And to Beale Street

The second part of my day yesterday didn’t seem to fit with the Graceland post, so it gets its own mini-post.

After checking into my AirBnb—a room in a private house, an old Craftsman in the quiet residential Cooper-Young neighborhood of Memphis—the rain had let up and it was only 5:00.  I could still legally drive...so I headed downtown to see the famous Beale Street.

Beale Street was fantastic.  It’s a tiny neighborhood, really just three or four blocks, but it was blocked off from cars and so full of clubs and restaurants, neon lights, wandering musicians and music lovers, that it seemed a city in itself.  Every restaurant I strolled past smelled delicious; every blues band playing outdoors on a park stage or at the back of an alley of shops was so talented I had to stop, until the old negro manager came at me waving me closer and brandishing the CD for sale. 

It was too early for either dinner or the real street energy, so I wandered further afield in the downtown area—and came upon a minor-league ballpark just about to start its game.  I’d actually heard about this ballpark as a classic old stadium and a Memphis attraction worth seeing, so I bought a $9.00 ticket and went in to see the Memphis Redbirds play the Nashville Cubs. 

It was a lovely stadium, with a great view of the downtown buildings, and slopes of grass above the outfield where families spread picnic blankets and kids rolled or practiced sliding. 

From my position out in right field the voice of the announcer was perfectly overlapped with its echo, rendering all names unintelligible, but it was still fun to watch the hopeful young Triple-A players field grounders and rap out hits before the light applause of the sparse crowd.  One Nashville Cub hit a long arc across the twilight office buildings for a home run, but more entertaining was the foul ball that fell into a vast section of empty dark-green seats near me, with the sound of a fist hitting a pillow, whereupon the woman usher marched off to a populated section and returned with three or four young children to hunt about for it.

Alas, the baseball purist in me is no more, and at 7:30 when I was really hungry for dinner I up and left, with the score still 1-0 in the fourth inning.

Now Beale Street was really jumping, crowded with wanderers and street acrobats, and in addition to the rocking bands fillling the night from their outdoor stages I was confronted with great-sounding music from every restaurant club whose door swung open for a moment.  There was no way to choose, so I picked a place that advertised gumbo above the door, and went in to the King's Palace Café.  I had the bowl of excellent gumbo and a very large beer (the plastic cup read “BIG-ASS BEALE ST. BEER”), and listened to a lone blues guitarist rolling out soft standards like “What a Wonderful World” interspersed with gently mind-bending solos. 

Afterward the night was still warm and not raining, so I drove home through the soft Memphis air with the top down.  And that completed my first day in Memphis.

I've Gone to Graceland

I made it to Memphis on the last day of my temporary driver’s license under a black sky threatening storm.

I thought I’d get the most out of my last driving day by taking back roads from Little Rock.  In many respects my choice merely added hours of boredom: on this side of Arkansas the back roads lie canal-straight to the horizon through open farmland flat to the other horizons.  The day was humid, dim under the low cloudlid that seemed like a swollen belly drooping ragged teats that occasionally spattered rain.  The green land seemed too lush for domestication, sprouting high grasses where not tended, sloppily trimmed to agriculture like a man with a bad haircut.  As I drove past towns and houses words slid off them; they were neither pretty nor ugly, old nor new; they were simply ordinary, simply there.  Small gas stations, big metal barns, family cottages, unevenly mowed lawns.  And yet I was still glad to have avoided the highway.  Not only did I feel safer when the rain turned briefly blinding, but I felt I had more legitimately seen Arkansas.

Meanwhile, I received word from Mexico City that my friend Brett had overnighted my replacement driver’s license to me at my AirBnb address in Memphis.  With that in mind—including a day likely spent waiting for the mail—I got as many Memphis goals out of the way yesterday as I could.  The first of those was to go to Graceland.

***

Well, after all, in Mexico I had visited the preserved home of a renowned national artist at the Frida Khalo Museum.  The least I could do for my home country was the same.

Hardly the same, of course.  Graceland does, it’s true, have a preserved house, in which renowned national artist Elvis Presley passed his domestic hours, but in America the house is surrounded by a veritable city of huge grey-and-blue boxes that comprise a sort of Elvisian theme park, with restaurants, multimedia exhibits, and a ticketing booth like a bus station.

It’s also horrifically expensive.  You do not buy a ticket to the house, or even the grounds, but to one of various “tours,” ranging from the “Elvis Ultimate VIP” tour ($159.00) through the “Elvis Experience Tour” ($57.50) to the lowly “Graceland Mansion Including Planes” tour, which I chose ($43.75).  You then file through an airconditioned terminal, sit in a dark waiting room where you watch a video on Elvis’ life, and finally board a shuttle bus that takes you eleven feet to the attraction you’ve come to see.  On the way you’re handed a rubber-cased video pad with attached headphones, that will be your audio-video tour guide as you move room by room through the experience at a standardized pace.  I slung the pad over my shoulder and forgot about it.

From the outside the mansion is quite handsome in the classic stone colonial style, with a white-pillared entry and shutter-framed windows.  But this disappointment doesn’t last long.  As soon as you enter the front door, the tackiness you expect engulfs you. 

I realize my blog is only adding the billionth exact duplicate of each of these photos—and poor iPad versions at that—but really, there’s nothing else one can do with one’s amazement as the queue moves from velvet rope to velvet rope through the house.  Not shown above are the TV lounge, the music lounge, the squash court, the green-carpeted stairs, and of course the grounds that include the family gravesite in a pillared peristyle with a pool and a statue of Jesus whose pedestal says “PRESLEY.”  Whether one’s tongue is in or out of one’s cheek, one has to click.

Indeed, there was a fine line between the overt absurdities of the young millionaire’s indulged whims, and the subtler nonsense afloat in the zeitgeist from which he picked.  Some rooms in the house were done quite “straight”—by 1950s standards.  The wood paneling, the carpeted stairs, the preponderance of mirrors, the china figurines on glass—in such things Elvis is reflected less as the creative force, more the victim equally with his culture of a runaway prototype domestic industrialism.

What I found missing from Graceland was the artist’s art.  Of course Elvis songs play constantly in the background in the theme park, and over the tour-pad headphones whenever I checked, and I ate my meatloaf lunch in the “Vernon’s Smokehouse” cafeteria to the tune of “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Jailhouse Rock,” etc. on the sound system, but that’s not exactly the same thing.  The mansion has several pianos, but no writing room or sound studio; the museum hall downstairs has framed invoices from the house’s remodelling but no penciled lyric sheets or handdrawn musical notations.  Whatever came out of this young man that changed the world—and something surely did—America chooses to recognize it only in its effects, only in its remunerative capacity.  Only in its mirrors.

