleeping in Hoss’s bed had evaporated like morning dew at the Ponderosa.

We pulled up stakes and headed toward Mazatlan.

Gerry