Mexico When the World Was Still Young

When our world was still young, my bride and I travelled to Mexico. Just a few months after we stepped off the ship to my new job in Toronto, I was sent right across the continent to a conference in San Diego. Looking it up on a map, I saw the city was close to the Mexican border. In those days Kitty had an uncle living just inside California at El Cajon on the road up from Tijuana so, once an avid child fan of the Cisco Kid (‘Hey Pancho, Hey Cisco!’) and seeing a great sidebar vacation opportunity, I proposed we travel via Mexico

I planned for us to begin in the centre of the country, make our way across to the Pacific, and from there travel up to California in time for the conference start. With my first-ever charge card in hand, I phoned America Express about a place to stay in the Mexican capital after we landed there. After listing off lots of pedestrian-sounding chain hotels, their service rep told me of an older heritage hostelry right on the Zócalo that lacked some amenities that English-speaking Norte Americanos usually demand. Book us at it, I said without hesitation, not yet being a paid-up citizen of this continent with the comfort expectations that go with that exalted status.

It proved perfect. We breakfasted each day out under the sun on a high terrace overlooking the President’s palace. The nearby National Museum of Anthropology provided an amazing kaleidoscope of colourful artifacts from a rich pre-Hispanic past. The Hanging Gardens of Xochimilco were fabulous, still being largely unpolluted back then in the early ‘70s, the years just before Mexico City became a byword for unbreathable air.

All too soon it became time to head west. We needed to get across country to Guadalajara and I decided we should go by coach. One was heading that way from the central bus station and we hopped on board, the only gringo passengers. It proved a rickety old contraption barely meriting the designation ‘coach’, and long hours went excrutiatingly by being jolted on hard seats over rough roads. The bus stopped in every small town it reached, and each time as he got out, the driver called out the wait time too quickly for us to understand. We did not dare step out. How we both made the entire trip without a single bathroom break I cannot imagine, tight sphincters nowadays being only a memory

The nightmare ride eventually ended in our destination. Badly in need of a soft bed, we decided to splash out on the Guadalajara Hilton. It was Saturday night and show time, with flamenco dancing and a mariachi band. We loved it, dancing and clapping along into the small hours, then, young and dauntless, got up early for the famous Sunday morning market. Again, we were the only gringos wandering the stalls. Every knickknack you can imagine was to be had. Silver-plated single-shot rifles and long vicious-looking machetes were on open display. Fat chance of getting one of them home, I recall thinking.

Leather was cheap and I bought a billfold. As we were leaving the building an unusually tall policeman made a beeline for us and grabbed my arm. He told us in good English that a small woman standing behind him had accused us of stealing a wallet from her display, and we should accompany him to the station. No way, I thought, were we going that route. “Canadiano” I stuttered in my awful pidgin Spanish, “No este Americano”!  After a lot of denials and my refusing to move, the cop relented, saying that, as he had once been a US GI, if we could show him the stall where we bought, everything would be fine. Canadiano must equal Americano I realised.

Kitty and I stared out in despair across what looked to be acres of similar goods. The weathered-looking peasant women vendors all looked nearly identical. Kitty, who thankfully pays more attention than I ever do, recalled it was at a corner we had made our purchase. Up and down the endless aisles we trailed looking for corners, with policeman and accuser in tow. Finally after what felt like an age we both agreed that one stall looked like it might be the place. The cop asked the stallholder in Spanish: “These gringos say they bought from you?”  She took her time looking us up and down several times, before muttering in a small quiet voice “Si, Senor”.  No-one apologised and, as we turned to leave, our accuser spat at us. The world loves Americanos.

Busing had been dropped from our trip menu and it was time to rent a car to continue west. In those socialist times there were only two manufacturers making and selling automobiles in Mexico. One was Volkswagen, and, if you wanted to rent, you had a choice of the soft-top Safari (modelled on a German Army jeep) and the Beetle. As the Beetle had a hard roof and seemed less military, we took that. Off we set one late morning to drive right around the large lake called Chapala, famous for its mild climate and mountain scenery.  We had a reasonably detailed map that I took for granted measured in kilometres and from which I estimated four hours at a modest speed. But after five hours we had got barely two-thirds of the way round.  A careful look at the map key revealed that the thing was actually calibrated in miles.