I had been routed at last to the gift shop when the skies opened up and a severe downpour came slashing across the theme park.  The parkinglot was a long walk away and the rain wasn’t letting up.  So I spent my last half-hour at Graceland trapped in the mecca of merchandise, eating a $5.00 ice-cream cone from the Elvis-themed sweet shop and humming helplessly along with Elvis tunes.  Eventually I ran for the parkinglot anyway, where my Miata was ankle-deep in a good old Tennessee puddle. 

Hot Springs Park and the Ozarks - Down and Up in Hilly Arkansas

Yesterday I woke up in my room at Motel 6 in Texarkana feeling lousy.  Not as if I was coming down with a cold, just generally headachey, out of sorts, and not wanting to move.  Outside it was raining on the parkinglot alongside the highway where the lonesome wail of the big trucks rose and fell.  The last thing I wanted to do was get in my car and drive.  I needed a day off from travelling.  Unfortunately, what with the timing of my expiring license, I couldn’t stay in Texarkana—not that I wanted to anyway.

It’s a very unpleasant feeling to check out of your motel in the rain when you have nowhere lined up to go.  My plan had been to spend a couple of days driving back roads across Arkansas to Memphis, starting with a visit to Hot Springs National Park, finding motels or campsites as I went.  The rain nixed that plan, and for a moment I had no idea where to go.  For a while I simply poked my car around the interconnected retail parkinglots near my motel.  I went to a bookstore looking for a travel guide to the South (they didn’t have one), to a Best Buy looking for a replacement camera body (not in stock), even to a movie theater to look at their matinees (there was nothing I wanted to see).  In the end I sat at a Starbucks for a couple of hours, reading, then, feeling somewhat recovered, booked another Motel 6 in Little Rock, drove two and a half hours down the superhighway, checked in and spent the rest of the day there just relaxing, and going over prep material for my writers’ retreat.  It was the closest thing to a down day I could achieve.

Part of what hit me was indecision.  I’m making up the rules of this mini USA road trip as I go, and I’m being pulled in different directions.  I have two weeks to get to Virginia, which could be done in three days, so the proper thing is to get off the highways and do some liesurely exploring; however, the situation with my license is making me rush to get to Memphis.  I was on the verge of discarding Arkansas completely in my hurry.  And America makes it very easy to hurry.

So today I slowed down, and wound up doing everything I intended to do yesterday.  I went to Hot Springs National Park, and took a day-trip drive up North to the Ozarks and back.  It was a good day.

Hot Springs is a curious National Park.  It’s downtown in a small city, and consists of two parts: a hilly wooded area with trails, like a city park, and a row of historic bathhouses that in one form or another have served up the eponymous hot springs’ water since the 19th Century.  I started with the park, and cheated: instead of hiking I drove up to the top of the hill, where they have a large, phallic view tower added in the 1980s.

By “hill,” it should be understood, Arkansas means “low ridge,” and when one rides the elevator to the observation deck one is not that far above the roofs of the city, though one can look outward across the countryside of gently rolling woods, whose low ridges overlap in a slow fade from green to a hazy blue horizon.

The bathhouses were more fun.  The handsome Edwardian buildings are in a line along the main street of town, all boasting long porches with Adirondack rocking chairs; most are still in operation--and the chairs occupied by men in towels--but one has been converted to an exhibit that you can tour (entry is free). 

Inside, it was a wonderful return to the age of turn-of-the-century therapeutic health treatments.  The white-tiled rooms trimmed with varnished wood were filled with complicated tubs, showers, pipes, nozzles, boxed enclosures, and strange electrical devices; one could practically hear the buzz and smell the steam.  Upstairs were salon galleries with stained-glass ceilings, grand pianos, wicker chairs and pool tables.

What the heck is THAT?   

From Hot Springs (the town) I took Route 7 North—marked as a scenic road on my map—through both the Ouachita National Forest and the Ozark National Forest, and got a look at the Arkansas country.  The day was lovely, 80 degrees and sunny with a soft mild air, perfect for driving a convertible on country roads.   And it’s a pretty country, breathing a soft, homey loveliness: light woods, gentle slopes, green fields, old barns, small working farms, fields of cows.  Through Ouachita I was mostly driving in a trench of trees, with not much to see, but in the Ozarks the fields opened up to vistas of the gently rolling land. 

At one point the temperature suddenly dropped, a shadow fell over my Miata, a glance up showed the top peninsula of a towering thunderhead limned in newly eclipsed light as an ozone reek arose from the road, and I pulled my canvas top over just before a blinding downpour swept through.  After another few minutes the sun beat down again, I patted my roof through the window and found it dry, and I stopped for a second in the middle of the deserted road to fold the top back down.  But the sky continued to advance giant chess pieces of cloud, and it rained on and off again on my way back to Little Rock.

One more night in Little Rock (I say Little Rock, but I haven’t seen it yet; my Motel 6 is on the outskirts by the highways, in faceless-retail land that could be anywhere), then tomorrow I head across the State to Memphis.  Tomorrow, Monday, is technically my last legal driving day, but I’ve arranged with my friend Brett to overnight my driver’s license to the AirBnb in Memphis where I’m staying, and ideally it will arrive Tuesday.  We’ll see!  I’ll be in Memphis through Wednesday (licensed or not, I want to see Graceland, Beale Street, etc. etc.), and after that I’ll be visiting my old buddy Andy in Nashville. 

The mini USA tour continues!

P.S., why do we pronounce Arkansas "Arkansas," but Kansas "Kansas?"  I've been wondering that all day.

Race Against Time and Harvey

I lit out early from San Antonio yesterday and drove the whole day Northeastwards across Texas, arriving in Texarkana in the evening.  It was one of the longest driving days of my trip.  The reason for the haste is that I’m running two races.

