Culture Shock

This post will have to rely on words, as today was a day for both hands on the wheel, both eyes on the road, and no time to grab a camera.  Today I crossed into Mexico for the first time.

I started at dawn from my budget hotel in Tucson and made straight for the border.  In about an hour I was in the Arizonan Nogales.  The border crossing was smooth and fast—too fast.  I had wanted to pull over on the US side to fill my tank and do a little shopping, but the town was much smaller than I’d thought, and the next thing I knew I was in the lane for Mexico the way you’re in the lane for the ferry at Edmonds.  And suddenly I was going over metal bumps and through a steel booth past two guards who paid me no attention, and then I was out the other side and in Mexico. 

And the real Nogales exploded around me.

Everything was smaller, faster, more crowded, more colorful.  We were in the middle of a busy city and the cars jockeyed on narrow, barely-painted lanes, sharing the road with pedestrians and bicyclists and around us was a zoo of small shops, stacked and toppling with peeling paint and hand lettered signs and walls of peach and orange and green.  A stench of fish and exhaust filled the air.  A woman pushed a baby carriage across four lanes of traffic.  I was trying to stay on the highway to Hermosillo, if it WAS still a highway and not a street through Jessica Rabbit’s Harlem, but fortunately above the chaos recurred regular signs for “Hermosillo” and I swerved both toward where they indicated and away from other cars and trucks, thanking the stars for a small nimble Miata.

I had no idea how big Sonoran Nogales was, but I had a very good idea how many desert miles lay between it and Hermosillo, so my first stop was a Pemex for gasoline.  It’s full serve in Mexico, and I knew neither liters nor pesos; fortunately the lanky attendant spoke English and understood when I told him to fill half of a 12-gallon tank.  “Small tank,” he laughed.  “Nice car.”  A moment later he saw my camera in the front seat.  “Nice camera,” he said.  He had to run next door to get change for my pesos. 

Then Nogales was behind me.  A few miles on (I knew ahead of time where to look for it) was the pullout for the tourist offices, where I spent about forty-five minutes getting the necessary paperwork done.  The offices are all clustered under an outdoor roof offering blessed shade, rather like vendors at a slightly seedy state fair.  First I got my Tourist Permit, then I went next door to the Banjercito to pay for it, then back to the Tourist Office to have it stamped.  Then back to the Banjercito to wait in line for my Vehicle Permit.  This required copies of my documents, which—aha!—I’d known in advance and had at the ready—except, of course, for the copy of the Tourist Permit I’d just been handed.  So it was back to Building #3, the copy office, to buy a copy, then back onto the Banjercito line.

In all this I felt very keenly my lack of the language, the sudden stupidity of not being able to communicate with the world around me.  Again, fortunately, the tourist office officials spoke English.  But I wished they didn’t have to.

Finally, twin permits in hand and sticker affixed to my windshield, I could use the shade for my own purpose, which was to switch my cellphone to Sprint Worldwide Roaming.  This was one of the things I’d meant to do on the U.S. side, when the phone still worked.  It no longer did, but I had instructions for how to set it up, and I set my phone on the curve of an abandoned Customer Service counter between the offices and pecked at my settings.  Yes!  It worked and I had data again. 

And now I drove for miles through the Sonoran desert.  Quickly the road became almost deserted around me.  The landscape looked, of course, much like Southern Arizona—the same carpet of pale-green bushes speckling rolling hills, with browned mountains in the distance—but it looked drier than Tucson, the saguaros fewer and scragglier.  At a roadside grille in the town of Imuris I stopped for my first meal of the day, and at a fly-blown plastic table hard by the highway I had a carne asada quesadilla whose meat didn’t bear looking into too closely, but which came accompanied with a platter of tasty salsas to cover it up.  Questionably nourished, I drove on. 

And dammit if I didn’t do it again!  I arrived at Hermosillo hours later without a having booked a room in advance, and by then I was so sweaty and road-weary that I pulled into the first hotel I saw—and wound up stuck at a pricey one.  This time it wasn’t entirely my fault: I had my Lonely Planet Mexico Guide in the front seat, and I’d intended to pull over and dutifully study it for budget lodgings.  This I did—only to find that the book had no section for Hermosillo.

However, my “pricey” hotel (the Holiday Inn Hermosillo) is both much cheaper than its equivalent in Mt. Carmel Junction, and MUCH nicer.  This is actually one of the nicest hotels I’ve stayed in.  After a shower in the glassed-in, wooden-floored shower booth and a delicious salad lunch with coffee at their attached restaurant, I had no regrets.  Especially as the first thing I did was make budget-conscious reservations for the next two nights at my next destination. 

For Hermosillo is just a stopping point.  Tomorrow I’m off for Copper Canyon.