The road from Northern California to Central America is a long one and the reasons for taking it are not immediately clear. For now I'll start with the journey to Monterrey.
Alessandro and I leave our home in Smith River, CA on March 10. By the end of May we plan to be in Costa Rica, where he has a job with a non-profit and I have a situation at a Spanish language school. We begin with months of dreamy planning -- routes mulled, gear got, budgets begun. I feel like I am researching the writing of Bohemianism for Dummies. Maybe I am. Then comes much ado about everything we own; survivors packed in to every corner, cubbie and cabinet of a '98 Dodge conversion van.
And so we go, in our wake a trail of pretty clothes, beloved pets, 10,000 things I found on the beach. In their stead all manner of potentially life-saving crap: things that cut, things that stick, things that burn, cool and heal, things with real ass potential and things I really really hope we never use.
We cross at Nuevo Laredo, spending our last night in Texas with a couchsurfing.org host at his casita overlooking the Rio Grande. We explore the remnants of a cattle ranch being consumed from the outside in by a master planned gated golf course community, its scabs of unholy green, pretty women holding babies and resident deer advertised on billboards of few words along Laredo's many industrial parkways. Lucky for us the developers of La Bota Ranch went bust before they could evict tenants of the run-down casitas or remodel the faded glory of the main house. So far the bankers havent touched the spider strewn barns, the corrals, the skeleton cars or the water intake system you'd rather not think on too long. For now, old dogs, skinny horses and wild white cats laze unmolested in heat that drives us south by mid-morning.
We cross the border without much fanfare -- just a couple hundred machine guns, three half-hearted searches of the cabinetry and a roving X-ray scan of the van. Save a couple more military checkpoints at which we are asked to stand aside while bored looking men in black swat gear pick through the van, mostly with their eyes. It's straight to Monterrey, five hours down the road. We arrive at 5 pm and I'm driving as the lonely toll road tumbles into a frenetic metropolis--- one of the largest in Mexico and its industrial capital.
The drivers do not disappoint and my education in fluidity deepens. In some ways the driving makes more sense here -- people do as they do, not as they ought. There's real freedom in half a lane; self-determination in horn honking. Less rage overall. Lots of potholes though, and animals in the road, cars stopped with no emergency flashers, unseen children dashing in front of the bumper at stoplights, old ladies ambling across 8-lane highways, very impressive juggling in very dangerous conditions, mangoes for sale.
In Monterrey we stay with another Couchsurfing host, Sarchem, a 30-something university professor set on marrying a Russian woman. His kindness and generousity leave us well fed and feeling bolstered about this whole half-baked scheme. The bed is big, a fan blowing right on it. Little birds sing outside our window in the morning. Children play at all hours of the night. We spend a day off the road, hiking in a national park clinging to the heights of the Sierra Madre Oriental.
Looking down from the impossibly sheer peaks of Chipinque, the city reminds me of a harried mouth, mid-chew. Mountains resembling rotten teeth bite sky so blue it hurts to look. The encyclopedia tells me this skyline was cut about 65 million years ago, when the vast Mexican plateau first folded, faulted and divided North America. Contemporaneous with the creation of the US and Canadian Rockies, the south bore the brunt of this epic displacement.
Today some 85 percent of Mexico's exports go north along the same tollways we follow south across the crumbling canines of the Sierra Madre Oriental. Moving through the rough country on smooth, federale-policed roads with no rinky dink stops, I imagine the great outpourings of lava that sculpted Central Mexico 30 to 50 million years ago. In the ceaseless semis roaring by, I hear America singing commercial jingles.
Alessandro and I leave our home in Smith River, CA on March 10. By the end of May we plan to be in Costa Rica, where he has a job with a non-profit and I have a situation at a Spanish language school. We begin with months of dreamy planning -- routes mulled, gear got, budgets begun. I feel like I am researching the writing of Bohemianism for Dummies. Maybe I am. Then comes much ado about everything we own; survivors packed in to every corner, cubbie and cabinet of a '98 Dodge conversion van.
And so we go, in our wake a trail of pretty clothes, beloved pets, 10,000 things I found on the beach. In their stead all manner of potentially life-saving crap: things that cut, things that stick, things that burn, cool and heal, things with real ass potential and things I really really hope we never use.
We cross at Nuevo Laredo, spending our last night in Texas with a couchsurfing.org host at his casita overlooking the Rio Grande. We explore the remnants of a cattle ranch being consumed from the outside in by a master planned gated golf course community, its scabs of unholy green, pretty women holding babies and resident deer advertised on billboards of few words along Laredo's many industrial parkways. Lucky for us the developers of La Bota Ranch went bust before they could evict tenants of the run-down casitas or remodel the faded glory of the main house. So far the bankers havent touched the spider strewn barns, the corrals, the skeleton cars or the water intake system you'd rather not think on too long. For now, old dogs, skinny horses and wild white cats laze unmolested in heat that drives us south by mid-morning.
We cross the border without much fanfare -- just a couple hundred machine guns, three half-hearted searches of the cabinetry and a roving X-ray scan of the van. Save a couple more military checkpoints at which we are asked to stand aside while bored looking men in black swat gear pick through the van, mostly with their eyes. It's straight to Monterrey, five hours down the road. We arrive at 5 pm and I'm driving as the lonely toll road tumbles into a frenetic metropolis--- one of the largest in Mexico and its industrial capital.
The drivers do not disappoint and my education in fluidity deepens. In some ways the driving makes more sense here -- people do as they do, not as they ought. There's real freedom in half a lane; self-determination in horn honking. Less rage overall. Lots of potholes though, and animals in the road, cars stopped with no emergency flashers, unseen children dashing in front of the bumper at stoplights, old ladies ambling across 8-lane highways, very impressive juggling in very dangerous conditions, mangoes for sale.
In Monterrey we stay with another Couchsurfing host, Sarchem, a 30-something university professor set on marrying a Russian woman. His kindness and generousity leave us well fed and feeling bolstered about this whole half-baked scheme. The bed is big, a fan blowing right on it. Little birds sing outside our window in the morning. Children play at all hours of the night. We spend a day off the road, hiking in a national park clinging to the heights of the Sierra Madre Oriental.
Looking down from the impossibly sheer peaks of Chipinque, the city reminds me of a harried mouth, mid-chew. Mountains resembling rotten teeth bite sky so blue it hurts to look. The encyclopedia tells me this skyline was cut about 65 million years ago, when the vast Mexican plateau first folded, faulted and divided North America. Contemporaneous with the creation of the US and Canadian Rockies, the south bore the brunt of this epic displacement.
Today some 85 percent of Mexico's exports go north along the same tollways we follow south across the crumbling canines of the Sierra Madre Oriental. Moving through the rough country on smooth, federale-policed roads with no rinky dink stops, I imagine the great outpourings of lava that sculpted Central Mexico 30 to 50 million years ago. In the ceaseless semis roaring by, I hear America singing commercial jingles.
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