The first is against Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall last night on the Texas coast last night as a Category 4 Hurricane.  In Laredo and as far North as San Antonio the highway signs were flashing warning messages: “Hurricane Warning for Texas Coast / Travel to Texas Coast Discouraged.”  I was trying to outrun it.  When I left San Antonio it was a warm, bright overcast day and I risked putting the top down.  I then watched the sky go through some uneasy changes, with dark grey rags and streamers moving in under the high blue overcast.  It looked not so much like the periphery of the hurricane as a sky aware of its presence nearby, feeling its effects, perhaps able to indulge in some mischief of its own while the attention of the larger weather gods were elsewhere.  But I kept moving, and stayed North of it; the clouds brightened again, and never rained, and toward evening I even poked out into sunshine as I pulled into Texarkana.

The second race I’m running is against my driver’s license, which is due to expire Aug. 28.

My real driver’s license, you’ll recall, was stolen with my wallet in Mexico City, and WSDOL mailed my replacement license on July 18 by regular mail to Hostal Cuija in Mexico City, where it never arrived.  Since then I’ve been driving with a temporary permit that I convinced them to email me; this permit is what’s due to expire on August 28.  But I have a plan in the works—or actually, by accident, two plans.

I’ve sent in another “Lost License While Out of State” form, and this time I cleverly put an address in the U.S.: that of a friend of mine in Chicago who volunteered for the task.  Even WSDOL’s snail mail should reach him expeditiously.  When he gets it he’ll send it on to me wherever I am.  (Thank you!!  You know who you are!)  Then, just yesterday—AFTER I’d sent in the form—I suddenly received an email from Hostal Cuija: my original replacement license finally arrived!  So I’ve contacted my friend Brett in Mexico City, who’s going to pick it up and express-mail it to me. 

The upshot is I now have two replacement licenses en route to me.  However, neither will likely reach me by August 28.  Hence my haste: I’m trying to get to Memphis by Monday.  I figure if I have to wait a day or three until I can drive again, that’s a fine place to do it. 

In the meantime, I crossed Texas.  And for once I got off the highways and took the back roads.  My plan for the U.S. portion of this road trip is to take a page from “Blue Highways” and follow the smaller lines on the map.  The Miata cruises happily at 55, and taking it onto the superhighways has always been a nuisance: not only is it antisocial, as a slow car, but it’s antithetical.  A Miata is all about enjoying the experience, while Interstate driving is all about eliminating it.  So at San Marcos I got off on Route 21, through towns like Bastrop and Dime Box, and spent the day rolling through the wide green Texas farmlands.  It was no slower—in fact the speed limit on these country roads was 75, and cars were still bunching up behind me until either a passing lane appeared or I pulled over for them—but it was prettier.

And in the town of Bryan, on the corner of Wm. Jennings Bryan street, I found my smalltown restaurant with pie.  It was called Must Be Heaven, and the pie was delicious.

Laredo to San Antonio - Mexico Through the Mirror

At first glance, Laredo, the border town, is wholly American: coming from Mexico you get the full culture shock.  Roads are smooth, everything is clean, parkinglots are vast, restaurants have doors, business signs are printed.  You have crossed the line into the First World, and the difference is stark. 

                                                

But Mexico is still present in Laredo.  In the stores I went into, and especially the restaurants, the music of the Spanish language could be heard fluttering back and forth behind the counters, amongst the clerks and waiters.  It made me wonder how many of those cars crossing the border were Mexicans who live on one side and work on the other.  Laredo thus seems bilingual, even bicultural, but in the manner of a lap joint, with the USA sliding in on top to fit to its neighbor.

By “the USA,” it should be understood, I mean the Land of The Franchises and Home of the Brands, for Laredo is a mighty shopping strip for big box retail.  Coming from Mexico, the triumph of cold reiteration has its appeal of familiarity: an IHOP breakfast, a Sprint store to plug back into my cellphone account, TWO Best Buy stores, were all within range of my hotel.  Given that my animating image of America was a smalltown restaurant where I could get coffee and pie, there nevertheless remains something soothing and efficient in this world of prepackaged experience. 

(The Best Buy, alas, didn’t have a replacement camera body for me.  They had the Sony a5100, and I was tempted, but I have three Canon lenses, dammit.  So I’m still taking pictures with my iPad.)

I got another last look at Mexico, in the rear-view mirror as it were, up the road in San Antonio, where I arrived in time to visit the Alamo yesterday.

A thunderstorm was clearing off leaving the streets puddled and the air still humid as I arrived at the site in downtown San Antonio, where the old stone building and the low walls of its compound are preserved amidst banks, hotels, and office buildings.  (Entry is free, but parking costs $15.00.)  The Alamo is probably the most curious tourist attraction in America.  It commemorates a battle lost, not even by the United States, but by rebellious settlers within Mexico fighting to establish Texas as a third country.  Yet somehow the massacre has been appropriated as a patriotic American symbol, to the point where flags of all 50 states stand inside the building alongside metal plaques naming the fallen.  The building was originally a church before it was a fort, and a twisted version of the sanctity remains: visitors must remove their hats and take no photos as they contemplate the last redoubt of brave soldiers. 

Inside, the old stone is a mottled white like palsied skin.  It’s a small space, undecorated, with nothing in it, and aside from the plaques and the scale model showing the cannon placements there’s nothing to see.  Perhaps that’s why they’ve added a large garden outdoors, and a living history exhibit, and a film about the battle, and a great stone bas-relief monument, and a gift shop.  Part of the garden is given over to a series of standing panels showing the history on a timeline, and I was struck by the illustration of Miguel Hidalgo, founding father of Mexican Independence.  Whereas in Mexico he is represented (everywhere) as a larger-than-life, leonine, heroic figure, the picture here showed a gnome-like little priest amid books.  Farewell Mexico.

I liked downtown San Antonio.  The streets are broad and clean, the buildings large and handsome, traffic light, and a great, spacious quiet reigns over it.  I had lunch prematurely at an expensive hotel restaurant near the Alamo, prematurely because I then found, just a few blocks further on, dozens of better restaurant possibilities along what they call the “Riverwalk.”  This is a boutique remodelling of the city’s little river into an upscale promenade, sunken below street level so you descend on stairs into a separate world of meandering tan stone walkways along the water, overhanging trees, romantic arched bridges, tray-like canal boats going by, and, on both banks, a line of tony restaurants and expensive hotels.  It’s an open-air shopping and strolling galleria, and the only element that doesn’t participate is the old river, whose murky waters slop sluggishly with the unmoving detritus of leaves and litter.  It was a nice place to walk.

