On the Road Again!

My Miata is road-borne again, and in its dust I find a blog that hasn’t been updated in several days!  The culprit was a two-day stay in Tepoztlán without an Internet connection, followed by a hotel here in Puebla whose promised wi-fi failed to reach my room.  I’m now installed at a coffeehouse called Tarlets, upstairs with a balcony view of Puebla’s grand cathedral on the zocalo, feeling like an Internets tarlet myself as I just spent an hour successfully troubleshooting a DNS error that was keeping me from viewing my own blog, and while there will certainly have to be a series of backfilling posts, I’ll begin with a summary of how I got moving again, where I’ve been, and where I think I’m going.

So I still don’t have my new driver’s license, to replace the one I lost in the robbery.  Theoretically it’s en route, as the Washington DOL mailed it to my Coyoacán hostel on July 18 by, yes, regular post—which the Mexicans tell me means it should get here about August 18 if (they add knowledgeably) it isn’t stolen on the way.  Ah, Mexico.  Having already dallied one full month in Mexico City, albeit enjoyably enough, I rebelled at sitting out a second, and as of my last report I was preparing an escape plan that went like this: I would store my Miata at my wonderful friend Adrian’s house in nearby Tepoztlán and spend August wandering the southern provinces the old-fashioned way, by bus & backpack. 

By good fortune Adrian, whom I met at Hostel Cuija, was returning there on July 31.  She entertains many a guest from abroad, and has a system of ending their stays with a night at Hostel Cuija prior to their flights home—and I was now such a fixture at Hostal Cuija that I had caught her on a second cycle.  In place of Sarah (Vietnam) she now appeared with Ron (Austin, TX), and the arrangement was that on August 1 I would drive her home to Tepoztlán, leave my car at her house, and begin the bus phase of my travels.

Just as we were preparing to do this, however (she and Ron and I enjoying a last dinner in Coyoacán at a patio restaurant on the lively town square with the old church, the thematic wolves fountain and the various itinerant vendors stopping by our table to offer us flowers, toys or song), a forlorn hope that I had launched some time ago suddenly bore fruit.  When the DOL refused to send me another new license by express mail I had appealed over their shrunken heads to my State legislator, and lo and behold, the office of Gael Tarleton applied the leverage I couldn’t, and a flurry of emails was followed by the DOL emailing me a “temporary license” that I can use to drive until my new one arrives.

Gael Tarleton has my vote!

Adrian and I then stuck to our plan and, after bidding Ron goodbye in an Uber to the airport, and making myself a round of goodbyes with the fine staff of Hostal Cuija, we loaded up the Miata for the drive to Tepoztlán.  This was a more difficult feat than one would think, for my own travel gear fills the tiny roadster’s trunk to bursting and its passenger seat with the loose excess of driving efficiency, and Adrian was adding two bags of her own.  For the first time I actually used the Miata’s luggage rack that I had installed before the trip, and with Adrian nobly bearing my daypack on her lap we made it, and us, fit, and we prepared to depart.

Then my Miata wouldn’t go.

This was my fault.  Weeks and weeks ago, when I first came to Mexico City, I suddenly had a problem in which my shift knob locked up and wouldn’t move, refusing to go into any gear.  It had proved fleeting: the next day it shifted fine, and I had warily test-driven it on my trip to Teotihuacan without it recurring, and then with everything else that happened I willfully forget about it.  I did so all the more willfully after a Google search told me the fix was either topping off the clutch fluid or disassembling the clutch, and my clutch fluid was full. 

At any rate, the issue picked this propitious moment to recur.  I was indebted to Adrian here (as in many other things, by the end) for both her undaunted pluck and her Spanish fluency: she explained the problem to the hostel staff, who in turn contacted their manager who in turn produced a mechanic, a tall, thin, quietly thoughtful fellow with curly grey hair, who nosed around under the hood, gave the clutch twenty pumps, and solved the problem.  (A pump that’s supposed to route fluid to the clutch is out, and if the car sits too long the fluid will settle, but pumping the clutch restores it.) 

Much gratitude, further goodbyes, and at last we were off.  It was with a sense of the miraculous that I finally saw Mexico City melting away into the green mountains of the countryside.  The day was sunny and we had the top down, and a little over an hour later I was nosing my low-slung, overloaded Miata carefully through the irregularly-cobbled, pitted, narrow back streets of Tepoztlán, scraping bottom on the cement speed bumps, then weaving between dry spots down the long, puddled, bouncy dirt road fringed in hanging bushes, and finally angling in through the solid metal gate doors to park on the grass in the spacious lawn before Adrian’s house.  If I was getting on a bus for a month, this would be the most secure parking spot I could think of.

And I spent a day and a half in Tepoztlán, staying in Adrian’s handsome house with her two cats and two dogs.  Adrian, I learned, was in the midst of a family medical emergency, and was throwing together a short-notice trip to Oklahoma during my visit, which made not the slightest difference to her friendly welcome and insistence on showing me the town and its best restaurants. 

Adrian and friend

Her house itself was newly built (with its second story still under construction), and she was simultaneously still wrestling with builder ineptnesses and disobediences that gave me an insight into the hurdles of homebuilding in Mexico, but indoors it was clean, elegant and comfortable, and its location at the foot of Tepoztlán’s mountains was simply epochal.

The view from near Adrian's house

A separate post about my day in Tepoztlán is coming.  But yesterday morning, armed with my “temporary license,” I backed my Miata out of the gate, eased it down the dirt road and cobblestoned streets to the highway, and resumed my southward travels.

What are my plans from here? 

I still have a rubber band connecting me to the North, in the form of my actual driver’s license which (hopefully) will arrive sometime at Hostal Cuija.  The staff promised to call me when it does, at which point I’ll have to return for it.  So I’m not at liberty to set full sail for Tierra del Fuego.  But that was looking less and less likely anyway, due to concerns about money and navigability that I had already discussed before losing a month to Mexico City.  On the other hand, I still have four months remaining in my trip (and I can’t return sooner, thanks to my apartment rental).  That leaves me holding an unwieldy lump of time and somewhat unsure what to do with it, a liminal traveller’s state that makes me antsy and disassociated, and here at my first stop in Puebla I’m trying to figure it out, to the momentary detriment of for example the cathedral across the street.

For now I can “continue” as if on the original plan, that is, southward through the rest of Mexico.  I’m looking forward to seeing Oaxaca and Chiapas, and I’ll perhaps cross the border and explore parts of Guatemala.  That can likely all be done before my license shows up.  But I never meant for my trip to be confined to these supertropical locales, as interesting as they are, and when I’m sprung back North I’ll really be betwixt and between.

One option that I discussed with Adrian is to park my Miata at her house then, and jump to the end by flying to Buenos Aires; from there I can backpack my way to Torres Del Paine or Ushuaia.  It would be cheaper than driving it (what with shipping Pepin around the Darien Gap), and would have the end benefit of keeping my Miata, but somehow this idea is unsatisfying.  Instead I could—not park the Miata and spend the remaining three months wending the back roads of the USA en route home.  Or instead I could—just light out at high speed for Tierra del Fuego now with my impossible Miata and my temporary license and see how far I get. 

All I can say at this point is—stay tuned to see what happens!