It was beginning to get dark. The road was unlit and full of potholes. Donkeys and cows appeared regularly out of the gloom as they wandered untethered. I had read that it was very unwise to have a collision as the campesinos will want to be paid for the animal on the spot.  If I was not a former dodgem cart whiz, I doubt we would have finished the circuit unscathed.

At around dinnertime, in the late evening in Mexico, we pulled up for the day in a small town.  As we drove along the dusty narrow street towards a cantina up ahead, gunshots sounded off to our right. We waited a while parked outside the bar listening, but all was now quiet. Inside the owner greeted us amiably and showed us to a table. Out on the street we could hear nothing beyond the barking of dogs in the distance. No-one else seemed to be about. As all seemed well, we ordered cerveza and tacos and tucked in with relish.

All was well until a short time later the swing doors behind us flew violently open and two large men came storming in.  It looked like these out-of-the-way towns must have someone like a tin-star sheriff, as one man sported a many-pointed star on his shirt. Running hard, the warriors of the law tore up the stairs at the back. A deal of crashing and grunting right overhead was quickly followed by a clonk, clonk, clonk as they dragged a surly-looking fellow down one stair at a time, across the floor and out the front door without looking back. A hush descended on the darkened little town once more. The patron soon re-emerged from the kitchen to ask about a main course. With raised eyebrows I pointed at the door. “Bandidos” he said, smiled and shrugged his shoulders. Earlier that same day, as we passed a file of riders under wide sombreros, rifles on their laps and twin bandoleers across each shoulder, I had been tempted to shout “Villa, Villa, Villa!”  I resisted the urge once again, since my movie preferences were my private affair and only likely to get me into more trouble.

We eventually reached the Pacific, where the cost was only four dollars US each for Mexicana Airlines to fly us across the Sea of Cortez from Mazatlan on the mainland coast to La Paz in the Baja California Sur territory. In the little town of La Paz the only way out to the beach was to take a taxi, and pray you had paid enough to coax the driver to come back before dark. There were a few small roads leading out of the town but they dribbled away in the desert after a few miles. It was August and hot, tumbleweed and roadrunners the only things moving over the sizzling pavement. On our first trip out we had a long desert beach all day to ourselves. The swimming was wonderful and, as the blistering sun rose high in the cloudless sky, we settled into a midday siesta under the only bush casting any shade. Before very long our dozing was interrupted by the sound of a motorbike out in the desert behind us. After about a quarter of an hour of steadily increasing engine roar, a big bike burst through the dunes. “You speak English?” the biker asked as he stopped sharply to pull his helmet off his long hair. He proved to be one talkative hippy, fresh from many solitary days riding down through the high desert from California. There were no metalled roads up the long lonely mountain spine of the Baja in those long ago times.  This American hippy had slept out on the desert or on pueblo floors if he had been lucky enough to reach a village before dark.  An ‘Easy Rider’ I thought, Henry Fonda’s now-legendary road film having been a recent hit with me.

After flying up to Tijuana, we tried out the only other car made in Mexico those days, a Chevrolet sedan. Thinking it would be a safer ride than a VW Beetle over the border on US freeways, we soon found out that California state troopers needed only one look at our Baja California Norte plates to pull us over. Worse, Kitty’s uncle turned out to be a volunteer reserve Border Patrolman outside his working hours at Boeing in San Diego.  When he was home, his border-cop buddies kept calling him up on his radio to joss about the wetback car still parked at his gate. However Kitty and I did not much fret about that sort of thing, for, even though in Mexico we had been thought gringos and now in California wetbacks, this was 1971 when North American life and times were shiny and new for a pair of youngsters still fresh from a tired and relatively sedate Old World.