When I came back up to the streets I found myself before the “Buckhorn Saloon Museum,” an emporium of antlers, stuffed animal heads, and the promise of tacky Texas glories inside, including Bonnie and Clyde’s “actual car!”  I bought the ticket for $20 and went in, and added an $8.00 beer from the saloon to carry with me into the museums in back.

There was enough taxidermy on display to be sad (including a room full of stuffed fish), but this was the kind of place that celebrated guns, gunfights, hunting and carnival sideshows—a little bit of everything for the 1950s boy in you.  There was an exhibit on the history of the old Texas Rangers, others on P.T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill, skulls of both Asian AND African elephants (interesting to see the difference) and whole rooms dedicated to obscure target-shooting marvels from the turn of the century.  Oh, and the car was indeed a lovely old 1930s sedan—with “bullet hole” stickers plastered all over it.  In short, it was good tacky fun, but not worth the $20 (and I couldn’t finish the beer).

Run For the Border

There’s not much to tell about my last two days in Mexico.  From Xilitla it was a straight shot to the border.  The first day’s drive was very scenic on a lovely smooth two-lane road, with high grass growing right up to the edge of the road and green fields beyond, really the nicest driving of the trip, like driving in Ireland.  I spent the night in Cuidad Victoria, a typical blot of a run-down Mexican city in crumbling cement, where the hotel actually had an underground parking garage (score!) and where I did my laundry.  There wasn’t much else to do in Cuidad Victoria.  The second day took me through Monterrey and on to the border crossing. 

I’m sorry to not be sorry about skipping Monterrey.  I gather that some people are very proud of it.  I missed my turnoff for the ring road and took the highway straight through the center of town, so I did get a glimpse when I looked up from the chaotic traffic.  Tall metal skyscrapers like electrical components, billboard signs for American franchises like Home Depot and Office Max, a last spur of dramatic mountains hazed brown by smog.  And I was through.

From there, the drive was on ever bigger highways through ever bigger land, wide flat scrub desert from horizon to horizon, the road a shimmering ribbon into it.  The further North I went, the more the thermometer climbed: 70, 80, 90.  It was a strange feeling approaching the United States from Mexico.  I could feel it ahead, the long straight line of it, like a great weight pressing downwards.  I thought of all the desperate migrants making the final stage of their approach through this land.  Around me on the highway were mostly big trucks, some with Texas plates; armadas of them were moored at the truck stops and weigh stations in the dust.

At the border in Nuevo Laredo the temperature hit 100 and I had to stop at the Banjercito on the Mexican side to officially log my Miata out.  A great parkinglot behind a chickenwire fence rose and fell and glinted chrome, behind which ran a long dilapidated government building, white with huge black letters.  Literally pouring sweat and having to wipe my brow on my sleeve every minute wasn’t, I thought, the best look for applying to cross the border, but there was nothing for it but to clamber out of my Miata and give it a try.  The entrances to the Banjercito side of the building were closed off with hanging police tape, so I had to walk the length of the building—passing a marching file of armed soldiers in camouflage—and go in through the side marked “MIGRACION” where all the Mexicans herded in a room of plastic seats waiting their turn.  Fortunately my side was sparsely populated, the paperwork went quickly, and I was able to go back to Pepin and peel my vehicle permit sticker off her windshield (it left behind a sticky residue).

From there Google had some last fun with me, routing me to the border crossing via the back streets of Nuevo Laredo (there must be a major road for this), through one more slum where I crawled over jagged cement speed bumps, dodged potholes, and peeked around blind unmarked corners.  Then I joined the hundreds of cars inching toward the checkpoint.  “Welcome to the United States of America!” Google Maps crowed suddenly, about ten cars premature.  But I got through, and in, with no trouble.

I spent last night here in Laredo, just on the American side, at a pleasant faceless hotel (“Extended Stay America”) on a pleasant faceless suburban retail strip.  It was very strange to be able to chat about the heat, in English, with the large friendly guy checking in alongside me, and to go to dinner at a little suburban bar and grille nearby with air conditioning and multiple TVs showing sports where I ordered a burger with sweet potato fries from the menu.  It was like waking up from a dream, or perhaps falling into one.

There was one readjustment I had to make at once.  As soon as I crossed the border, of course, my little Panasonic cellphone with the Telcel plan, that I’d bought in Acapulco, ceased to get data.  I found my hotel by grace of the blue Navigation line still showing on the screen, and once in my room I connected to the hotel wi-fi, found a Sprint store in Laredo, used my mobile printer to print out the map to it, forged back out into the oven-like heat, and drove over.  At the store I was hoping they could simply add the Panasonic phone to my plan—it’s a fine little phone, and I like it—but it wasn’t “compatible” (in fact, the very notion of a Panasonic cellphone made the clerks laugh).  So, yes, I had to buy ANOTHER cellphone, the third such of my trip.  This one at least is financed on my normal plan and has my proper phone number.  

Back in my hotel room I spread out my United States map, and tried to figure out my route from here to Algonkian Park, Virginia, the great inauguration of Part II of my travels.  But the heat and the weight of the burger caught up with me, and I fell asleep.

I'm back in the USA.

The Enigma of Las Pozas

I’m currently in the little town of Xilitla, still within the green mountains of San Luis Potósi.  Xilitla is a couple of cement-paved streets and crowing roosters on a hillside, plus someone blasting hop-hop music from a parked car under my hotel window.  The only reason I’m here is to see the nearby attraction of Las Pozas, which I did yesterday.  It was probably my last tourist attraction in Mexico, as from here I head straight for the border, but it was probably the most bizarre of all.

I’d heard of Las Pozas, and seen travel videos about it, and music videos set it in, and had fellow travellers at hostels recommend it.  In the name of all of the above, I think I’ll describe what it is by quoting my Lonely Planet guidebook:

“Las Pozas is a monumental scultpure garden built in thick jungle that links a series of concrete temples, pagodas, bridges, pavilions and spiral stairways with a necklace of natural waterfalls.  The surrealist creation stands as a memorial to the imagination and excessive wealth of Edward James (1907-84).  A drop-out English aristocrat and poet, he became a patron of Salvador Dali in the late 1930s and subsequently went on to amass the largest private collection of surrealist art in the world.”

