Interlude: Tales of the Mexican Road

June 21, 2017

When I’m driving I can’t take notes, or even photos that are halfway satisfying, so I’ve been using my digital audio recorder.  As I roll down the highway I describe impressions of the land I’m travelling through, and aspects of the previous day’s activities that I don’t want to forget.  But these verbal accounts are almost constantly interrupted mid-sentence with “Wait—hang on—more road craziness.”

Driving in Mexico is exhausting.  There is no way to settle into the steady, long-distance highway groove familiar to Americans.  You can’t go more than five minutes, even on the major routes, without having to apply the brakes and react to some sort of interruption on the road ahead.

The most common of these is towns.  Your interstate Mexican highway will suddenly become, for a half mile or so, a narrow street through the middle of a town filled with pedestrians, street vendors, dust, playing children, dogs, horses, trucks in reverse, etc.  To slow the highway traffic down they have, at each end of town, a gigantic speed bump, usually well advertised with signs, that you must crawl over at 1 mph or risk damage to your undercarriage.  Through the town you mosey, over the second bump and out the far end, and it’s back up to highway speeds—for half a minute: then there’s another town.

But towns aren’t everywhere, and especially in the North there are long stretches of road through unpopulated country.  Here, the thing to be wary of is abrupt changes in pavement.  One minute, you’re purring along on smooth, dark, brightly-lined asphalt that looks like it was built yesterday; the next, with no warning, you’re clattering over cracked and potholed macadam that hasn’t been attended to in decades.  Then there are the stretches of recent repair, where the roadway is too fresh to have painted lines at all, and you and the oncoming traffic are free to do full highway speeds at each other on the basis of knowing where the lines SHOULD be.

Of pavement afflictions that make you hit the brakes, the most frequent is the ubiquitous section that is currently under repair, i.e., closed.  Road construction in Mexico is constant and everywhere.  I had one person tell me that they’re rushing to get repairs in before the rainy season, another that it’s an ongoing enterprise in graft.  Whichever it is, if you’re lucky the solution will be a dirt-road detour paralleling the highway, where you and the other interstate travellers rumble along in a cloud of dust for a few miles.  If not, you all come to a complete stop while highway workers take turns letting traffic through on the one open lane.  Since, especially on hills, the other direction’s traffic can include loaded trucks doing 10 mph, you can sit waiting for quite a while.  At least it’s a chance to stretch your legs and take a picture.

Speaking of hills, I won’t dwell on the Mexican highway’s predilection for Alpine curves, because in a Miata this isn’t strictly speaking a complaint.  Your long flat road will suddenly sprout a “Curvas Peligrosas” sign, which you had better take seriously, for the next moment you’re embarked on a two-lane hairpin-swerving gorge-rimming adventure.  The only downsides here are the truck traffic doing it with you (yes, you’re all still on the Interstate) and Mexico’s maddening refusal to put scenic pullouts alongside mind-blowing scenery.  My favorite moment was the hairpin curve with the sheer dropoff on the right, no guardrail whatsoever, and the road steeply cambered so that absolutely the only safe way to take it was at high speed.

But let’s say all goes well: the road is straight, the asphalt is smooth, you’re between towns, construction gangs are in abeyance.  Can you finally relax into a steady driving zone, and narrate your day’s events?

No.

By far the most aggravating aspect of Mexican driving, to me anyway, is the passing lane situation.  Most highways here are two lanes, and like America sport a yellow line that’s either solid or dashed to indicate no-passing and passing zones.  Unlike America, onto these roads they throw shiny Nissans trying to do 90, heavily-laden trucks doing 30, beat-up work pickups with wooden-cage beds doing 20, and farm tractors doing 5.  You HAVE to pass.  So the Mexicans have evolved a very courteous system by which they ignore the yellow line.  When a fast car comes up on a slow one, the slow one slides onto the shoulder, giving you JUST enough room to squeak past with two tires in the oncoming traffic’s lane.  This works fine unless the oncoming traffic is doing the same thing, and I’ve seen four cars abreast on a putatively two-lane road.

Dangerous, yes, but I can handle it; what gets me is the prompting.  Any time I come up on even a slightly-slower truck, into the shoulder he goes, sometimes flashing his left blinker to helpfully indicate that it’s safe for me to go.  Well, what if I don’t WANT to go?  What if I would rather do 50 behind him than burst suddenly to 80 to go around him?  Sorry, the social prompting is imperious, especially if there’s a car behind me: I MUST go.  Bear in mind that because of road closures, towns, tollbooths, etc., the highway traffic is often coming back to up speed in a clump, and you can get into wild rally-car shakedowns as cars and trucks bunny-hop each other in and out of oncoming traffic to establish speed precedence.  It’s a constant irruption of ridiculous high-adrenaline road combat in what should be a day of relaxed highway cruising.

It’s true that my Miata’s seats aren’t the most comfortable for a long drive, and in the heat I can get pretty sweaty.  But that’s not exactly why I tend to arrive at my destination worn out and ragged after a 4 or 5 hour drive.  And it's why my audio recordings contain precious few complete sentences.