What the rich, mad Old Worlder left behind here amid the steaming heat and draping, overhanging foliage is something like a gargantuan ruined playground based on the works of M.C Escher and Dr. Seuss.  You follow narrow paths through the jungle to come across one inconceivable cement structure after another, huge surrealist flights rising in spirals and pillars, with bulbs and domes, towers, unreachable rooms high in the air, stairs going nowhere, windows to nothing, multiple stories that don’t connect.  It’s an attempt to bring the symbols of a children’s book to life, and somehow it’s the kind of thing that could only be found in Mexico, wild fancies manifested in heavy drab cement and left to decay, like some abandoned socialist garden.  You admire it in surprise and a kind of pity.  The connecting stairs and paths hide one construction from another and make you quite sweaty as you seek them out, but the most charming aspect is just the gateways and the hidden routes, leading you on, until you loop back and realize you’ve seen it all.  The guidebook said one could spend a whole day there, but I finished sooner.  They give you a rubber bracelet with an electronic chip in it when you enter, and you hand it back when you leave.

The site has a nice café where I had lunch. 

(Photos taken with my iPad...I still miss my camera)

Fun and Wet Sneakers in the Sierra Gordo

After my multiple encounters with the Mexican highway police the day before, my desire when leaving San Miguel de Allende was to head for the remote wilderness on back roads.  Fortunately, this was already my plan.

My final sightseeing fling in Mexico, before I make a straight line for the border, is to explore the lush forestland of San Luis Potósi, home of mountains, waterfalls, and exotic wildlife.  So I set out for the town of Jalpan, in the heart of the National Park called the “Reserva de la Biosfera Sierra Gordo.” 

Jalpan is reached by a single road that winds into the mountains.  To get to it, however, entailed jumping back on Highway 56 for a short leg southward.  So spooked was I about that highway, that setting out on it (especially southward, i.e., back TOWARDS it) caused my heart to pound and my breath to get short.  In fact after a few moments I pulled over, grabbed my cellphone, looked at the map, and forced Google to choose a connecting route on secondary roads.  My theory was the smaller the road, the less likely it was to have highway patrols.  As soon as I was off Highway 56 I felt much safer.

It also led to a more interesting drive.  My one-lane connecting road ran through industrial farmland, past huge agribusinesses with their own rail lines, fields full of cows, horses grazing at roadside, a massive cowboy event that shut down the road to let a string of pickup trucks file out in a cloud of dust: a side of Mexico I hadn’t seen.  It’s funny: normally driving my yellow Miata through that sort of milieu would have made me nervous.  Now, as long as I saw no highway patrols, everyone was my friend.

Eventually the connecting road connected, to the even smaller road to Jalpan, and I headed up out of the flatlands and into the switchbacks.  At this point I felt safe enough to actually put the top down and enjoy the swing and swoop through the amazing green dorsals that began to rise and plunge around me under a blue sky.  My wounded Miata behaved wonderfully, as did I, considering it was the day after a road accident.  To be fair it was 20-mph swooping, as not only were the switchbacks that tight, but on the one-lane road I was frequently in a traffic jam, held up behind a grinding truck.  That was fine; when I got tired of the company I simply seized a pullout, stretched my legs, enjoyed the country air, then drove on in pleasant privacy (at least until I caught the tail of the traffic jam again).  The sun, the miles of forested mountains breathing around me, the vistas into hazy V-cut distances, all soothed my soul.

Jalpan is a cute little town in the middle of the “Reserva:” a pretty square with an old church and a couple of clean, cobbled streets with shops and restaurants.  After eating a late lunch of chicken fajitas at my Posada Mexico restaurant (where I’m staying, in a room off a dormitory-style hall in the back), I walked into the square to try to book a wilderness tour for the next day—the thing to do in the Reserva.

The tour companies had little kiosks on the square.  At first I struck out, as the company I spoke to didn’t have enough people to make a trip.  But in the morning after writing my blog post, when I wandered into the square wondering what to do, I found a different tour kiosk whose blue-shirted people were loading up their van and ready to set out on a waterfall tour in five minutes!  I jumped aboard.

It was a great fun day.  The tour went to the El Chuveje waterfall and the Puente de Dios ravine, two spots where the water pouring through these lush steep forests steps out in dramatic abandon in the privacy of hidden grottoes deep in the woods.  Though exposed now to the tourist trade their privacy is only slightly impaired: they’re hard to find, both accessed down bumpy, twisty dirt roads off the main road, followed by hikes on well-maintained trails.  There were six of us in the group, led by a nice-looking young guide with heavy dark curls and a scraggly dark beard, and I was the only English speaker, but everyone was friendly. 

It was a day when I really missed my camera; I used my cellphone—which takes terrible photos, almost unsalvageable even in post-processing—and otherwise tried to take the advice of Paul Theroux and Henry Miller and collect my impressions the old-fashioned way.  That began with the drive high up through the Sierra Gordo mountains, whose huge peaks and deep valleys were set exactly as far apart as great waves on the sea, though scaled enormously greater and carpeted in nubbly green treetops even up their sheerest sides.

El Chuveje was the more polite display, and even the more formally staged.  The hike led along the rushing stream of grey-green water, to a spot in the woods where a series of placid descending pools have been created with artificial berms.  With a brown grotto of trails on each side, romantic arched bridges spanning the stream, and huge trees lifting their dappled trunks from the water’s edge to a hang a ceiling of innumerable flecks of green and gold above, it looked rather like a movie set, but was no less charming for that.

A little further on was the Chuveje waterfall itself, a white plunge in the rough shape of a musical clef down smooth-bellied stone and serifs of diverging spray.  We lingered at the roaring green pool for a while.

The second attraction, the Puente de Dios, was a much more immersive affair—literally.  This trail followed its stream into a severe-sided ravine, and several times switched sides, necessitating fording the waters.  At first I tried to keep my sneakers dry, holding them up as I waded knee-deep on flat submerged rocks, but after a few of these I gave in, put them back on, and got delightfully wet in the cool mineral-blue surge of mountain water alongside all the other tourists. 

Our second guide helps one of our group ford the stream.

This is about how deep I got wet.

The path through the ravine became ever more dramatic, sometimes ascending on ladders through holes in the wet overhanging rock, sometimes following a catwalk along one wall of a cut so steep it seemed an interior space, like a room in a house given over to the thunder and green light of passing waters.  It ended in a surrealist vision of a cave: here the stream had cut a twenty-foot-high archway through a mass of overhanging rock and greenery, under which one could wade shin-deep, but there must have been water above too, because from the roof of the archway jets of it poured down, channeled through weird stone tunnels like inverted fumaroles.  The effect of waterfalls inside a cave was as if massive kitchen faucets were emptying into a covered sink. 

In short, by the end of the day I was bruised, sunburned, and soaked from my thighs down—a fabulous trip.

The Strangest Day of My Life

I’m not sure how to write about this day; I’m not even 100% sure how to understand it.  It was either the worst day of my life, or perhaps the luckiest.  Two days later, sitting at my B&B in the mountain town of Jalpan, I’m still shocky over it. 

By the time Friday, August 18, was done, I had almost lost my passport, been shaken down by Mexico cops not once but twice, and been in a car accident on the highway.  I should say immediately that I’m unhurt, and my Miata is still driving fine, though its rear end is bashed in.  And then, to cap off the day, I recovered my license plate that had been stolen over a month ago.

I’ll start with the latter, just to explain why I was trying to get to San Miguel de Allende in the first place.  My license plate, you’ll recall, was stolen back in June on my visit there.  I had a spare plate, which I’ve been driving with since, but of course it doesn’t have my tags.  Well, weeks later, and miles onward, I was telling the story to someone who lives in Mexico, who said that the plate was likely “stolen”—by the police!  They do that when they issue parking tickets, to make sure you come and pay.  I emailed my contact in San Miguel, Shelley Cohee; she went down to the police station, and sure enough, they had my plate.  In short, she got it out of hock, and we set up a meeting on Friday for me to repay her and get it back.

It’s a short drive from Coyoacán to San Miguel de Allende—at least normally.  My meeting with Shelley was at noon, so I got ready to leave Hostal Cuija at 6:30 am.  Fortunately the hostel was almost empty, and I had the six-bunk room to myself, so I could turn on the light and pack everything up.  Then I set out in the morning darkness.

The first thing that happened was the GPS on my new cellphone suddenly went wonky.  I was using Google Maps Navigation to get me through the maze of Mexico City to the highway, and suddenly it had no idea where I was.  I managed to get to the highway by staring at the little map on the screen and pulling over several times to peer at street names in the dark, as the morning traffic thickened and honked around me.  Finally I was headed North on the artery as the sun rose.

I was about an hour into the drive, on the outskirts of Mexico City, when the first cops pulled me over, two of them on motorcycles.  It turned out I had completely forgotten Mexico City’s arcane driving restrictions, which prohibits cars from driving on certain days of the week based on their license plate number.  The cops informed me that I was in violation: Friday was a no-drive day for me, at least between 5:00 am and 11:00 am. 

I was trying to explain the situation to them when I went to show them my identification.  And that’s when I realized I’d left the little neck-string bag with my passport under my pillow at the hostel.

In a weird way it took the cops pulling me over to save me from a worse situation.  And I’m sure that my face of absolute horror and panic helped convince them of my helpless sincerity and need to return immediately to my hotel.  They did shake me down, taking pretty much all the cash on me, after which one led me on his motorcycle through the streets necessary for a U-Turn, and I headed back into Mexico City.  Now it was full rush hour, the highway a solid ribbon of shining cars into the city in the distance.  As we proceeded inch by inch I had plenty of time to offer every prayer that I could think of that my passport bag would be there under the pillow, and envision every nightmare scenario—all of them fully deserved—in which it wouldn’t.

By the time I got back to Hostal Cuija my bladder was bursting, but I ran in straight to the bunkroom and lifted the pillow.  There was my bag, right where I had left it.

It was 9:30.  I explained to the amused staff as best I could what had happened, emailed Shelley to reschedule our meeting, replenished my cash at the local ATM down the street, and then waited out the time in the hostel common room until 11:00 when I could legally drive.  The couch was so comfortable, I really didn’t want to go.  But off I went, faulty GPS and all.

The second shakedown was on the highway, well on the way to San Miguel, thin traffic moving fast, and was worse.  This pair was in a cop car, and after parking well behind me on the shoulder leaned in my window to genially tell me that not only was I speeding (I was actually going slower than most traffic) but I was still in violation of my no-drive day (it was well after 11:00).  At first they wanted a fine of $1,500 US dollars.  “No dollars!” I said.  They then settled on $3,100 pesos, which I also didn’t have.  We went back and forth on this for a while; they had all the patience in the world.  The cop, his gun handle showing, then suggested that he get in my passenger seat and accompany me to an ATM.  I pretended not to understand, then explained quite honestly that I couldn’t clear the passenger seat because my trunk was full. 

I realize that in that situation you’re supposed to volunteer to go to the station with them, at which point they usually settle.  But in my shaken state this didn’t occur to me.  I was trying to offer what I had, less the money I would need for tolls to complete my drive, which I couldn’t calculate, and the lead cop was simply shaking his head with a smile.  We were at an impasse, and they were prepared to drag it out as long as necessary. 

Out of nowhere came a shriek of tires.  A little white car spun out of control at high speed on the highway, skidded spinning onto the shoulder, struck the parked cop car, and rebounded off coming backwards right at me from behind.  I had a glimpse of one cop pulling his partner bodily out of the way, and then BAM, my Miata was struck a vicious punch from behind.

There was a moment of confusion that unfolded into an uncertain span of time.  The white car sat a few feet behind mine, its rear end mangled, steaming.  Two Mexicans got out, slightly bloodied, and leaned on the guardrail silently.  I turned off my engine, got out, and surveyed my yellow Miata’s crushed rear bumper and left taillight with an expression of sheer disbelief.  The cops were off a ways, on the phone and directing traffic.  I tried to ask if the Mexicans were all right, but they paid me no attention.  We all stood around on the roadside in the hot day.  Eventually the lead cop came back, his hard smile replaced by a face open and wondering, and signed to me that he had made a call and I was free to go. 

I didn’t need to be signed twice.  Cautiously I started up my Miata and eased her forward.  She seemed to be driving, so I pulled away onto the highway.  Gears worked, brakes worked, power windows worked, there was no wobble.  She was running fine.  After a few miles I leaned over and popped my passenger side mirror back into position.  And continued slowly on.

I was in terror of further cops, especially if it was in fact still my no-drive day.  Several times I looked hard at roadside hotels in little truck-stop villages along the highway, thinking to pull off, but I continued on.  And I got the rest of the way to San Miguel de Allende doing 45 to 50 mph in the right lane. 

I was glad I’d been in the town before.  With my scattershot GPS it took me a while to find my hostel, but navigating those crazy streets barely wide enough for a car, rumbling over the rocky cobblestones and dodging pedestrians, didn’t faze me in the least.  I even remembered which streets were where.  And within a few minutes I was checked into my hostel, and my wounded Miata was parked in a secure off-street garage nearby. 

At 5:00 pm, then, there I was: sitting with a beer at a patio table of a charming and familiar restaurant, in the golden light of a San Miguel de Allende evening, waiting for Shelley.  She soon appeared, with a friend of hers from Boston in tow, and we all went next door to the magnificent estate home where she works.  For a couple of hours we strolled the gorgeous rooms and grounds of the mansion (Kathy was getting the tour), deep in conversation about everything under the sun, ending up on the roof garden at sunset where the cypress trees framed the dome and pink church spire next door and the high view over the valley showed distant skirts of rain turning patches of gold by the light.  And somewhere in the middle Shelley opened an office drawer and I got back my original Washington State license plate with the tags still valid through December.

The smashed rear bumper did not interfere with my screwing it back into place.

Like I say, I don’t know how to parse that day.  I’m alive.  I’m not in jail.  My car still runs.  I have my passport on me.  I’m traumatized, but I did know enough to offer many thanks of gratitude to Shelley, despite the mist of surreality attending everything around me, and I didn’t fail to offer a few in other directions as well. 

My bashed Miata...with its license plate back!

Back to Coyoacan

My blog has fallen a couple of days behind, but such is my pace now that I’m on the move again that I’m several towns and adventures behind.  Tonight I’m in the mountain town of Jalpan, within the National Park known as the “Reserva de la Biosphera Sierra Gorda”; I’ve got a private room on kind of a dormitory hall in back of a restaurant (courtesy of AirBnb), with two beds, bare walls, and doors to a little balcony that I’ve opened to try to cut the sweltering heat now that the sun has set.  A thunderstorm has just passed off, leaving my floor wet where the rain blew in under the closed balcony doors; the air is still hot and humid.  This is the thick green wilderness region of San Luis Potosí.  Tomorrow I’m hoping to explore some of the Sierra Gorda; the next day I plan to visit the mysterious jungle art gallery of Las Pozas nearby.

So how did I get here?

First, let me catch up with some general thoughts and plans.  Since leaving Zipolite on the Northward turnaround I feel happier and happier with my decision.  I have an immediate goal: I’ve successfully signed up for the “Algonkian Novel Writer’s Retreat,” in Sterling, Virginia (just across the river from Rockville, MD), from Sept. 12-17, where I’ll be putting my unpublished novel’s feet to the fire of professional criticism.  The retreat cost about half of what it would have to ship my car across the Darien Gap.  To me it feels like the better investment, which tells you something about where my heart lies as well as the riptide of future financial reality asserting itself to reverse the momentum of the dream.  Driving North I feel on solider ground.

I’m also effectively commencing a whole new road trip, as I have a little over four weeks to get to Eastern Virginia.  Hence my pace upward from Oaxaca.  My plan is to swing through Monterrey, cross into the USA at Laredo sometime next week, and then, as I mentioned in an earlier post, explore my way East through the Mid-Atlantic States, the Blue Ridge Parkway, etc.

And I’m off!  From Acapulco, my next stop was back at Mexico City.  The drive up from the coast wound over mountains that were an exercise in changing shades of green.  Near the ocean the vegetation was so thick that the hills seemed to boil with it, but as we got higher the trees changed to a thin-trunked species with all the leaves at the top, so that hillsides looked like scalps of thinning hair.  Later were meadow-green mountains studded with gigantic boulders like necklaces of chunky jewelry.  Then of course came the urban sprawl and traffic of Mexico City, and I pulled right back into the friendly garage at good old Hostal Cuija in Coyoacan, where I had spent a month.  The staff all welcomed me and I felt right at home.

I was in Mexico City for two reasons, neither of which panned out.  I was checking at Hostal Cuija to see if my driver’s license (snail-mailed by Washington State DOL on July 18) had arrived; the staff was supposed to call me if it had, but I figured I’d check for sure.  Nope, still not there.  I was also thinking that maybe I could find a camera repair store.  At first I thought I’d struck gold, as a Google search pinpointed one right in Coyoacan.  But after a nice walk down gorgeous Avenue Sosa to find it, they didn’t repair cameras after all. 

So I just enjoyed a day in lovely Coyoacan.  It was strange to be back on streets that I knew so well, walking slowly and a bit light-headedly from the altitude.  I sat down at my favorite coffeehouse, Café Negro, to catch up on email, and ordered my usual latté and cinnamon roll; for lunch I had the good tuna panini sandwich at Café del Barrio with their wall of dozens of toy action figures; I strolled up to the local supermarket and bought fresh fruit to make a fruit salad back at the hostel kitchen where I knew where all the bowls and plates were.  I spoke to an Australian traveller at the hostel who had just come in, and was able to recommend good places in the city to see Frida Khalo works.

It was hard to believe I wouldn’t be staying a week or more.  But after one day I was saying goodbye to the staff and getting them to open their garage door for me.  I was back on the road. 

And it would be a road day like none other.  But that’s a subject for another post.

Ack-Upulco

Two books I’ve read recently have advised travelling without a camera, books as different as “The Old Patagonia Express” by Paul Theroux and “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare” by Henry Miller.  Both writers seem to prefer trusting their own eyes and memory to gather impressions.  Well, since my camera died, I will try to emulate them, at least until I get the hang of taking pictures with my iPad.

I spent one night in Acapulco on my way North -- fabled Acapulco!  I chose a big city because it was easy to find a cheap hotel, and because I needed to buy a new cellphone; the glamour of the name meant little to me.  My guidebook said the city’s glory days had passed, but that didn’t daunt me; the same was true of Mazatlan which I’d found charming in its retro seaside decay.

Acapulco, however, on a first and brief impression, struck me as a bloated old whore of a city, sprawled in her mottled cellulite across a divan in a wrinkled dress, smoking cigarettes and stubbing butts on the floor as she regales you in a scratchy voice broken by coughs of days gone by.  The route to my hotel in the Old Town took me around the ring of the great bay, through an endless march of sad, boxy, run-down department stores, in chaotic taxi-choked traffic filling the air with a steady cacophony of honking horns.  Long police buildings and warehouse-like institutes blocked a view of the water, the gaps giving glimpses of dozens of speedboats moored on a light chop.  Above and around the city the green mountains were half consumed in ugly pink-and-white stone buildings like a spreading fungal growth up their sides.  When I found my hotel the area in front was quadruple-parked in vans, police cars, taxis, and other cars; I had to swing wide and take a side street down a slummy block of road construction and gaping iron-grilled storefronts to find a parking garage.  It was a sweltering ninety degrees in thick humidity as I walked back under an arcade where armed policemen stood alongside homeless people sleeping in the corner.

My hotel, the Hotel Oviedo, was shown on the web as a grand historic building, a big rambling affair on the corner with terraces and awnings, and to its credit it was easy to spot at a distance (not having a cellphone I was navigating old style, with paper maps).  But though I recognized it, I felt like I was seeing its faded photograph in an album whose plastic covering bore coffee rings and smudged cigarette ashes.  The high-ceilinged lobby halls were dim and dirty, with locked gates at the far ends; a jerky elevator took me to the top floor where an outdoor hall surrounded an interior courtyard of monotonously repeating doors at each level, at the bottom of which was a strange trash of discarded advertising cloths with huge letters.  But the room had that most magical of amenities: an air conditioner!

Full disclosure: it had been an eight-hour drive with my sneakers still wet (well, I can’t work the clutch in flip-flops); I hadn’t had lunch and I had a splitting headache.  In short, I’m sure Acapulco has more to offer—somewhere.  What it offered me, waiting for my oven-stuffy room to cool down while I downed aspirin and wondered WHERE I might find a Sanborn’s store to buy a new cellphone, was a look out the parted curtains, to see a giant lard-colored slab of a windowless building across the street—with a Sanborn’s logo.

So I spent my scant evening hours in Acapulco buying my new cellphone, having dinner in a nearby plaza (where a madly amplified voice was trying energetically to sell something in Spanish, not good for my headache), and going to bed in my mercifully cooled room.  All in all the evening was a perfect success!

But my favorite part of Acapulco was the Maxi Tunel, a mile-long, ruler-straight, modern and well-lit highway tunnel that shoots one on a slight upward angle out of the center of town.  It felt like the old whore’s spotless ivory cigarette holder.

The Rogue Wave of Puerto Escondido

Puerto Escondido was supposed to be just a stopover, a little coast city a couple of hours up the shore road through the jungle from Zipolite, to put me in range of the bigger drive the next day.  But having checked into the hostel early, found a cheap lunch on the city streets far inland, and whiled away some hours, I figured I’d walk down to the beach in the evening light.  It was a long walk, and I’d certainly had my surfeit of beach evenings in Zipolite, but Puerto Escondido’s was supposed to be a favorite spot for surfers, and I’d yet to bag any surfing photos. 

In fact, this was a beach of a different order.  Here’s a shot to set the scene:

The Playa Zicatela runs the entire arc out to the far headland, a distance of a little under two miles, all in a smooth toe-tactile slope of golden sand.  As with all beaches it was fronted by various little restaurants on the dry sand at the back with tables set out under umbrellas, and in the other direction were, sure enough, a few dots of surfers bobbing far out at sea.  And the waves coming in under them were simply monstrous. 

The sheer walls of water arising to loft their expectant bodies high into the sky above the beach were on a vertical scale that water shouldn’t be able to assume.  And indeed in that moment the water looked unnatural, a stretched iridescent emerald painted with tan veins of spouted-up sand like the opening neck of an enormous angry cobra, on whose hood expectant fleas were proposing to ride.  Of course the fleas had to be in the correct position, which they mostly weren’t, but it was mesmerizing enough just to watch such cobras strike, still far out from the beach, in hissing, cutting, straight or side-biting stoops to transform wholly into explosions of foam, criss-crossing each other and tossing festive spouts of spray as they tangled in a deep soapy surge up the long slope against the undermining suction of their predecessors.

 I didn’t evny the surfers just setting out, who had to fight through them.

In the end some of the patient fleas teasing the erratic wrath of the ocean were in the correct place, and at long last I got me some surfer shots, albeit at the furthest murky range of my zoom lens.  And yes, I’m posting two version of the same shot below—surfing happens fast and I only snapped a few.

As I’ve hinted, my delightful hours at Playa Zicatela were spent with one eye glued to my viewfinder.  And therein lay my doom.

I was, of course, stationed far back from the water, up on the dry sand at the back of the beach; nevertheless there were times when the foamy smother of monstrous snakes at the water’s edge resolved too easily and a remnant wave would dart deeper inland, as if making one last push with a flick of its tongue.  Twice I had to suddenly snatch up my sneakers, resting at my feet, and backpedal hastily out of the way. 

I was positioned, then, just about as far back as the restaurant tables when the rogue wave hit.  I had just enough notice to snatch my sneakers and see in a split second of regret that I was going to get my ankles and pant legs wet, when the water struck.  And it did so with no intention of stopping at my ankles; suddenly I was belt-deep in delicious warm water, and the unstopppable push was such that it knocked me down.

I was up again in an instant, soaked from my T-shirt neck down, with time to brace myself and feel the backwash dig ankle-deep hollows around my bare feet underwater, seeing the wave swirl even around the legs of the tables, dragging the hanging tablecloths, starting female diners up from their plates with their long dresses soaked dark.  In the next instant it was gone, skittering strangely back over the sand in a thin percolating mud like a million brown insects running toward the sea.

For a brief giggly moment I took stock of my clothes, as drenched as if I’d been pushed into a swimming pool, and my precious sneakers, still in my hand, now heavy with salt water and sand.  Then it occurred to me to check my camera.

Dead.

And then it occurred to me to check my cellphone, in the back pocket of my pants.

Dead.

And so concludes the cautionary tale of the rogue wave of Puerto Escondido.  Beware, O man of electronics, when trying to waylay monsters made of salt water!  I took a taxi back to my hostel (it was too far to walk in squishy shoes) and on the advice of some folks there put my camera and phone in bags of rice overnight.  Alas, to no avail. 

The next day, in Acapulco, I bought a new cellphone (the second new cellphone of this trip).  But as for my precious Canon T6i DSLR, well, I will try to find a camera repair store on my way through Mexico City,  but this post may well contain the last photos it ever took.  I can’t remember whether I bought the warranty, but if I did the stores that would honor it are in the USA and the paperwork is in Seattle.

At least it died in the line of duty.  It got me some surfer photos.